In the last installment of In the Room, I explained why we are rewriting the Principles of Accreditation. At the Summer Institute, I opened with a reminder that bears repeating: the June 1 version was a draft, and there was more work to do. Draft #2 is representative of that work. This installment walks through what you told us, and what the Principles Review Committee did with it.

The Issue

A first draft is written to be argued with, and you argued with it. The Commission received 473 responses (385 complete, 88 partial): 182 on the institutional survey and 291 on the public survey. Overall, the comments trended positive. But they also named the places where the June draft fell short.

Five areas came up repeatedly: differentiation of institutional mission, the line between a standard and its implementation, the role of faculty, the role of libraries, and academic freedom. Underneath them sat two trade-offs that every standards revision must manage. One is the number of standards versus how they are structured. The other is clarity of expectations versus flexibility in how institutions apply them.

There was also a second audience. The June draft intentionally did not designate federal requirements. We did this to allow people to focus on the language of all standards rather than focusing, or not focusing, on the federal requirements. As you all know, the Department of Education’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rulemaking is still in motion and should be finalized soon. Draft #2 had to account for the proposed changes. We will, of course, keep a close eye on the regs when they are published in final form.

The Discussion

The most useful way to read Draft #2 is against the feedback that produced it. Here is how each of the five areas shows up in the August 18 text.

What you told us	What Draft #2 does
Role of Faculty	New Standard 3.1, Shared Governance, requires published governance policies and a clear line between the board, the administration, and the faculty. Program content (10e) must be designed and revised with faculty input. Faculty evaluation returns as an explicit expectation (20c).
Academic Freedom	June’s “Freedom of Inquiry” is now Standard 21, Academic Freedom, requiring clearly articulated policies that protect “the faculty’s academic freedom.”
Mission Differentiation	Mission must be appropriate to “the institution and credentials offered” (2). Programs must “align with” mission (10). Student success is disaggregated by mission and the students served (22).
Role of Libraries	Standard 23, Support Services, now opens with a rationale and expects library resources “consistent with the mission,” not a single template.
Standards vs. Implementation	Prescriptive detail moved out of the standards and into the Resource Manual (more below).

Governance deserves its own section. In June, one board standard carried six items, and the CEO standard defined the roles of both the CEO and the board. Draft #2 splits governance in two: 3.1 Shared Governance and 3.2 Governing Authority. The board now “focuses on creating and approving governing policies,” and the “first duty” clause is gone. That structure names the faculty’s role directly instead of leaving it implied.

I’ll offer the same caution I gave at the Summer Institute: beware of crosswalks. I said this then, and I remind you here. Crosswalks look solely for content and do not take intent or verbs into account. This also leads to the natural human reaction to read each of the standards as a checklist or in isolation. I would like to propose a different idea: bundling. Standard 15 focuses on assessment and allows institutions to develop their own assessments. Some would say, “Oh, you took continuous improvement out.” I would say, look at Standard 22 regarding outcomes. If you “bundle” these two standards together, you are able to tell a more powerful story of how institutions assess students and use outcomes to make programmatic decisions that lead to improvement for students. Another way to think about this is to stop viewing accreditation and its standards as a checklist to endure; instead, think of it as a narrative that explains how institutions work to improve and provide high-quality education to their students.

Standards vs. Implementation

At the Summer Institute, I said that standards are the easy part and implementation is the work. Several of you told us the June draft blurred the two. Draft #2 draws the line more cleanly:

• Financial planning. The prescriptive three-year, annually updated, board-approved financial plan is gone. Financial planning now lives inside Standard 5, Sound Institutional Planning, which must connect to realistic revenue and expense assumptions.
• Financial documents. Standards 6 and 7 merge into Financial Stability, which accepts audited or independently reviewed statements. That matters for smaller institutions.
• Student success measures. The list of example measures leaves the standard. The secondary measures recommended under AIM will be listed in the Resource Manual.
• General education assessment. Gen ed is no longer named in the assessment standard. The Resource Manual will direct institutions to treat general education as a program with learning outcomes to assess.
• Rationale statements. Several standards (7, 11, 23) now open with a short statement of why the standard exists, so evaluators and institutions start from the purpose, not the checklist.

The Two Trade-Offs

Number vs. structure: The count holds at 31 numbered standards. Underneath, much has moved. Three are new (3.1 Shared Governance, 18 Research Integrity, 25 Intellectual Pluralism). Two pairs were consolidated: financial planning with financial documents, and program content with post-baccalaureate expectations. The four sections are now three; the regulatory standards sit under Student Success.

Clarity vs. flexibility: I also said at the Summer Institute that clarity matters, and Draft #2 proves it. In general education, “and/or” became “and”: gen ed must support lifelong learning, citizenship, and future employment, now with career adaptability added. In assessment, the June draft prescribed a collect-analyze-improve cycle. Draft #2 asks instead for specific, measurable outcomes for each program, periodic review to keep them current with professional and licensure standards, and examples of how the institution judges whether students meet them. That is clearer about what we expect and more flexible about how you get there.

Federal Context

The June draft was written before the federal picture settled. The AIM negotiated rulemaking committee reached consensus in May, and the Department published its proposed rule in the Federal Register on August 20, with a final rule targeted for November 1 and implementation proposed for July 1, 2027. The proposal asks accreditors to look at program-level outcomes, intellectual diversity and freedom of inquiry, research integrity, transfer of credit, and periodic faculty evaluation.

Draft #2 now flags 26 standards with an asterisk as aligned with federal requirements or AIM. Two of the three new standards come straight from that work:

• Standard 18, Research Integrity, expects policies and documented procedures that promote sound research practice, plus internal mechanisms to identify and remediate questionable research.
• Standard 25, Intellectual Pluralism, expects policies that support intellectual diversity and the civil exchange of ideas, along with periodic measurement of how students and faculty perceive the range of viewpoints offered. That measurement is a new expectation, and I want to be direct about it.

The federal frame also explains other moves: student success now applies to programs as well as the institution (22), and the transfer standard (14) was retitled and narrowed.

An asterisk tells you where a standard meets a federal expectation. It does not mean the standard is only about compliance, and it is not a substitute for reading the standard in light of your mission.

Progress Update

Draft #2 is better, and it is still a draft. A few items are open, and I would rather name them than have you find them:

• Closing the loop. The assessment standard no longer includes the phrase “use of results.” Evaluators have long looked for it. Again, this is the idea of looking beyond one standard at a time. Historically, the assessment standard was very prescriptive in the Resource Manual. This provides greater flexibility and responsibility to institutions. Regardless of accreditor, institutions will most likely be required to evaluate programs under the new AIM regs. Separating the assessment standard and results provides cleaner context for the individual standard, while allowing institutions to give better context to student and program success when taken together. The Resource Manual will elaborate on this further.
• Polishing. Some wording needs work, and we know that. Some of the standards still need work, we know that too. There is work yet to be done on clarity. While we feel we moved closer to the finish line, we also recognize the work is not over by any stretch.
• The Resource Manual. Much of what left the standards lands here: general education assessment, secondary student success measures, and examples of evidence. It is being fully revised alongside the standards. I know you want it, and I want to give it. But to do a full-scale development of the manual before the standards are set would be a waste of valuable time. It is a priority, and we will not add content to the Manual, but we will add clarity and examples.

The Committee’s broader proposals from the summer stand and have been officially endorsed by the Executive Council at its September meeting. These include discontinuing CR standards, differentiated reaffirmations, and the QEP; using attestations for a number of standards; shortening the time between reaffirmations; eliminating the Fifth-Year review; and bringing back non-binding on-site suggestions.

The implementation schedule also stands:

Reaffirmation class	Standards
Class of 2027	Current Principles
Class of 2028	Institution’s choice (Fall 2027 reaffirmation visit)
Class of 2029	New standards

We will retrain every evaluator, so the new standards are applied with the philosophy they were written in, not read through the old ones. And we are looking at how the review cycle itself may need to be reconfigured.

Please read Draft #2 and tell us what you think. The draft and the feedback survey are online here, and comments are open through October 12, 2026.

The Pruitt Perspective

When the Committee started, it did not work from the current standards. It started with what matters for quality, then looked at federal requirements, then asked what it had overlooked. Your feedback was, and is, critical to that last step. Faculty, libraries, academic freedom, and mission were not afterthoughts. They were not clear enough in the first draft, and you made sure we heard them.

I also know not everyone will like every change. Some will think Draft #2 went too far on workforce alignment or intellectual pluralism; others will think it did not go far enough. That is what a real public review looks like. Every standard still must pass the same four questions: does it promote student achievement, advance quality and continuous improvement, improve transparency while reducing unnecessary burden, and keep the focus on outcomes rather than process for its own sake?

The goal has not changed. We are asking institutions to accept less prescriptive language in exchange for more responsibility to show that students are well served. Draft #2 is a better version of that bargain because you pushed on the first one. Keep pushing.

Dr. Stephen L. Pruitt
President