The year 2025 will not go down as a banner year for our Veterinary college accreditor, the AVMA COE (Council on Education). Much attention has been devoted, and it won’t slow down, to accreditation decisions.
What became public recently was Tuskegee’s need to go to federal court in Montgomery, Alabama to preserve its rights to due process as it appeals an AVMA COE decision to place Tuskegee on terminal accreditation. The appeal is governed by a seven-member panel selected by the AVMA Board of Directors and, astonishingly, the Board decided with no precedent that Tuskegee would have only two (2) hours to make its case to avoid termination and would not be able to call former Purdue Dean Willie Reed and former Florida Dean Jim Lloyd as witnesses (contrary to the actual rules for appeals).
Fortunately, the federal judge in Montgomery advised the AVMA’s attorney that his client might want to reconsider . . . and the AVMA did.
But the decision I’m writing about today came last March, but drew little attention outside the world of Veterinary college deans. With no science behind it (and very little common sense) the AVMA COE implemented a rule that restricts drastically the ability of Veterinary colleges to use online or distance learning tools to deliver parts of the curriculum.
In other words, the AVMA COE unilaterally decided that allowing students in one program to benefit from online lectures and slides from a noted professor from another program couldn’t be tolerated. Unlike other academic programs in American universities who are granted considerably more freedom to decide how its students should be able to access distance learning, the AVMA COE decided that Veterinary colleges must be restricted and that this decision should be made by a panel of untrained accreditors and not Veterinary college leadership and faculty.
This decision came at a time of faculty shortages. This decision challenges the budgets of each school to recruit faculty (with a limited pool of candidates) so that students get lectures in a campus auditorium rather than what is now common for other programs, namely accessing high-quality lectures and slides from student laptops. So costs go up for Veterinary colleges while the freedom to experiment with teaching modalities is crippled. If you are wondering why the AVMA COE did this, join the crowd. No serious reason backed by experts was given.
This has led to most, if not all Veterinary schools filing requests to the AVMA COE for “exceptions” to the new anti-online rules. So now the AVMA COE (with no expertise) is wading through this stack of exception requests, one-by-one, to decide if the request is meritorious. That’s what our Veterinary accreditor is doing and how do you think this will turn out?
The AVMA COE is finishing its third year of imposing prescriptive policies on our otherwise excellent Veterinary schools. No one called for the AVMA COE to abandon a focus on innovation and academic freedom for Veterinary colleges to choose their own course. It’s time for schools to regain control of their programs and the Veterinary accreditor to follow the lead of other academic accreditors and make outcomes, not processes, their beacon.