# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S240
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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238 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

in the matter of instruction, to demand better training for their
faculties, to maintain more adequate library and laboratory facil-
ities, and to discontinue certain practices which interfered with
their educational effectiveness and standing. These are very posi-
tive achievements which have been brought about largely through
the direct or indirect influence of accrediting agencies.

Your Board has also made a careful study of the Revised
Manual of Accrediting of the Commission on Institutions of Higher
Education of the North Central Association of Secondary Schools,
the largest and best-known of the regional accrediting agencies,
This Manual states clearly and adheres closely to what we believe
to be sound principles for the accreditation of educational institu-
tions, It maintains that “the facilities and activities of an in-
stitution will be judged in terms of the purposes it seeks to serve.”
It states further: “In its accrediting procedures the Association
intends .. . to observe such principles as will preserve whatever
desirable individual qualities member institutions may have. While
it is necessary to emphasize certain characteristics that are rec-
ognized as basic, such as the competence of the faculty, the
representative character of the curriculum, effective administra-
tion, standards of student accomplishment, and financial adequacy,
it is regarded as of prime importance also to protect such institu-
tional variations as appear to be educationally sound.... Uni-
formity in every detail of institutional policies and practices is
believed to be not only unnecessary, but undesirable.”

Personal consultation with officials of this Association and the
presentation made to the Professors’ Conference in Milwaukee
(1946) by the secretary of its Commission on Institutions of
Higher Education have given further assurance that there is no
disposition to interfere with any curriculum which can be shown
to be effective in achieving the educational objectives of a given
institution, whatever these objectives may be. The experience of
the Church with the Middle States Association of Colleges (with
which the Bronxville Concordia is accredited) gives additional
assurance that it is entirely possible to conduct in accredited in-
stitutions the program which the Church requires for its purposes.
If, at a later time, it should be found impossible to do so, your
Board would be the first to recommend withdrawal from any as-
sociation which presumed to make demands or to encourage prac-
tices which might make the achievement of our specialized ob-
jective difficult.

Our schools are in a position to report some progress in the
direction of accreditation. The Hausmann survey (1941—1944)
lists one college and one high school as having achieved accredita-
tion. At this writing one college and three high schools among the