HLC Quality Initiative Project Mission Statement

1.1

Our project at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) is dedicated to vastly improving the collegiality, mutual support and understanding, and level(s) of collaboration within the CIA community itself, toward solidifying and rendering more robust the communication flows at the college between and across all faculty and staff.

In order to investigate collegiality, one must first adequately define the term. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2015), collegiality is defined as the cooperative relationship between colleagues. In any workplace environment, these cooperative relationships have the tendency to remain within individual departments, creating unconnected silos across an organization. Within higher education, these silos result in a narrowed view of the overall educational experiences of students, interrupt organizational communication, decrease the way community is created, and detract from an overall positive work environment. These factors contribute negatively to the way we interact with and respect the roles each of us play in the larger organization.

The Higher Learning Commission’s Quality Initiative steering committee at CIA believes that initiatives centered on how our professional community supports, collaborates, and communicates with each other will not only satisfy a requirement of the HLC, but will create a truly transformative experience that connects, if not eliminates, the silos that interfere with our pursuit of a holistic educational experience for our students and preferred working environment.

The work of this initiative will begin in earnest following the approval of this proposal from the Higher Learning Commission. Initial work will include identifying projects as priorities and approaching appropriate people in our community to assist in carrying out the work. The steering committee is dedicated to seeing the end goal of improving the overall collegiality through specific programmatic endeavors as attainable by the end of the allotted time.