Seminary/College degrees - accredited

Re: Re: Seminary/College degrees - accredited

I want a degree that can be used to teach Bible in a Seminary or Bible Institute setting.

Thanks to all for your prompt help. God bless you all!

Libnysr

 

Brad:

ATS faculty reqs are more rigorous/precise?

My understanding of my discussion with the head of TRACS was that to teach grad courses TRACS normally required docs in the area of instruction. That , I was told, is part of the reason why ACCS lost the TRACS accreditation.

In contrast to that, at Western (ATS/RA) I had three instructors who held just the four year, USA sort of ThM (most in Biblical/Theological Studies had ThDs from DTS and PhD from Fuller) : in Hebrew grammar and exegesis ; in Hermeneutics ; and, in a DL course in the Greek Exegesis of the Pastoral Letters.

If one looks at the faculty of Multnomah Seminary (ATS) , one sees a woman with only an MA teaching Counseling and one with a DMin as prof of Biblical Studies. I don't see how a DMin (John Wecks) is in the area of in Biblical studies. He does have a ThM too , however.

So, I'm at a loss to match these data with the ATS dictum that a doc in in the area instruction is required or that the ATS faculty reqs are more rigorous than RA or TRACS. I'd be happy to be shown the my error, however..

 

Re: Re: Re: Seminary/College degrees - accredited

Then Liberty may be your best bet. I don't know the utility of the SATS degree for this purpose. Others on here are more knowledgeable than I on this matter.

 

Take faculty expectations for example. The TRACS requirement is that "There must be under contract an adequate number of full-time faculty
for programs offered (a minimum of one for each program/major), who not only possess high academic qualifications and spiritual qualities, but who are spiritually mature providing a Christian role model."

In contrast the ATS benchmarks state that "Faculty members shall possess the appropriate credentials for graduate theological education, normally demonstrated by the attainment of a research doctorate or, in certain cases, another earned doctoral degree. In addition to academic preparation, ministerial and ecclesial experience is an important qualification in the composition of the faculty."

That's more precise and rigorous than the expectations for a TRACS faculty member.

I wonder if that would fly in ATS today. Although, there are other ways to demonstrate faculty competence than a research doctorate -- but that is the normal standard -- and it is applied particularly in the more academic portions of the curriculum. Also, were they all at the professor level or were they "instructors" or "lecturers" or even TA's? There are a lot of language teachers who aren't technically professors.

I suspect that they figured the combination of the ThM and the DMin and probably his published work and teaching experience was enough to demonstrate competency -- as an exception to the research doctorate.

I wrote a DMin dissertation at Fuller. Well, actually, when I started the program it was called a "dissertation" but by the time I finished they called the final piece I did a "ministry focus paper". It certainly wasn't a dissertation in the full academic sense -- although it had a strong and significant academic portion. However, I have a friend who did a Fuller DMin and he wrote a full academic dissertation on a passage in Romans that would have flown in any PhD program. The difference was that the DMin had different residency requirements than the PhD and he didn't want to do the residency (his wife would have killed him if he spent two more years in full-time academic work). It is possible that Wecks' wrote a DMin dissertation that was more academic in nature and that the ATS visitors recognized it as such. I don't know. I am only speculating. But there is a certain level of flexibility.

In regard to the woman with the MA, she isn't technically a professor in rank. She is an instructor and if memory serves me right that requires a certain level of oversight by a professor.

 

Re: Re: Re: Seminary/College degrees - accredited

Find a few schools where you think that you would like to teach. What kind of credentials do the current faculty members have? Did they all go to a certain one or two schools for their graduate work? Assume that the academic faculty standards for these schools will increase over the next few years. Set your course accordingly.

 

Re: Re: Re: Seminary/College degrees - accredited

 

I'm not really sure what this argument is about.

If the thesis is that all recognized accreditation is academically eqivalent, then that's ridiculous. The National Association of Cosmetology Arts and Sciences is a CHEA recognized accreditor that accredits 913 beauty colleges.

If the thesis is that there is no real difference between TRACS accreditation and ATS accreditation, I have a couple of comments:

First, compare the lists of schools that each accreditor accredits. People can talk all day about paper standards and about whether this or that instructor at this or that school has what somebody or other thinks is a suitable degree.

But I think that when we are talking about accreditors, the bottom line is what an accreditor actually ends up accrediting. I would also assert that the ATS list includes names more noted for theological scholarship than what's found on the TRACS list:

http://www.ats.edu/members/lists/alpha.html

http://www.tracs.org/accredited.htm

Second, there's the matter of the accreditor's emphasis and ultimate purpose.

ATS enforces a requirement that its accredited members all be Christian or Jewish. But it's very flexible within that universe, accrediting everything from the borderline Christian Unitarian Universalist Starr King School of Ministry in Berkeley, to staunchly evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary. The ATS roster includes many Catholic and Orthodox seminaries as well as things like the Yale and University of Chicago divinity schools. There's Claremont, a source of many people active in the Jesus Seminar. But it also has Regent University of VA.

TRACS was founded by Henry Morris to accredit his Institute of Creation Research. Apparently its initial recognition by the US Dept. of Education was a matter of some internal controversy. TRACS demands that all of its schools have what it calls a "Biblical basis" and requires that they not hire non-Christians.

If the thesis of this thread is that ATS accreditation adds nothing to regional accreditation, my reply is that it is a specialized accreditor like AACSB or ABET. The regional accreditors are institutional accreditors that accredit higher education institutions in all fields. Many of the RA schools are massive universities with a hundred or more majors and departments. So by necessity, the regional accreditors don't poke into the minute details of each and every department with the zealousness that some might desire. For that, you might want to bring in a second team composed specifically of theologians to look at just the theology program. Well, that's precisely what ATS does.

Is that worthless? Well, to me it probably would be. It might even be counterproductive. My interests are in comparative religion and in philosopical topics that exceed ATS' self-imposed scope. I notice that while the Harvard Divinity School is ATS, the Ph.D. in religion offered by Arts and Sciences isn't. I notice that Stanford's religious studies Ph.D. program is missing from the ATS list, as are Columbia's and UC Santa Barbara's.

So my point in the paragraph above is that some kinds of programs in the study of religion do just fine without ATS accreditation and for them it isn't a gold-standard at all. But that doesn't mean that ATS doesn't add something extremely valuable when it's applied more appropriately, so in those cases the term 'gold standard' may be entirely appropriate.

At the diametrically opposed end of religious interest, some people may place a great emphasis on doctrinal purity and Christian 'character-building'. So to them a 100% heathen-free teaching corps and a literal 6-day creation may be among the things that define their own individual 'gold standard. While I'm viscerally repelled by TRACS and its schools, I recognize that there are people out there that will love them. For them the TRACS distinctives might be more important than anything that ATS or even the regional accreditors could possibly offer.

 

Ecrasez l'infame department

Good post.
The funny part is that TRACS is more progressive (or sloppier???) on DL than the troglodytic ATS.
Also, from where I sit, TRACS is liberal, too, just less so than ATS.
And, yes, I may be a "six-day-Creation type", but the average ATS school is likely academically much stronger than the average TRACS school.
And TTS Newburgh is still corrupt.

 

I understand the word 'argument' to mean the marshalling of evidenciary statements in order to support a desired conclusion. My point was that I wasn't sure what that final point was.

That was a response to these words of Gregg's:

if there's one thing that bugs me about accreditation, generally, it's the whole notion that one USDoE/CHEA-approved accreditation standard can be vastly better than another

I was responding to this statement of Gregg's:

If my "USDoE/CHEA approval is the thing that makes them all not only valid, but downright good" argument has any merit, then should not a TRACS-accredited MDiv (for example) have, if not precisely as much respect in the marketplace as one accredited by ATS, then at least enough respect, by comparison, that its holder may be reasonably certain that s/he can compete favorably with an ATS-accredited MDiv holder in the marketplace?

At that point you and Brad got into a back-and-forth, but I wasn't sure why or what the larger point was any longer.

You wrote this:

Help me out. Why is ATS the gold standard over RA? One of my alma maters, Western Seminary, is ATS/RA, [ AND offers some DL] but I'm not clear as to why that ATS accreditation is an advantage.

I don't really know what you meant by that, and I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth.

But I did want to make the general point about the value of specialized accreditation as well as general institutional accreditation.

I didn't address faculty requirements.

I did say that ATS schools typically have a higher profile than TRACS schools, and posted the lists of schools that each accreditor accredits as evidence. So whatever it is that these accreditors are doing, I think that the results tend to favor ATS, at least in conventional academic terms.

But I also pointed out that that many excellent religion programs do perfectly fine without ATS accreditation. In fact, ATS accreditation isn't even appropriate (or possible) for many of them. So in that sense ATS falls short of a general 'gold standard' for all religion programs.

I also pointed out that very unlike ATS, TRACS enforces an extremely strong doctrinal position that may not be everyone's cup of tea. Personally, I would reject TRACS schools out of hand (just as they would reject me). But for some students, that uncompromising doctrinal stance is precisely what makes TRACS accreditation both distinctive and desirable.

 

Bill D.

I got it, thanks for the clarification.

My only probing of Brad's comment was over the ATS vs. the TRACS requirements for faculty. I may be wrong, but my experience of four years in an ATS/RA institution (1990-94) ,and my casual looking at faculty pages in some ATS schools, leads me to question , that which I had understood Brad in one post to say, that ATS requires that schools hire faculty with earned academic docs in the areas(s) of instruction more rigorously than does TRACS.

 

Re: Re: Re: Re: Seminary/College degrees - accredited