Harold Washington looks to assessment efforts after self-review

Chi-Town Daily News:

When the staff at Harold Washington College realized recently that many on the campus didn’t know what the school’s connection to the former mayor was, they promptly put up photos of him in the lobby and commissioned a memorial.

While that may seem a trivial move for a community college with more than 19,000 full- and part-time students, it was one of the first and most noticeable changes as the school launched into an intensive review process to renew its accreditation.

The process dissected the 145-word mission statement of the college, finding among other things that it was too long and many people didn’t know its key points – an issue of wordsmithing, college president John Wozniak says.

But keeping students aware of Washington’s legacy of encouraging diversity and open government is now a more prominent effort at the school, he says.

“It’s going to have to be an ongoing thing to the extent that, and this always happens, there are some faculty who are more invested than others,” Wozniak says.

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