As an elementary school student in the 1960’s, I can remember my father commenting on the issue that the Soviet bloc athletes were professionals (paid by the state) and that America’s athletes were amateurs.   I thought that was unfair until “we” redefined the participation rules and many of our professional athletes were allowed and encouraged to compete in the Olympics, where there are probably few examples of self-supported amateurs competing in any event regardless of the country that the athlete represents.

With the advent of popular marketing, the world has also seen the rise of professional athletes competing in what used to be an amateur-only arena, the Olympics.  The first Olympics to allow professional athletes to compete were the 1988 Games for some sports and the 1992 Games for the remainder.  It is no coincidence that this era also saw an unprecedented sports marketing boom.  The emphasis on professional sports, often to the detriment of amateur sports, has had a trickle-down effect on sports at the college and high school levels.

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Institutions receive accreditation from either a regional or national accrediting body.  Generally, it’s the institution that receives accreditation which covers all the programs offered by that institution at the time of the accrediting visit.  There are other accrediting bodies that accredit individual programs only, and that form of accreditation is referred to as specialty accreditation.  Recently, we received notice that our Emergency and Disaster Management program had received specialty accreditation from the Foundation of Higher Education.  I asked Dr. Chris Reynolds, Program Manager for our EDM program and our Fire Science program, to provide a little background on what the FoHE accreditation means for this program.

In 2007, the Emergency and Disaster Management program of the American Public University System initiated its accreditation request with the Foundation of Higher Education for Disaster and Emergency Management and Homeland Security. The Foundation of Higher Education (FoHE), working through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Higher Education initiative, along with practitioners and academics from around the world, developed a set of emergency and disaster management educational standards based on a hierarchy of educational objectives (much like Bloom’s Taxonomy).  These emergency management standards are centered on emergency management “best” practices, as defined by NFPA 1600 and the FEMA Higher Education initiative.

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Today is the 162nd birthday of the Smithsonian Institute.  On August 10, 1846, President James Polk signed an Act passed by Congress establishing the Smithsonian as a trust, to be administered by a Board of Trustees and a Secretary of the Institution.  The impetus for this Act was a bequest by a British scientist, James Smithson, who left his estate to his nephew, unless his nephew died without heirs in which case the estate went to the United States of America to “found at Washington, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”  Smithson’s nephew died in 1835, the money was delivered to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1838 and Congress debated the situation for eight years before passing the 1846 Act.

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