WASC is friendly enough, but they've expressed discomfort with the DRBU model. They suggested that DRBU might be better off applying to a religious accreditor like ATS or TRACS (?! yeah, right). ATS won't accredit non-Christian schools, but they have voted DRBU affiliate status.
The school's niche is trying to reinterpret the traditional Chinese Buddhist monastic discipline into Western degree form. Old wine in new bottles. Here in America, in order to be recognized as an educated person, you need to have a big shiny degree. That's how it works. Unfortunately, Buddhism is an experiental and practice oriented subject and when it's translated into to an arm's-length classroom approach, something vital seems to be lost. That was the fear and it's why DRBU exists.
The Talmage campus is primarily a large monastery and DRBU students join the monks and live pretty much as they do. The biggest differences are the addition of university courses and the fact that the students don't take the full vows and precepts of the traditional monastic vinaya. Nor do they shave their heads or wear monastic robes.
It's probably not for slackers. Students begin at 4:30 AM and their day continues until 9:30 PM. Every day.
http://www.drbu.org/students/studentlif ... hedule.asp
I imagine that one of the things that made WASC nervous is the fact that ceremonies are an integral part of students' activities:
http://www.drbu.org/students/studentlife/ceremonies.asp
As it is with the monks, manual and intellectual work (farming, translating sutras, cooking) is an important part of the program:
http://www.drbu.org/students/studentlife/commwork.asp
Most classes are held in this building, the former Mendocino State Hospital guesthouse:
The university library:
A classroom scene:
DRBU is also active about 100 miles south in Berkeley. That's where their Institute for World Religions is located.
http://www.drbu.org/research/iwr.asp
(Here's its journal)
along with the associated Berkeley Buddhist Monastery
http://www.berkeleymonastery.org/
and DRBU's Berkeley MA program, which seems rather more conventional than the offerings up in Mendocino:
http://www.drbu.org/berkeley/bspMA/default.asp
Ok.... if I had to state my two biggest reservations about this place, they would probably be:
1. A rather home-grown faculty at the Talmage branch. But seeing as how most of the teachers with DRBU degrees are monastics, that might be kind of inevitable with this model. The inbreeding problem doesn't seem to exist at the Berkeley branch, where the monastic emphasis is a lot less.
2. More fundamentally, the free-inquiry question. How can a school that exists to initiate students into an ancient tradition in ways that go well beyond the purely intellectual, simultaneously stand apart from all of that and subject everything to Western-style academic questioning?
It's easy enough to see what might worry an accreditor like WASC. But they are legitimate questions and they would never have even arisen if the state approval process hadn't provided a space where educational experimentation was possible.
And it's a question that could really be asked of every religious school. Tradition shapes and transforms its practitioners, while academia shapes and transforms received traditions. There has to be a dynamic balance, I guess, but it's not a trivial problem finding it.
