How to Evaluate Your Campus Climate: A Tool for Faculty Change Agents to Survive and Prosper
By: Debra Guckenheimer
Tags: Organizational Change, Diversity, Faculty, Navigating Academia, Higher Education

How to Evaluate Your Campus Climate: A Tool for Faculty Change Agents to Survive and Prosper

by Debra Guckenheimer and Sarah Fenstermaker

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

Faculty change agents must navigate the ways in which institutions support and challenge their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus. Junior faculty who devote part of their time to institutional change are particularly vulnerable to unsupportive senior colleagues and can find themselves being pulled between competing scholarly and civic expectations.

Our survey of the faculty of nine college and university campuses across the country and thirty-five interviews with faculty change agents working on diversity equity, and inclusion on their campuses revealed five climate “signals” worth watching for. These signals demonstrate when a campus climate is supportive of diversity and equity efforts. Campus climate is a multifaceted term describing everything from cultures of collegiality, expectations for promotion, attitudes toward teaching and research, to the centrality of campus sports! Thus, specifying indicators — or “signals” — of the nature of campus climate is crucial to our understanding of how to make campuses truly hospitable to all.

Below, we provide some considerations in each of five categories. Responses to these prompts will signal the degree to which your campus is supportive of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts by faculty.

Category 1: Criteria for Tenure and Promotion: Colleges and universities that are the most supportive of faculty efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion will consider this work formally in tenure and promotion decisions.

Category 2: Administrators: Look not only to what key administrators are saying regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion; as they say, actions speak louder than words. Who on campus is working on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how much power do they have? Are they spoken about with respect? How many resources are being allocated? How do administrators treat other faculty change agents on your campus?

Category 3: Your Department: Departmental support can be vital to tenure and promotion, but it is also crucial to avoid burnout from hurdling numerous barriers to deep and meaningful change. Are there other change agents among your colleagues? Are change agents receiving tenure and being promoted? Are your departmental colleagues and the department chair talking seriously about diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Category 4: Mentors: Some of the most supportive institutions have formal programs to connect faculty interested in change with mentors. Others have well-established change agents serving as senior faculty members who are willing and interested in mentoring more junior faculty. Mentors help you balance change efforts with your academic success as well as strategize to make your efforts more effective.

Category 5: Outside Powerful Influences: There is increasing pressure on colleges and universities to end efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, with Prop 209 in California serving as an example. Courts challenge the prerogative to pay attention to race in admissions. The U.S. Executive Branch is actively seeking to limit colleges and universities from admitting and protecting marginalized students. Interest groups may target individual faculty change agents, and sometimes these groups include powerful alumni. All of these can impact the other categories described above and transform your institution’s ability to engage in deep and meaningful change around diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is important that faculty encourage upper level administrators to not only protect faculty change agents, but clearly represent the institution as committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Faculty change agents in unsupportive climates may suffer burnout, but here are some ways that they can continue their work long term:

1. They have a sense that change can take a long time and that there may be set-backs. Rome, as they say.

2. They find new paths for creating change when their efforts are stalled.

3. They find additional supports — in other departments, in professional organizations, and by bringing colleagues into their efforts.

4. They draw support from other faculty who meet regularly to strategize, and remain flexible in their approaches and vision.

All of the institutions we studied had competing forces which supported and challenged diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Climates shift over time as factors mentioned above (administration, colleagues, etc.) change. Faculty change agents who are untenured are the most vulnerable, and engaging in diversity, equity, and inclusion work on campus over time is challenging because of the lack of incentives and the many obstacles to any real change. Our research found that faculty change agents matter.

For more information on the research behind these recommendations, read:

Castro, Joseph, Sarah Fenstermaker, John Mohr, and Debra Guckenheimer. 2009. “Institutional Contexts for Faculty Leadership in Diversity: A UC Santa Barbara Case Study.” Pp. 209–230 in Doing Diversity in Higher Education: Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies. Ed. W. Brown-Glaude. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Guckenheimer, Debra. 2009. Insider Activism: Faculty as Institutional Change Agents. Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara.

Part of a series, University Faculty Are Agents of Change.