With the context of our organizational development noted earlier and the importance of campus climate on student success, we have undertaken three major initiatives for the purposes of understanding our campus community’s perceptions of climate and working toward the assurance that every student, staff member, faculty member, and administrator can work and learn in a healthy and positive environment: Campus Climate Surveys, Inclusive Excellence Action Plan, and the Equity Lens Framework.
With our GI2025 goals on closing equity gaps for students from historically underrepresented groups and Pell recipients in the forefront of our overarching efforts, it is imperative that we are embedding diversity, equity, inclusion and access into all aspects of our work – both inside and outside of the classroom and for all members of our campus community. If we are doing this work at an exceptionally high level, progress on our student success metrics and GI2025 goals (and subsequent enrollment growth) will follow.
- Campus Climate Survey: I am proud of our work to better understand our campus climate through survey instrumentation that, for the first time in Fall 2022, was developed, administered, and analyzed in house. The first of these was on the topic of job satisfaction and was administered to all employees in late Fall 2022. In marked improvements over prior Campus Climate Surveys in 2018 and 2020, the latest went deep rather than broad in its single-topic-focused content, and by late January, had findings ready for sharing with the campus community—satisfying our goal with this new approach of administering short, focused surveys every semester, in that we can get good data out to the campus in more focused, more timely, and therefore more actionable ways.
Our plan is to develop a sequence of four short, focused surveys for employees, the first of which was administered in Fall 2022, and four short, focused surveys for students, the first of which will be administered in Spring 2023. Also in Spring 2023, the second employee survey will be administered. In Fall 2023, the second student survey and third employee survey will be administered, and on through until four surveys have been taken by each group. Then the cycle will start again for each group—four surveys over four semesters, repeating that cycle so that changes over time can be identified through this longitudinal data collection strategy.
- Inclusive Excellence Action Plan (IEAP): This is CSUCI’s comprehensive plan, developed in 2021-22 by six Inclusive Excellence Action Teams (IEAT). The IEAP will be enacted and revised for years to come, beginning in 2022-23, for promoting racial and social justice throughout our Through this immediate, intermediate, and long-term initiative, we commit to doing better and being better by advancing racial and social justice at CSUCI in these six action areas: Professional & Leadership Development; Recruitment, Hiring & Retention of a Diverse Workforce; Advancement and Community & Government Relations; Campus Climate & Communication; Data-Based Decision-Making & Planning; and Student Access & Success. We are confident that, in making progress in these six areas, student persistence will be better facilitated, student success will be better realized, and campus climate pain points will be better seen, understood, and addressed. Our work to grow our collective and individual knowledge and skills for walking the DEIA talk is most visible in our Inclusive Excellence Action Plan (IEAP) website, which lists all IEAP initiatives, divisional leads, and status reports on initiatives that received funding through the 2021-22 SRPC process for awarding Strategic Initiatives funds.
- Equity Lens Framework (ELF): Through the leadership of the President's Advisory Council on Inclusive Excellence (PACIE), the Equity Lens Framework (ELF) that was used by six Inclusive Excellence Action Teams in 2021-22 to inventory and evaluate our DEIA progress in six dimensions has been revised. An ELF Interactive version has now been published that will, in the future, allow us to download institution-wide results and create data visualizations on DEIA changes over time at CSUCI. It is exciting to know that we are building toward having a DEIA dashboard as a critical element of our DEIA praxis—the ongoing cycle of reflection and action that our IEATs (reflection arm) and IEAP initiatives and website (action arm) are designed to facilitate. The interactive ELF will be piloted in Spring 2023, with standardization of usage requirements (i.e., for institutional dashboard-building purposes) to be determined and in effect by Fall 2023.