Executive Summary
The College of Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) is committed to the University of Massachusetts Amherst goals of community, diversity, and social justice (CDSJ). Dean Cleve Willis appointed a Committee on CDSJ in May 2004. The Committee delivered its first report on CDSJ issues in spring 2005 (http://www.umass.edu/nre/cdsj/index.php).
The report focuses on interpreting data for the College from a survey of employee attitudes toward CDSJ issues conducted by the University’s Academic Affairs CDSJ Team in 2002 and on developing a NRE CDSJ Action Plan. Its analysis and recommendations have a workplace orientation and represent a first step toward further integrating issues of community, diversity, and social justice into the life of the college.
The Current Situation: The Committee approached the survey data by examining each job category (Graduate Employee, Classified, Professional, and Faculty) separately and in comparison to each other. It found that for the most part NRE was performing well on community, diversity, and social justice issues.
An area of particular strength, and one that the Committee was pleased to see, was in questions that concerned bias or discrimination. At least 90% of respondents agreed that there was respect for women and for differences in race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. Respect between people in different job classifications proved to be an exception. The Committee found fairly stark differences in perceptions of working relationships between classified staff, professional staff, and faculty. For example, when asked whether faculty respected classified staff, 43% of classified staff disagreed while only 16% of faculty disagreed.
The centrality of community, diversity, and social justice was an area that the Committee felt showed improvement yet believed more could be done in order to meet our goals for CDSJ. While over 85% of college respondents agree that the University of Massachusetts Amherst is socially and culturally diverse, a majority of respondents feel that community, diversity and social justice do not have a central role in their day-to-day activities. However, answers are overwhelmingly positive when asked about how central they feel this set of concepts should be to the goals of the university.
The NRE CDSJ Action Plan: The Committee proposed an action plan with three areas: integrating CDSJ into the College’s life, hiring and training, and building community. The set of workshops being held now for all College employees seeks to address all three of these areas by introducing the CDSJ initiative to the College, providing training on CDSJ issues and approaches, and providing a community to discuss CDSJ in the life of the College.
