Introduction
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is committed to the goals of community, diversity, and social justice. During the 2004-2005 academic year, the colleges and other major units of the university were asked to study their own progress toward community, diversity, and social justice (CDSJ). Dean Cleve Willis appointed a Committee on CDSJ for the College of Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) in May 2004. The committee met with leaders from the University’s Academic Affairs CDSJ Team at that time and started deliberations in fall 2004. This report summarizes our findings and makes recommendations for actions to be taken by the college to further the goals of community, diversity, and social justice.
Background Information and Survey Design
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is involved in an on-going effort to address issues of community, diversity, and social justice. These concepts are defined as follows:
Community is defined as a sense of connectedness, pride, and responsibility, in which all individuals and groups feel welcomed, included, and respected. Such a community holds all of its members accountable for creating and maintaining this climate.
Diversity is a commitment to the variety of perspectives that spurs intellectual and creative work and learning, where men and women of diverse racial, social, and economic groups play major roles and, in a spirit of mutual respect, come to understand and appreciate what each brings to the whole.
Social Justice is a commitment to equity and fairness in treatment and access to opportunities and resources. This commitment to fairness began with the 1964 Civil Rights Act focusing on issues of race and gender and has evolved over time to include other categories such as religion, sexual orientation, and ability. This commitment is already codified in large part by federal and state civil rights laws, which prohibit discriminatory treatment in several categories.
In 2002, the University’s Academic Affairs CDSJ Team conducted a survey of employee attitudes toward CDSJ issues. Included in the survey were graduate student employees, classified staff, professional staff, and faculty. Data from this survey were reported for the university as a whole and for different employee groups, as well as separately for major units such as colleges, again both overall and by employee group. These survey data were the major input used by the NRE Committee to look at CDSJ issues within the college (see Appendix for NRE survey results). These issues, particularly diversity, were being prominently discussed campus-wide during the period we were meeting. The university appointed a Commission on Campus Diversity in October 2004 and received its report in March 2005. Our 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. A further analysis with particular emphasis on student academic experience, and the experience of graduate and undergraduate employees, should follow on this effort.
Analysis of Current Situation
The committee approached the survey data by examining each job category (Graduate Employee, Classified, Professional, and Faculty) and began tallying up what percentage of respondents either agreed or disagreed with the question asked. After careful debate the committee did not decide upon a specific numerical threshold at which a percentage of agrees or disagrees qualified as an area performing well or in need of improvement. We combined the “disagree (or agree) strongly” with the “disagree (or agree) somewhat” responses and tended to note response rates of 30% or greater. The committee analyzed the data over a period of four months. We discovered for the most part NRE was performing well on community, diversity, and social justice issues. While we identified a small number of problem areas, the college performed on par or better than the averages across the entire university.
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, as discussed below.
Satisfaction with a person’s job was another area that the committee thought was positive. Questions pertaining to overall job approval were answered with 80% of the respondents agreeing that they were generally satisfied with their job. Despite answering negatively to questions concerning adequate pay levels, workload, and respect issues, employees within the College of Natural Resources and the Environment felt positive about their roles.
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 fully meet the university’s 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, most notably for faculty in the way they teach, the content of their courses, or their research. However, the answers are overwhelmingly positive, when asked about how central they feel this set of concepts should be to the goals of the university. The committee felt that addressing the issues of CDSJ in course content and research was beyond the scope of the present committee but should be an area of future consideration for the college. Diversity issues in the classroom should include a focus on the particular challenges to students with learning disabilities.
Employee harmony is an idea that the committee feels contributes greatly to community, diversity, and social justice. As such we placed particular emphasis on the examination of the quality of employee supervision and coworker support. A majority of respondents answered positively, although we observed some issues concerning respect as well as communication. Of particular interest are fairly stark differences in perceptions of working relationships between classified staff, professional staff, and faculty. For example, when asked the question of whether professional staff respected classified staff, 37% of classified staff disagreed whereas only 17% of professional staff disagreed. Again when asked whether faculty respected classified staff, 43% of classified staff disagreed while only 16% of faculty disagreed.
While analyzing the data the committee observed and discussed concerns we had with the structure and results of the survey. In particular, we discussed what effect answering “no basis for judgment” had on the percentages of people who responded in a certain way. Where a large number of people answered “no basis for judgment” to a question, the effect was to artificially inflate or deflate the percentage of agrees or disagrees. In addition, some of the questions asked the respondents for their opinions instead of their observations, while other questions alternated between asking questions in the first and third person. We thought this could lead to misperceptions between the personal feelings of the respondent and the situation in the community as a whole. The committee thought that events concurrent with the time the survey was taken in 2002 could have significantly affected the data so they might not accurately reflect the attitudes of the campus now. Finally, we wondered whether the makeup of the college workforce is diverse enough to have a sufficient sample of individuals who might have experienced discrimination or discomfort and be able to report it on the survey.
