Cornell University
PAE-7: Measuring Campus Diversity Culture

Toward New Destinations provides a broad institutional framework for diversity, asserting the centrality of diversity and inclusion to the university’s values and excellence. Cornell’s diversity plan is based on the recognition that education, research, knowledge production, and operational and academic pursuits are enhanced through full and reciprocal engagement among diverse perspectives, life experiences, and modes of knowledge creation and interpretation. Toward New Destinations is thus designed to promote the pursuit of excellence through support for the core values provided in Cornell’s institutional commitment of “Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds.”
Toward New Destinations presents a comprehensive list of diversity goals structured according to four core principles: composition, engagement, inclusion, and achievement. These principles serve to display the scope of this new approach to planning, which includes the demographic make-up of the institution; Cornell’s ability to inspire personal, social, and professional commitment to its goals and activities on the part of all members of its community; the climate and nature of professional and interpersonal relations at the university; and the levels of attainment of underrepresented individuals or groups. Initiatives in the engagement and inclusion principles, specifically focus on campus diversity culture, thus regularly reported progress and accomplishments on these initiatives provide unit-level culture information.
Cornell regularly measures the overall organizational climate, including measures which specifically address diversity and inclusion, for students, faculty and staff. The student survey, called the Pulse, is conducted on a bi-annual cycle. The faculty survey is conducted every five years and the staff survey was just conducted last fall, 2011.

Specific advances toward these diversity goals are described in the Menu of Annual Initiatives, which Toward New Directions provides for academic deans and vice presidents in to organize the process of accountability and assessment in their respective areas. The Menu of Annual Initiatives presents a range of opportunities, each of which promotes a particular dimension of diversity and inclusion for a particular group. Deans and vice presidents are asked to select the five annual initiatives that best match their particular contexts, goals, and strategic plans. Each year, these will become the focus of their unit’s effort in support of diversity, and the basis for an annual report measuring local and institutional progress.
This year, units used the results of the various organizational surveys as a foundation for developing specific Toward New Destinations initiatives to focus on continuing to build inclusive, diverse cultures. Many of these included educational programs and initiatives to build increased understanding.