Duke University
PAE-7: Measuring Campus Diversity Culture

Several recent initiatives have sought to assess campus attitudes towards diversity, culture and equity and utilize results to guide policy at Duke. Examples of these include:

Campus Culture Initiative - A diverse, inclusive and engaged community that affirms difference: That’s the environment necessary for the transformative educational experience that Duke intends to provide, according to a report from the Campus Culture Initiative Steering Committee. The 24-member panel, which included faculty, administrators, undergraduate students, a graduate student and alumni, issued a report in 2007 outlining a series of actions intended to “engage difference more deeply and directly.” According to the report, “We are proud of the increased diversity that Duke has achieved. An academic community must, however, consistently and constructively engage difference in order to reap its full benefits.” From April 2006 through February 2007, the Committee was engaged in a thoughtful and comprehensive consideration of Duke’s Campus Culture and ways to improve it. They examined issues, analyzed data and engaged in multiple conversations with individuals and groups across campus.
http://www.diversity.duke.edu/initiatives/campus_culture.php
http://today.duke.edu/2007/02/CCI_report.html

Women’s Initiative - Toward the end of her remarkable tour of duty as President of Duke, Nannerl O. Keohane commissioned a study known as the Women's Initiative. When the report was published in fall 2003, the Women's Initiative received extensive national attention both within universities and beyond, as it deserved to. A generation after the most overt forms of gender discrimination were brought up for critique and revision in this country, subtler forces persist, impeding full equality of opportunity for women. Under President Keohane's leadership Duke undertook to assess the place we have come to in gender equality with unusual courage and candor.

The comprehensiveness of the Women's Initiative report remains its most striking feature. Rather than studying a single segment of the university community, a team of task forces considered the full set of women's experiences within the university: the lives of women faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduates, and alumnae as well. Through this breadth of focus, the report was able to highlight issues that link the experience of women across categories, such as the critical role of mentorship. At the same time, the study noted that the most salient issues for women in the university are often specific to their position, so that a women's agenda needs to have many different parts. The relation of the tenure clock to family responsibilities is an issue for untenured women faculty members, but not for the tenured. Childcare is an issue for younger faculty, staff and some graduate students but not, with rare exceptions, for undergraduates. And the pressures on undergraduate women have their own character, which the report is careful to detail.
http://today.duke.edu/2006/09/wiintro.html
http://universitywomen.stanford.edu/reports/WomensInitiativeReport.pdf

Campus Culture Initiative -
The Steering Committee has worked over a nine-month period to engage in a thoughtful and collaborative conversation about the Duke community, to gain a richer understanding of campus culture, to identify areas of strength as well as areas where there are problems or issues, and to make recommendations for improvement. In this process, the Committee recognized the momentum and accomplishment of the University; it reaffirmed that much good can and should be said about the Duke community. At the same time, it came to better understand how Duke is experienced differentially by different members of its community, that there are often pressures for conformity which work against our institutional vision as an inclusive academic community, and that engaging the notion of “difference” more deeply and directly will enable the University to accelerate its rise to the top.

To address these challenges, the CCI Steering Committee identified six interconnected areas for focusing attention and making recommendations:
• Curriculum and Experiential Learning
• Faculty-Student Interaction
• Residential Life, Dining, and Social Life
• Alcohol
• Athletics
• Admissions

The Committee recognizes that stewardship of the Duke community must be a collaborative process involving all its members, and that this report and its recommendations will need to be discussed and refined on a variety of levels – by the University’s administration, faculty, students, and alumni. Indeed, the entire Duke community must take ownership and play a significant role in considering thoughtfully how best to enhance campus culture. The work ahead is to join together in this conversation with a sustained commitment to the University’s advancement. It is the hope of the Campus Culture Initiative Steering Committee that this report and its corresponding recommendations will promote important conversations, significantly help strengthen campus culture, and further advance Duke as an even greater and more excellent community of teaching and learning.

Women’s Initiative –
Thanks to its comprehensiveness, the Women's Initiative has given Duke two valuable assets as we go forward. First, the report has provided us with a detailed checklist of problems and opportunities that we can monitor as we move on, work that the President's Commission on the Status of Women will oversee. Second, the large number of people who played active roles in this venture created a cadre of university citizens, of all ranks and ages, who understand the issues and are committed to constructive change.

The President's Commission on the Status of Women was established in the fall of 2003 to monitor implementation of Women's Initiative recommendations. It is the body charged with carrying forward this important work. Members are drawn from constituent groups -- undergraduates, graduate and professional students, faculty, employees, and alumnae. The President's Commission meets regularly throughout the academic year and produces a report to the President every summer (2003-2004, 2004-2005), as well as periodic updates by constituency.
http://today.duke.edu/2003/11/commission1119.html