REAC Subcommittee: Campus Climate & Assessment

Overview

The Climate and Assessment Subcommittee is charged with highlighting trends and analyzing outcomes that emerge in institutional datasets, including the first Duke Climate Survey on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The Climate and Assessment Committee will use data to identify gaps in policies and practices and inform educational and training opportunities that support equity at Duke. This subcommittee will provide recommendations to campus leaders and work collaboratively with the REAC subcommittees on specific initiatives, including:

• Infrastructure and Policy: commission institution-wide studies on pay equity,  advancement, and promotion
• Education and Training: develop toolkits to translate data into actionable steps (for use in local units)
• Communications: assist leaders with data analysis to include local context and lived experiences

Initial Priorities

• Work to understand the data, both in aggregate and disaggregate form, to ensure that no points are missed. This includes identifying opportunities for additional data collection to further address nuances and gaps.
• Advise leaders and the broader campus community on how to understand and use institutional data to inform their units and subunits.
• Work collaboratively with sub-committee co-chairs to identify follow-up measures from the initial data review.

­The Climate and Assessment (C&A) Subcommittee held the primary charge of assisting units with the roll-out and contextualization of the data from the 2021 Duke Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Climate Survey. In year 1, the co-chairs of the subcommittee (Merlise Clyde and Sherilynn Black), in collaboration with David Jamieson-Drake, worked extensively with REAC subcommittee co-chairs to provide support to units and leaders across campus as they received access to the survey data. The C&A Subcommittee collaborated with the Office for Faculty Advancement and the Office for Institutional Equity to hold two full-day retreats for academic and administrative leaders to engage in a ‘deep dive’ with the institutional climate data. These retreats were followed by 4 post-retreat sessions to allow for longitudinal engagement with leaders as they continued work in their local units. The C&A Subcommittee also developed a guide to catalog and document institutional data sources for the university community. This guide will be shared on the Racial Equity at Duke Website during the summer of 2022.

Read more about the work of the Climate and Assessment Subcommittee.

The following items reflect our focal points for the Subcommittee’s work in Year 2:

• Catalog survey instruments developed locally in schools and units for shared access for Duke leaders, and develop a guide for best practices in survey deployment (fall 2022)
• Develop and conduct pay equity analyses, including retention and promotion studies (winter 2022)
• Develop toolkit to assist leaders in translating survey data into measurable actions, including assistance with interpreting survey results while considering local context (winter 2022)