Published: Feb. 7, 2022

Nearly 18,000 CU Boulder community members participated in the Campus Culture Survey this past fall, and university staff who administered the survey are analyzing anonymized responses from students, faculty and staff in preparation for the public release of the survey results in early April.

According to the CU Boulder Office of Data Analytics, 73% of staff, 60% of faculty, 48% of graduate students and 30% of undergraduate students responded to the 2021 survey before it closed in late November.

The campus community will be able to access the survey results this spring through an online dashboard visualization tool to gain greater insight into the perspectives of students, faculty and staff by demographic groups.

The survey results will reflect how members of the campus community responded to questions about sense of belonging, sense of connection and community, feeling valued and respected, and about experiences with discrimination, hostile treatment and protected-class harassment, including sexual harassment.

Once the survey results become widely available to the campus, academic departments and administrative units will use them to determine how best to improve and expand programs and support services for students, faculty and staff, said Sonia DeLuca Fernández, senior vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The survey results will serve as an important source of information for improving the experiences of our students, faculty and staff in classrooms, residence halls, workplaces and other campus environments,” said DeLuca Fernández, who is developing a campus plan to provide support to academic and administrative units.

As part of the campus plan, leaders of academic and administrative units will be able to consult with staff project leads to develop and implement action plans and address challenges identified through the survey, she added.

“Ultimately, the goal is to support the academic and professional success of our students, faculty and staff by creating a more just and inclusive campus culture,” she said. “This work is especially critical for historically marginalized communities that, as past data indicate, experience greater inequity on our campus and elsewhere.”

CU Boulder administers the survey every four years to gather insights into how to improve the campus culture for students, faculty and staff. The 2021 survey was part of a broader initiative by the four-campus CU system, and in a first for CU Boulder, the campus administered the survey to all students, faculty and staff at the same time.

At the request of the CU Board of Regents, the campuses will share a few preliminary survey results with the university system’s governing board, which is holding a regularly scheduled meeting on the CU Boulder campus Feb. 10–11.