The Campus Climate and Culture Initiative (C3I) launched in 2019 and follows and expands upon the recommendations for institutions of higher education made in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In concert with Moving Dartmouth Forward and Inclusive Excellence, C3I is the third pillar in a comprehensive set of initiatives designed to create a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable learning environment for all Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff.
Organized into five categories—campus climate, academic and professional development, recruitment, resources, and mandatory reporting—the steps below address every one of the higher education-specific recommendations made in the NASEM report.
Campus Climate
- Conducting Academic Department Climate Reviews: Abigail Stewart, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a national expert in creating inclusive academic environments, and Vicki May, professor of engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, will lead climate reviews across all academic departments. The reviews are designed to help us understand whether individual academic departments at Dartmouth are equitable and inclusive environments for all of their members. The exercise will assess current conditions and identify opportunities for improvement, while also recognizing what is going well and how to build on success. Professor May is already engaged in the process, and her participation will build internal capacity to continue this practice on a regular basis.
- Revising Our Sexual Misconduct Policies and Procedures: To create clear and consistent expectations, Dartmouth will have a single sexual misconduct policy for our faculty, students, and staff. This policy, based on the Presidential Steering Committee on Sexual Misconduct Report and insights gleaned from addressing sexual misconduct allegations at Dartmouth, was reviewed with stakeholders and governance entities last fall. The goal is to ensure a consistent, reliable, and impartial institutional response to sexual misconduct claims, and appropriate processes for adjudicating potential violations of this policy.
- Creating a Policies-in-Action Working Group: The Policies-in-Action (PIA) Working Group’s report can be found here and a summary of the report can be found here. The PIA recommends: Dartmouth adopt a College-wide code of ethics and conduct and create a position of Assistant Provost for Faculty Affairs in the Provost’s Division; implement a mentoring system for graduate students and postdocs; and institute a system to represent staff interests, promote equitable and inclusive support and supervision of staff, and improve dynamics of positional power between faculty and staff.
- Establishing Mandatory Title IX Training: Beginning immediately, all faculty and staff, as well as postdoctoral and graduate students, are now required to complete an online sexual violence prevention program called “Bridges: Building a Supportive Community.” This training is in addition to the Sexual Violence Prevention Project, a four-year education program for undergraduates, and builds on the work we are doing to advance an effective training program for every member of our campus community.
Academic and Professional Development
- Providing Leadership Development Training: All deans, academic department chairs, directors, faculty members, and principal investigators who manage other researchers and investigators will participate in leadership development training.
- Making Research Advisory Committees Mandatory: To ensure that all graduate students have access to multiple advisors, research advisory committees will be mandatory in all programs overseen by the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.
Recruitment
- Supporting the Diversity Recruitment Fund: The Inclusive Excellence initiative established a goal of increasing the percentage of underrepresented tenure-track faculty to 25 percent by 2020. This effort requires creative recruitment approaches, networking and outreach activities, professional development opportunities, and the creation of pipeline relationships with graduate institutions. To offset the additional costs associated with these efforts, the Office of the Provost doubled funding from $1 million to $2 million a year, starting in fiscal year 2017. We will provide additional resources to help support this program at a sustainable level of up to 12 new hires per year for the next five years.
Resources
- Reviewing and Expanding the Title IX Office: In recognition of its pivotal role in compliance, outreach and prevention, and in anticipation of the adoption of a single policy for sexual misconduct, we will expand the size of the Title IX Office. We also will increase collaboration with deputy Title IX coordinators embedded in each of the graduate and professional schools, strengthen our partnership with WISE, and enlist additional support resources for all our campus community members.
- Increasing Mental Health Resources: We will invest in enhanced mental health services, including the addition of five counselors by 2022.
- Collaborating with National Academies: As a founding member of the Gender and Equity Collaborative and a participant in the Action Collective, Dartmouth will continue to partner with institutions committed to sharing ideas and best practices related to the successful implementation of the NASEM report’s recommendations.
Measurement and Reporting
- Establishing Measurement and Reporting Metrics: With input from the working group convened by the provost, we will establish key performance indicators to measure progress and impact in providing a healthy learning environment for all students, faculty, and staff.
- Providing an Annual Progress Report: An independent External Advisory Committee, led by Gilda A. Barabino, dean of the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York (CCNY) and a member of the task force that authored the NASEM report, will provide an annual update to the board of trustees, detailing progress on each action item of C3I. The report will be made available to the public. Dartmouth Hitchcock Health CEO and president, Joanne Mather Conroy ’77, Susan Finegan ’85, chair of the Pro Bono Committee at the law firm Mintz Levin, Cynthia Barnhart, chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and William Scheiman ’14, a consultant at Bain & Co. and a former member of Dartmouth’s Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault have agreed to serve on the advisory committee.
The Campus Climate and Culture Initiative will be successful only if the Dartmouth community engages and participates in the initiative. We will encourage and solicit input from all members of our community—students, faculty, staff, and alumni—to ensure that their voices are heard and their experiences can provide helpful context throughout C3I’s implementation.