2021 Campus Culture Survey
How to Take the Survey
Check your CU Boulder email for a personal link to the survey. The survey will take about 10–25 minutes to complete.
Look for the subject line: Your Link to the Campus Culture Survey.
What is the CCS?
CU Boulder will administer the 2021 Campus Culture Survey (CCS) in October.
Through this anonymous survey, faculty, staff, and students will be able to provide insights into the extent to which they feel respected, supported, and valued. CU Boulder also seeks to understand how the experiences of campus community members differ by gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The survey results will provide benchmark data in support of the Inclusion, Diversity and Excellence in Academics (IDEA) Plan. Insights from the survey findings will guide the campus’s efforts to build a more just, diverse, equitable, and inclusive campus community.
The campus’s goal is to gather anonymous feedback from students, faculty and staff related to their sense of belonging, experiences of incivility, classroom and workplace culture, and protected-class harassment (including sexual harassment), and discrimination.
In addition, as a follow-up to the 2015 CU Boulder Sexual Misconduct Survey, undergraduate and graduate students will receive the sexual misconduct module covering sexual assault and exploitation, intimate partner abuse and stalking.
The CCS builds on CU Boulder’s undergraduate and graduate student social climate surveys in 2014. Campus staff adapted student-focused survey questions to create comparable questions for faculty, staff, and institute employees with the goal of gaining a more complete picture of the campus culture. The survey was piloted in several iterations on over 3,000 CU community members before being finalized. In Fall 2019, the CCS replaced the previous survey used in the Academic Review and Planning (ARPac) process that each academic program undergoes every seven years to identify program strengths and weakness.
The survey is part of underway on all four CU campuses.
- Dr. Dyonne Bergeron, CU Boulder, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Inclusion and Student Achievement
- Valerie Simons, CU Boulder, Associate Vice Chancellor & Title IX Coordinator
- Teresa Wroe, CU Boulder, Senior Director of Education & Prevention & Deputy Title IX Coordinator
- Julie Volckens, CU Boulder, OIEC Director of Assessment
- Robert Stubbs, CU Boulder, Director for Institutional Research
- Dr. Frances Costa, CU Boulder, IR Senior Researcher
- Dr. Amy Biesterfeld Nakatani, CU Boulder, IR Assistant Director for Assessment
Please send questions and comments to CampusCultureSurvey@colorado.edu.
April to October 2021— Communication Plan, Campus Meetings, and Survey Preparation
October 2021— Survey Opens
November 2021— Survey Closes
January 2022— Results for Strategic Plan-Aligned Questions Shared to Board of Regents
February 2022— Presentation at Board of Regents Meeting
TBA 2022— Campus Results Presented at Board of Regents Meeting
TBA 2022— Action Plans Submitted
What steps are being taken to protect the anonymity of my survey responses?
- We know that individuals must have assurance that their responses are confidential and secure if we are to receive accurate and candid feedback. Survey participants' privacy is of utmost importance to us, and strict internal safeguards are in place to ensure that privacy.
- No one outside of the Office of Data Analytics’ (ODA) Institutional Research (IR) assessment staff—no administrators, supervisors, or faculty—has access to survey respondents’ identities or to files that may connect names or email addresses with answers to survey questions.
- Members of the IR assessment team will manage the survey email distribution list, wherein it is recorded who has and has not completed the survey questionnaire.
- Once a participant submits their survey, the identifying information that permitted the database manager to keep track of who did and did not respond to the survey is automatically deleted. In other words, each case in the final data file is an anonymous case. In addition, the data file is encrypted and stored in a secure, encrypted drive which only IR assessment staff can access.
- Questionnaire responses will be aggregated for statistical analysis and reporting. We will aggregate the data to groups of 10 or more responses in order to maintain the anonymity of survey participants. If any demographic group or combination of group characteristics has fewer than 10 individuals, those data will not be reported. IR will not provide any findings that would risk making someone identifiable due to the uniqueness of their demographic characteristics, years at CU, faculty rank, job category, department, major, or a combination of those factors. Your anonymity is our first duty of care and will be protected in all reports resulting from this survey. We are committed to ensuring that individuals can provide candid feedback with confidence. Anything else is counter-productive to the effort.
- Please email CampusCultureSurvey@colorado.edu for more information regarding steps taken to ensure anonymity and confidentiality.
How secure are my data?
- The CU Boulder Office of Data Analytics (ODA) currently safeguards any sensitive employment and student data it accesses by using state-of-the-art data security protocols. The survey platform, Qualtrics, meets (VSAQ) data standards. Data are encrypted in transit and at rest. . Once the survey has closed, data will also be encrypted in transit to ODA. The full database of anonymized responses will then be held by ODA in encrypted form on their secure server. The de-identified data will be stored to allow investigation of trends by comparison with future surveys.
- Please email CampusCultureSurvey@colorado.edu for more information about data security.