Understanding a culture of inclusion
U.C.I. Experience initiative seeks to optimize inclusive excellence
Cultivating Community: Awareness, Courage and Empowerment is the 2024-25 theme for UC Irvine’s Office of Inclusive Excellence. As part of that, OIE has launched a new campus climate initiative, the U.C.I. Experience – Understanding a Culture of Inclusion, guided by the intention to fully support every student, staff and faculty member in their learning and professional journeys.
“This yearlong initiative is designed to build on our vision of cultivating equity-minded leaders and being a welcoming top-tier university founded upon the concepts of inclusive excellence. It is consistent with California’s constitution and law that supports the need for all students, staff and faculty to thrive,” says Dyonne Bergeron, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion.
Adds Joshua Meadors, OIE research manager:“As accountability in higher education institutions has evolved over the years, the best practices have most recently moved to a demand for data-informed and data-driven decision-making. We as a university have collected plenty of data through surveys like the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey and the University of California Graduate Student Experience Survey, but we’ve never had a comprehensive survey focusing specifically on the climate in great detail.
“We need a foundation of information so that we can build an infrastructure that best supports and promotes inclusive excellence throughout the UC Irvine enterprise. The U.C.I. Experience is designed to give us that better picture.”
The initiative includes a lived experience survey that will provide a detailed measure of the campus climate. It will serve as a blueprint for goal setting moving forward and a benchmark to see if UC Irvine is improving inclusive excellence as it revisits these topics in the future.
For the campuswide questionnaire, OIE has partnered with the Center for Strategic Diversity Leadership & Social Innovation, which has expertise in gathering climate-related data from institutions.
“The survey will provide vast amounts of information on a number of topics. It intends to capture general feelings about the campus climate, such as respectfulness, hostility and the welcoming nature of it. It will ask about views specifically related to inclusive excellence, such as perceived prejudice and discrimination, as well as how much the community feels UC Irvine is committed to inclusiveness,” Meadors says. “The survey will also help us understand how much individuals feel that they are valued, that they belong and that they are living up to their potential, as well as their perceptions of equity and fair treatment.”
It will be distributed in the winter quarter, and everyone – students, faculty and staff – is encouraged to participate. The results will be analyzed and published in a report made available to the campus community.
“We share in this just as we share in the responsibility of actually taking these results and moving forward together to continually improve our campus and maximize the success of every member of its community. We appreciate your participation in the U.C.I. Experience, which supports the need for our students, staff and faculty to thrive,” Bergeron says.