The Campus Climate Research Interest Team presented the findings of a two-year study on the University’s cultural climate in a “Community Conversation” on Friday. The University’s Center on Diversity and Community sponsored the study and
the conversation.
The 150 students who participated in the study were organized into focus groups and asked to discuss the campus’ climate for diversity as well as their ideas about the meaning of race and ethnicity, according to the study’s executive summary.
CoDaC Interim Associate Director John Shuford said he hopes the information from the study can be used to add substance to the University’s controversial Five-Year Diversity Plan.
“We’re just funneling another piece of information into there,” Shuford said. “It’s a nice window into what our students are learning and how they’re learning.
“The plan, as it stands, is a first draft. There’s meat that still has to be put on
the bones.”
Psychology associate professor Holly Arrow, sociology associate professor Jocelyn Hollander, sociology associate professor Ellen Scott, and psychology graduate student Chuck Tate conducted the study and guided the audience through their findings.
The team isolated three primary ways individuals define “race,” according to the study: Phenotype theories define race by physical appearance alone, genotype theories define race according to genes and culture theories define race according to cultural differences.
Forty-six percent of the students who participated in the focus groups held culture theories prior to the study; only 28 percent held them following the study.
Over the course of the study, some of the students came to consider cultural differences to be better defined by the word “ethnicity” than by “race,” the report stated.
“Beliefs about what defines race are, to some extent, malleable,” Tate said.
The focus groups also made recommendations for administrators, faculty, staff and students to improve the climate for diversity on campus. Recommendations included better publicizing of information about clubs, activities and teacher performance, making changes in class instruction and curriculum, and recruiting more diverse people to all areas of the University.
Tate said there were several weaknesses to the study, including that students were self-selected and the respondents were not representative of the ethnic makeup of the University.
In addition, student perceptions of race and ethnicity clearly changed over the course of the study, but whether the study will have any lasting effects is unknown, Tate said.
Nevertheless, the fact that perceptions did change was evidence that “just having conversations about these concepts can really, actually, have some good effects,” Tate added.
About 70 people, including Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity Greg Vincent, were present for the hour-long presentation. Nearly 40 remained for break-out discussion groups afterward, in which they discussed the study’s findings and student recommendations.
The RIT report can be found
online at codac.uoregon.edu/RITsummary.pdf.

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