10/25/2022
By Julie Chen

One of UMass Lowell’s most essential priorities is ensuring a culture where every university member feels safe, respected and valued. Your experiences, ideas and feedback have been critical as we have developed programs, policies and initiatives to strengthen diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging across all areas of campus.

UMass Lowell’s Values Statement calls on each of us “to advance a climate whereby equity, transparency, fairness, safety and inclusion are valued so that all of its members, faculty, staff and students, can fully engage and thrive.” Maintaining a healthy campus climate improves learning and developmental outcomes for students and personal and professional development for faculty and staff.

But to truly understand where we are succeeding and where more work remains, we need to measure the attitudes and behaviors of the campus community, creating a benchmark we can use to evaluate our progress over time.

Following a recommendation earlier this year from the Council for Social Justice and Inclusion, on Friday Nov. 4, UMass Lowell will launch a campus climate survey to better understand your individual experiences and what we can learn collectively from them.

UMass Lowell is working with the independent firm Insight Viewfinder to conduct the campus climate survey. In addition to its expertise and experience distributing climate surveys across large, complex organizations, Insight Viewfinder was selected because of its commitment to privacy and confidentiality. At no point will UMass Lowell ever be able to connect any specific response to any individual.

Starting Nov. 4 for one month, Insight Viewfinder will each week send to each employee’s UML email a personal link, thereby ensuring that each person can only submit the survey once. Reminders and emails will discontinue once the survey is completed. At no time will any UMass Lowell employee have access to personally identifiable data. Any identifiable information included in write-in comments will be redacted. Paper versions of the surveys are available at designated campus locations.

While I hope you will take time to answer each question in the voluntary campus climate survey, respondents can answer some or all questions.

Another benefit of the individualized link is that you can complete part of the survey and finish the rest at a later time. The full survey should take about 15 minutes to complete. It is also offered in Spanish and is screen-reader accessible and mobile friendly.

The information we get back will be invaluable. These data, which will be shared with the campus community next semester following their analysis by Insight Viewfinder, will let us see what we’re doing well and where changes are needed. The survey will create a benchmark from which we can measure our progress over time.

A welcoming, inclusive campus is an essential foundation for UMass Lowell, supporting every other initiative, program or operation of this institution. The University of Massachusetts Lowell is its people, and this survey will help ensure we have the resources in place to support you and your colleagues and peers.

Thank you for all you do and for taking time to complete the campus climate survey you’ll receive in your UML email beginning Nov. 4.