University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering

LAS/Grainger Climate Survey

LAS & Grainger Department/Unit Climate Study

Dear Colleagues, 

Our greatest resource in the Grainger College of Engineering is you. For this reason, we are undertaking an academic/workplace study to understand your experiences with regard to work, research, teaching, and learning and how those experiences shape your sense of inclusion and belonging in our college. 

We need your participation to make the study successful. I encourage you to share your unique perspective and experience by taking the 10-minute survey. The survey will be available through March 2023. 

Complete survey

General questions about this initiative? Ellen Wang Althaus (co-PI), Associate Director for Faculty and Staff Engagement at Grainger Engineering’s Institute for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) at idea-facultystaff@illinois.edu.  

Questions about accessing the survey? Contact Maryalice Wu, Director of Data Analytics, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning. 

Only the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) will have access to the identifiable raw data, and it will not be shared with anyone outside of CITL. 

We are very cautious about accidentally exposing individual respondents to units who have any kind of authority over them. To mitigate this potential problem, we employ three strategies: 

Based on the list of potential respondents, we review the number of people within each demographic or other reported group to ensure we have a high enough concentration of people within that group to avoid accidentally identifying someone. Typically, the cut-off for reporting is that we must have at least five people in any reported demographic breakout. 

Sometimes we collapse demographic groups into a larger category for reporting purposes. For example, the university system has many types of employees: Tenured faculty, instructors, civil service staff, extra help, academic hourly, student employees, research graduate, teaching graduates etc. We will merge several of these categories and retain only two or three overarching groups. For example, we might merge Academic professional and civil service staff into a single group called staff. We will work with the college staff to ensure meaningful and consistent groupings. 

We will review all of the open-ended comments in the survey and redact information that could lead to individual identification. For example, some people name their advisor or others might talk about a specific event that would easily identify them; those portions of the comments will be redacted before they are included in departmental reports.  Only redacted comments will be shared with the departments.  A few people on the research team and outside of CITL, will have access to the unredacted comments, but without a name attached so that some concerns can be addressed at the college level. 

Departments will receive aggregated de-identified reports from Grainger Engineering. 

The Grainger Associate Deans and the IDEA Institute will be utilizing the survey data to generate reports for each unit, which will include proposed actions to address any identified issues. These reports will serve as a guide for each unit to develop their own strategic action plan, which will be shared with their respective members. 

Faculty, staff and postdoctoral researchers with active Grainger College of Engineering appointments (FTE > 0) are eligible to participate. Grainger Engineering must be listed as their home college to participate.  

Note: All of LAS (staff, graduate students, postdocs, undergraduates, faculty) will be invited to participate and that Grainger Engineering affiliates with primary appointments in LAS will take the LAS survey and will not be double surveyed. See the LAS website if this applies to you. 

If you feel you are eligible to participate in the survey and do not see a survey link when you log into feedback.illinois.edu please contact Maryalice Wu.

We are pulling info such as college, department/unit, employee type, etc. from BANNER before we launch the survey.  Then this info can be merged with the survey data, and will be used to feed specific questions to specific groups of individuals. 

If you have questions about Grainger participation in this study, contact Lynford Goddard (PI), Grainger Engineering Associate Dean and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Ellen Wang Althaus (co-PI) at idea-facultystaff@illinois.edu. 

For more information about the study overall, contact principal investigator Isabel Molina, College of LAS Associate Dean and Professor of Communication and Latina/o studies. 

The College of LAS climate survey team, led by LAS Associate Dean Isabel Molina, has been planning and developing this survey for over one year.  The Grainger College of Engineering is grateful for their tremendous effort in survey design and collaborative spirit in allowing for Grainger faculty, staff, and postdocs participation in this important study - officially renamed as the LAS & Grainger Department/Unit Climate Study.