On Feb. 18, every member of the Georgetown University student body received an email invitation to participate in a university Cultural Climate Survey, intended to gather information on students’ sense of belonging on campus.
However, despite the survey’s noble purpose, it is poorly designed: A combination of its leading question style, vague terminology and disputable underlying assumptions obstruct its aim of truly representing Georgetown’s student body. More broadly, the survey is not the best method of accomplishing the administration’s goals; rather, to understand students’ concerns about belonging at Georgetown, it should be more attentive to the existing mechanisms for students to voice their concerns.
The survey’s problems begin with the design of its questions. On page one, the survey includes statements beginning with “there are enough,” asking students to agree or disagree with each statement. Such statements include, “At Georgetown, there are enough opportunities for me to connect with people from my cultural communities,” or “At Georgetown, there are enough opportunities to positively impact my cultural communities.” However, these questions simply do not provide the capacity for students to respond with real discontent.
Possible responses to these questions, on a scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” create a tipped scale of “administration isn’t doing enough” to “administration is doing enough” in practice. This fails to leave room for those who feel the administration has done too much: Some Georgetown students believe that too much is spent on diversity initiatives. That does not mean that administrators should cater to them, and it does not mean that I am one of them. But any survey meant to be taken seriously for educational governance and fiscal planning must account for that viewpoint; the fact that this one’s style of questioning obstructs it is a misstep that foils its basic premise of inclusion.
These problems are further exacerbated by ambiguous terminology throughout the survey. The survey leads with a definition of a “cultural community” as a permeable label for any group, ranging from national identity and organized religions to a student’s childhood neighborhood. With such an elastic definition, how are students meant to provide concrete answers to questions like, “At Georgetown, there are enough opportunities to positively impact my cultural communities?” My opinion on the matter is entirely predicated on the meaning of that phrase.
On page two of the survey, the consequences of this vague phrasing become even more apparent. Embroiled in questions like, “In general, people at Georgetown help each other succeed,” is the question of who “people” are. Students? Administrators? Faculty? My answers to these questions are wholly dependent on that definition, and so is any action the university might take to improve that “metric” of belonging in the future.
I searched for a methodology to explain all of this. While Georgetown did not make public its methodology for this survey, it previously made the methodology of a similar 2022 survey of faculty, the “Faculty Climate Survey,” available online. Yet that survey’s eight-page appendix devoted to methodology makes no mention of question construction or definitions of relevant terminology — instead, most of its eight pages are devoted to nonresponse bias.
As respondents at the receiving end of any changes Georgetown makes in response to the survey results, students should have access to a methodology that is far more inclusive and comprehensive. Beyond that, though, the methodology uncovers another important issue: To make the results of the survey more representative of the entire student body, the university balances it by factors like race/ethnicity, household income, level of parental education, gender, sexual orientation, disability status and religious affiliation. This suggests that these identities are at the center of students’ belief that they belong at Georgetown.
Interestingly, however, the survey does not ask for the respondent’s class year. While the 2022 faculty survey was balanced for length of tenure at Georgetown, this year’s student survey was not. Class year is indisputably a central factor of a student’s sense of belonging; a senior will likely feel like they belong more than a first-year, no matter what communities they identify themselves with.
The goals of this survey have potential to be worthwhile. I appreciate that the administration is focused on improving students’ sense of belonging on campus.
That being said, through the survey’s suggestive prompting, unclear phrasing and ignorance of the importance of a student’s class year, it obstructs itself from truly representing Georgetown’s student body and therefore will fail to comprehensively, constructively or accurately evaluate institutional practices.
But, in reality, these lofty goals are not achieved best by a survey, and student belonging should not be defined by quantitative metrics. Instead, student life should be studied and improved through closer attention to the actions of elected student government, campus media and identity- or issue-based advocates alongside more reliable channels of contact with administrators. As students, we should be primarily enabled to improve our experience at Georgetown through mechanisms already in place to voice our concerns.
Page six of the survey states: “I am confident that Georgetown will use the findings of this survey to take action.” Yes, I am confident that the survey will be used that way. But it’s revealing that there’s no place to indicate that I have little faith in those actions’ roots in true student opinion.
Peter Sloniewsky is a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences.
