Dear Cockrell School Faculty and Staff,

Happy Lunar New Year and the beginning of Black History Month!

Many of you will recall participating in the Cockrell School Climate survey in March 2021 or reading about the preliminary findings over the summer. We’re excited to be able to share the full report of the results. Many thanks go to the Climate Survey Team and the tireless effort of biomedical engineering graduate student Nikhith Kalkunte and mechanical engineering professor Maura Borrego who have written the report and its recommendations.

We strongly encourage you to read it in its entirety, especially the qualitative comments – hearing peoples’ experiences in their own words can be really valuable. You will find that peoples’ experiences in the Cockrell School of Engineering are themselves very diverse – some people feel unsupported while others feel well supported.

In looking at the report’s findings that provide ways we can improve the experiences of all students, staff, and faculty in the school, we wanted to highlight a few notable findings:
  • Multiple respondents across diverse roles in the school noted the attention to racial, ethnic, and gender diversity but called out a need to increase the visibility of other aspects of diversity, like LGBTQ, disabilities, and first-generation status.
  • Many students drew attention to the fact that it is important to them to see professors and leaders who represent them and noted a particular lack of Black, Hispanic, women, and LGBTQ faculty.
  • Many challenges surfaced in the open-ended responses point to experiences of microaggressions related to disability, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; the faculty’s lack of awareness of well-being of students; or collaboration among faculty and staff given the power differentials in their roles.
  • International graduate students noted feeling particularly marginalized.
The good news is, there are really actionable ideas in the report and its recommendations that can start to directly address the challenges identified in the survey. We plan to repeat the climate survey on a regular basis (currently, the thinking is every two years).

In the meantime, there are concrete things that each of us can do. The Climate Survey Team created a long list that is included in the full report. However, we’ve called out a few here, based on one’s role in the Cockrell School, and directly tied to the report’s findings. Many of us wear multiple hats, so there might be several ways for you to act.

Department Chairs: Schedule at least one DEI-specific conversation as part of a faculty meeting this spring. Initiate a conversation among your department faculty and staff around the full Climate Survey Report and what concrete actions your department can take.

Instructors: Choose one new strategy to implement to ease the stress of your course or make your course more inclusive. If it’s too late to implement it this semester, make a plan for implementing it in the fall. There are some great examples on the Faculty Innovation Center’s website. You can also find concrete suggestions in the Texas Well-Being Guidebook or on the associated website.

Research Supervisors: Schedule a dedicated research group meeting or a portion of every meeting to speak directly to your group’s graduate students about the lack of diversity among faculty in your field, the impact it has on you and them, and ideas you all have for addressing this.

Staff Supervisors: Have a conversation with your direct reports about their long-term goals and then support them in exploring professional development that meets these goals.

Staff: Take a look at the Diversity Education Certificate courses offered by DDCE through UTLearn. Think about which provides the most meaningful connection to your role in the Cockrell School and sign up for one.
We hope you will take some time this semester to explore these suggestions and read the full Climate Survey Report. However you choose to engage, we look forward to having more conversations with you all around how you are feeling in the Cockrell School and ways we can continue to foster and grow an inclusive, welcoming, and supportive Texas Engineering community.

Sincerely,
Roger T. Bonnecaze
Interim Dean
Christine Julien
Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
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