By ELLEN SCHMIDT/Murphy News Service

The University of Minnesota administration’s two-year long campus climate initiative will emphasize its efforts to make campus a successful place for faculty in its next steps after focusing primarily on students.

Campus climate is a broad term encompassing a range of efforts—such as diversifying faculty, increasing scholarship funding, and providing more gender inclusive restrooms—which is aimed at promoting a welcoming, respectful, and conversational University campus.

The Campus Climate Workgroup, composed of President Eric Kaler and several administrative vice presidents, meets every other month to form strategies to improve campus and delegate tasks downstream. Since 2014 the group has chiefly worked on student issues, such as multicultural student engagement and reaching out to commuter students.

Kaler’s Chief of Staff Amy Phenix said campus climate efforts have focused on students so far because there was more data available on the population from The Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) survey conducted over the past several years. The January 2015 Campus Climate report’s recommendations reflected the student emphasis.

Phenix said when the efforts started in 2014 there was only one year of the Employee Engagement Survey data to work with. Now that the survey has been ongoing, it’s possible to respond to faculty and employee concerns with a better understanding of their issues.

The campus climate team will keep working to fulfill the recommendations outlined in the 2015 report, she said, while tackling new problems that have arisen. One of the newer initiatives requires faculty and staff to complete implicit bias trainings.

Implicit bias trainings inform faculty and staff how to recognize bias and remove it from the hiring process to give every candidate an equal shot, she said. The trainings lend to making a more diverse faculty, a goal for campus climate.

“We all come to the world with our own biases and preconceived notions and baggage,” Phenix said. “So in the hiring process, what you don’t want to have happen, is that those biases prevent you from looking at a qualified candidate fairly, and giving them a fair shot at the job.”

The Office of Human Resources hired specialists this year to build relationships with various communities of color to network with and encourage them to apply for jobs at the University. This will help to add more resumes from diverse populations, Phenix said.

Adding more multicultural members to the faculty will help decrease concerns from multicultural students, help them feel more accepted on campus, and have more people to relate to, President of the Minnesota International Student Association Keerthana Shankar said. She said it would increase awareness about campus climate efforts, too.

“I don’t think a lot of people know about [campus climate],” she said. “I didn’t know about their efforts at all.”

To inform more people about campus climate, Shankar said administration could have representatives reach out to student groups on the second floor of Coffman Memorial Union. She said talking at student groups’ meetings or adding campus climate information to newsletters would help spread the word.

Kaler sends out university-wide emails to inform students, staff, and faculty about campus climate progress, and the campus climate website is a resource to learn more, but it can be difficult to reach the large expanse of people at the U, Phenix said.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that it’s going to be everybody’s issue every day,” Phenix said. “What we want to help people understand is that everybody has an individual responsibility to try to make the campus welcoming.”

A possible 2016 report has been discussed by the Campus Climate Workgroup, Phenix said, but not decided on yet.

Reporter Ellen Schmidt is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.