The Faculty Bearometer

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Who is behind the Bearometer?

This is an entirely faculty-led project. Chris Hoofnagle started the Bearometer and is looking for collaborators.

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What is the Bearometer?

The Bearometer is a one-question survey posed to the regular faculty. The results will be private to the University community (that is they are not published).

The Bearometer is based on MIT’s faculty-led Pulse Survey.

Its goals are simple:

• Empower faculty to shape campus discussions by contributing their questions.
• Amplify the perspectives of the broader faculty community—especially those too reticent or busy to participate in the Senate.
• Deliver timely insights to the Senate and administration on faculty opinions.
• Address the infrequency of university surveys

MIT’s Pulse has surfaced interesting campus dynamics. Some are related here.

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Why did you start the Bearometer

The Faculty Senate has many principal/agent problems. Leaders must intuit faculty sentiment, yet the Senate does not have good tools to communicate preferences. Existing tools, such as FBF and TeachNet, are intimidating to use.

The Bearometer makes it possible to hear from the reticent and the too busy for Senate service.

The Bearometer will also be more democratic, because faculty themselves will propose questions.

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Is the Bearometer private?

To ensure that responses come from regular faculty members and prevent ballot stuffing, you’ll need to authenticate. However, rest assured—Qualtrics’ anonymous mode is on, so the Bearometer will not receive any identifying information. The leaders of the Bearometer also pledge never to attempt to identify any Bearometer participant.

This is how the privacy works:

• Qualtrics is configure to screen all respondents with Calnet Authentication.
• Calnet passes the respondents’ UID (employee number) to an internal database stored on Qualtrics that contains the UIDs of all Senate Faculty.
• If there is a match, the respondent can take the survey.
• The UID is not passed on to the collected results, nor is GeoIP information.

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What gives you the right to do this?

The Bearometer is an experiment in democratization of faculty voices. We would love to hear whether and why one might object to the Bearometer, feel free to reach out.

At MIT, the Faculty Pulse is administered by two elected “question keepers.” If the Bearometer is successful, Hoofnagle pledges to hold an election and hand off the project to colleagues who will adhere to the principles and goals of the Bearometer.

Hoofnagle was the PI of several, national survey research projects that are, combined, cited over 1,000 times and covered in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The Bearometer is not human subjects research.

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Feedback, praise, complaints, or become one of us?

If you have feedback, want to join the effort, or prefer not to receive further communications, don’t hesitate to email Chris Hoofnagle.