The Faculty Bearometer

Who is behind the Bearometer?

This is an entirely faculty-led project. The Bearometer is not affiliated with the Senate.

Chris Hoofnagle and Will Fithian started the Bearometer and are looking for collaborators.

What is the Bearometer?

The Bearometer is a one-question survey posed to the senate faculty. The results will be private to the University of California 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.

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. Other tools, like the pervasive use of “telephone,” risk misrepresenting others’ reviews. More broadly, some campus leaders have misalignment and are spending University resources pursuing goals untethered to research and teaching.

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.

Is the Bearometer private?

To ensure that responses come from senate faculty members and prevent ballot stuffing, the survey will be delivered using Qualtrics’ email system, which creates a unique URL for each participant. 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:

• We have uploaded a list of Berkeley Senate Faculty to Qualtrics, current as of January 2025.
• Qualtrics distributes individual emails
• The UID is not passed on to the collected results, nor is GeoIP information.

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 and Fithian pledge 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.

Fithian is a professor of statistics!

The Bearometer is not human subjects research.

What are the Bearometer’s Methods?

The Bearometer has a two step process:

1. Questions are collected using Poll Everywhere.

In this step, faculty can submit questions and upvote/downvote them. We do not have the ability to put Poll Everywhere behind CAS authentication yet, and we do not want to turn on “registration” because that will undermine the privacy of users.

Once a question gets sufficient upvotes, the Question Keepers advance the question to stage 2.

2. The Question Keepers distribute the question to Senate Faculty (as of January 2025, this is a total population of 2635) using Qualtrics’ unique email link system.

Will you censor the Bearometer?

The Bearometer solicits free text responses. We will redact responses where they mention people by name, where responses undermine anonymity, where responses degrade or attack others, where private or other inappropriate information is revealed, or where a response is incompatible with our standards of collegiality. This has to be a flexible standard.

We will always indicate a redaction and attempt to communicate the intent of the respondent.

Is the Bearometer public?

We upload the Bearometer using a link only available to the Berkeley community.

We mark Bearometers with “UCFEYES: UC Faculty Eyes Only.” By this, we mean that you are welcome to share the Bearometer with others in the UC system. Please ask us before distributing it outside of UC.

We cannot guarantee that Bearometer recipients will not circulate the results outside the institution, and this is among the reasons why remove material identified above.

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.