The Faculty Bearometer

The Faculty Bearometer is a one-question survey of the Berkeley faculty.

The Bearometer *is not* affiliated with the faculty Senate. Instead the Bearometer is an independent, faculty-led initiative. In fact, survey questions are nominated by faculty! Check your email for the link.

The latest Bearometers

  • Bearometer 4: Intercollegiate Athletics
    On March 4, 2025, we distributed the following question to senate faculty (2635 members) via Qualtrics email contacts. 341 completed the survey. Results are available here. What level of priority should Berkeley place on intercollegiate athletics?
  • Bearometer 3: SAT/ACT Testing
    On February 20, 2025, we distributed the following question to senate faculty (2635 members) via Qualtrics email contacts. 430 completed the survey. Results are available here. Should UC Berkeley go back to using standardized test scores (e.g. SAT or ACT) in undergraduate applications?
  • Bearometer 2: Union
    On February 11, 2025, we distributed the following question to senate faculty (2635 members) via Qualtrics email contacts: “As the University prepares to renegotiate the graduate student union agreement, what is the most important insight you want negotiators to understand about how the current agreement impacts your teaching or research?” Results available by email link.
  • Bearometer 1: Welfare
    On January 27th, 2025, we distributed the following question to senate faculty (2635 members) via Qualtrics email contacts. 300 submitted responses. What is the single most important challenge to your overall welfare as a faculty member at Cal? Results here (requires CalNet Authentication)

Suggest a topic for the Bearometer

You can suggest a question and upvote topics for the Bearometer on Poll Everywhere. The URL for Poll Everywhere has been shared with Senate faculty.

Feel free to suggest topics or to upvote others.

When suggesting a question, please specify how you’d like faculty to respond, e.g. a Likert scale, free text response, etc.

FAQs

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 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.

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.

Let’s make this a valuable tool for faculty voices. Thank you for participating!

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