I am writing to ensure that the university community is aware of how they can access reports on the climate for racial and ethnic diversity at CMU. In the spring of 2007, telephone interviews were conducted with more than 350 white undergraduate students and Web surveys were conducted with a comparable number of students of color.

The report summarizing the experiences and opinions of these students can be found at the CMU 2010 Web site, which is planning.cmich.edu. Then, you go to “Documents” at the top, and then to Results of CMU Diversity Study. There you will find a 147-page report as well as a four-page executive summary. A separate study focusing on the experiences of faculty and staff was undertaken in the fall of 2007.

The report, summarizing the opinions and experiences of almost 1,000 CMU employees, is found at the Human Resources Web site hrs.cmich.edu. At that site, you need to click on “Spotlight” at the right and then scroll down to the faculty and staff report and its executive summary. The report derived from the faculty and staff surveys is also available at the CMU 2010 Web site for your convenience (I will ask the Human Resources staff to add the appendices to this site. They include copies of the Web survey itself, which can be useful to readers of the study).

My point is that every effort is being made to make the findings of these studies widely available to the campus community. I would welcome invitations from your office or group to make presentations as well. My colleagues involved with this project extend this invitation as well; they are Angela Haddad, Chris Owens, Lisa Patterson and Cherie Strachan.

Now, every other researcher and I are at CMU bound by a series of ethical principles derived both from our professional associations and from CMU’s institutional policies. I will not release raw data that may identify individual respondents. To do so would violate pledges of confidentiality extended to respondents and would violate what I promised when I completed my request for Institutional Review Board permission to complete these studies.

Further, I did not release parts of the faculty and staff findings to the public (or to one particularly insistent student) prior to my completion of the full report, which was given first in its entirety to the senior officers and staff who had requested that it be undertaken. This is common professional courtesy.

I will not release to the public my own PowerPoint presentations. They are my personal intellectual property and are protected, to the best of my knowledge, by CMU policy.

I do, however, welcome your review of these studies. I can assure you – contrary to the opinions of one student letter writer – that I have not expressed concerns about their validity. Quite the contrary, these studies provide a consistent picture of the strengths and weaknesses of CMU’s efforts to create a climate that is welcoming to all of its students, faculty and staff. The intent of these studies (and those that are Dcurrently underway but not completed) is to contribute to a discussion on campus of ways of enhancing diversity at CMU – one of CMU’s five priorities through the Vision 2010 process.

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