Climate Survey

The Harvard University Division of Science conducted a climate survey across all of the Harvard science departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The CFA-IDEA Climate Survey subcommittee spent a great deal of time working on the survey so that it would be relevant to the CFA wide community with the intentions of the CFA taking part in this effort. Unfortunately, SAO was not able to agree to the terms of the survey on Harvard's timeline and therefore the survey was only administered to the Harvard community.

Despite SAO not taking the survey, the CFA community still gathered as a whole to discuss the results and share feedback about how to make improvements to the CFA climate.

On February 10th, 2020 HCO/Astronomy held a CFA Wide Town Hall to discuss the results of the survey with a focus on community. The presentation that goes over the history of the survey and its findings can be found here (requires CFA Google access). Eleven breakout rooms were created to discuss ways in which we can build community at the CFA. The feedback from those breakout rooms is summarized here (requires CFA Google access).

On March 10th, 2020 a discussion with HCO/Astronomy staff was held to discuss the results. The topics discussed were workplace incivility, sense of community, communication, and accountability of wrongdoing. The meeting included a number of Harvard resources outside of the department able to assist with these issues such as those from HR, Center for Workplace Development, and the Title IV/Professional Conduct office. Potential action items under discussion are training, reporting, values statement, and social gatherings.