In November 2016, hundreds of students occupied the Arthur G. Coons (AGC) administrative building of Occidental College in protest against the college administration. They sought to begin a movement for institutional change and administrative action regarding matters of diversity, equity and inclusion. Students issued a list of 14 demands, nearly all of which the administration committed to fulfilling in some capacity. The occupation rocked the college campus: some teachers held classes inside the AGC, many administrative staffers were told not to come to work that week, a number of them quit their jobs to move on to other institutions and students stood and slept together in emotion-wrought solidarity as they waited for responses from the administration.
One year later, The Occidental Weekly conducted a school-wide survey on campus climate, asking students, faculty, staff and administrators alike to reflect on the events and their aftermath. Students were given one survey while faculty, staff and administration were given a variation of that survey.
Here we present to you the results of both surveys. We received a 15.6 percent response rate from students and a 26 percent response rate from faculty, staff and administration.
Though the racial makeup of the survey respondents is not dramatically different from the racial makeup of the school for most racial categories, because the representation of white students was 20.3 percent higher than the school population, we have chosen not to highlight student survey responses. Instead we will pull out what we found to be some interesting responses from faculty, staff and administration. For the sake of transparency, we have included external links to the responses to all questions from both surveys at the bottom of the page.
* Percentages for student responses add up to more than 100 percent because we allowed participants to select more than one option. Occidental’s enrollment demographics allowed for only one choice.
