Sense of Belonging: Changing Institutions, Not Just Individuals
Highlights from a Master Class on Belonging at Princeton University
THE JUMP-OFF: AN INTRODUCTION
Sense of belonging is a feeling, a sensation, an affective, emotional response that has cognitive triggers and behavioral manifestations. However, it’s not just that students can be expected to “find” a sense of belonging on their own, like searching for prizes in a mazed hunt. Campus leaders, educators, faculty, and student affairs professionals must also take deliberate, equity-minded actions to root out, replace, and/or revise existing practices, policies, and processes that act as barriers to students’ sense of belonging. They must simultaneously build new scaffolds and supports that enable student success — what I like to call the “constructive” and “destructive” work of boosting, building or engineering belonging.
In this short piece, I underscore the importance of focusing on changing institutions, not just individuals in boosting students’ sense of belonging in higher education.
SENSE OF BELONGING: A PRIMER
Much of what has been written about sense of belonging locates the underlying causal process(-es) largely within the individual. In theory, this makes a lot of sense since sense of belonging has three core dimensions: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. It is, in part, about how a person feels, thinks, and behaves.
However, it’s clear from my research over the last decade that those thought patterns, emotions, and actions are conditioned, influenced, and (re)shaped by larger structural forces. Looming structural forces operate in the environment (e.g., climate), organization, or broader society (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism). Taken together, they can inspire or inhibit, catalyze or constrain one’s optimal sense of belonging.
Consider data from my recent pulse surveys and corporate focus groups that reveal how these same dimensions operate at the institutional/organizational level. For instance, organizational mindsets (i.e., cognitive) and organizational health (i.e., affective) drive strategic decisions (i.e., behavioral) about business plans, 5-year goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), and “bottom line” targets, to name a few. Figure 1 presents an illustration of the multi-level, multi-dimensional model of belonging.
Structural forces related to the organizational environment that impact sense of belonging vary in nature and intensity. For instance, an institution’s history of excluding women, African Americans, other people of color, or LGBTQIA+ populations can produce chilly, hostile, and unwelcoming climates that threaten students’ sense of belonging. It can also raise doubts about one’s membership status (within the group) and worries about being treated equitably, fairly, and justly. These histories, though past, are memorialized through campus markers, ranging from confederate statues to offensive murals, buildings named after white supremacists to unmarked slave graves, just to name a few.
Know it or not, that history alone has denied some individuals’ access or “equal opportunity” to enroll, attend, graduate, or be employed as faculty and staff, which reveals how some groups may be predisposed to feeling invisible, marginalized, or underrepresented on campus. That predisposition is not due to being unready, unqualified, or unwilling — NO — but rather to the undeniable history that structures opportunity in this country.
CHANGING INSTITUTIONS FOR SENSE OF BELONGING
To cultivate conditions that make sense of belonging possible for all, institutions have to deal with this troubled history. No, we can’t go back and change the institution’s history — I get that. It is what it is, literally. But, we can acknowledge the present pains caused by past wrongdoings and fall on the right side of history by charting a plan forward for the future that’s inclusive, equitable, and just, crafted at the hands of many of those who were once shut out.
“…you can acknowledge the present pains caused by past wrongdoings and fall on the right side of history by charting a plan forward for the future that’s inclusive, equitable, and just, crafted at the hands of many.”
To be sure, sense of belonging results from systemically and systematically changing institutions, not just individuals. Otherwise, racist and oppressive institutional structures, particularly at predominantly White, classist, patriarchal institutions (e.g., elite colleges), coalesce in the “othering,” minoritizing, and marginalization of some faculty, staff, and students while setting others as “the standard” or norm by which all others are measured. Such oppressive forces cascade over time, avalanching into a lifetime of inequitable experiences that render impacted individuals/groups as deficient, problematic, lacking, or worse, too different to be accepted, too needy to be helped, or too few to count or matter.
Make no mistake about it: institutional structures, policies, and practices must change to create conditions for individual’s sense of belonging in education. In no uncertain terms, I oppose perspectives that pathologize the individual — faculty, staff, or student — prioritizing changes in faculty over renovations in facilities, changes in staff over redesign of pay structures, and changes in students over dismantling of systems. We must enact institutional changes if we hope to facilitate and condition sense of belonging for faculty, staff, and students.
Countless examples of “promising practices” exist showing what’s possible when campus leaders set a strategy for intentional, strategic institutional change. For instance, the University of Oklahoma harnessed the power of technology to boost belonging, yielding higher “recruit back” rates than ever before. Fresno State, a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), targeted belonging as a way of establishing sustainable articulation agreements with community college graduates, leading to record-breaking transfer success. Sense of belonging is the driving force behind Colgate University’s strategic plan, the academic plan at Kent State, and a campus-wide inclusive excellence campaign at Amherst College, Bucknell University, and Kennesaw State’s College of Education, to name a few.
At my previous institutions — LeMoyne-Owen College and Virginia Union University — we launched fresh marketing campaigns (#YouBelongHere), embedded navigational strategies within a freshman summer bridge program (i.e., Passport to Success), purchased wayfinding signage, and setup staff- and student-run support lines (4Help) to provide 24/7 assistance to students. More than a mere collection of new tactics, taken together these examples represent campus-wide strategies to change how the institution serves students — not just what they offer. Personalizing communication, decoding privileged language, and humanizing teaching and advising helped raise enrollment, improve time-to-degree, increase class attendance and retention rates, ultimately nurturing a strong sense of belonging.
CONCLUSION
By displaying affirming messages, helping students locate campus resources, and answering their questions, campuses can improve infrastructure, enhance architecture, revise curriculum, and create new communication channels, all while improving customer service, raising satisfaction, and boosting belonging. To do anything less, would be unproductive and unwise. Students can find a sense of belonging when we, as educators and leaders, do the hard work of changing our institutions in ways that make belonging possible for all.
