Developing Community Agreements for Anti-Racist Universities

Overview

Racism is still widespread in higher education and academia. We see racism shows up in interpersonal interactions in academic settings, and anti-racist community agreements will help create a more inclusive and diverse culture in research groups, classrooms, departments, and institutes. Throughout this fall quarter, our team has worked on designing a toolkit to empower community members to establish community agreements. We first listened to our community to learn about the experiences of our community members, created an initial design of the toolkit, and revised our design based on feedback from stakeholders and surveys we collected from various groups on campus. We summarize our effort towards this design project and insights we learned from the conversations and survey here.

The Team

Jarita (pictured above)

Jarita is a doctoral candidate in Race, Inequality and Language in Education where she studies indigenization. An active member of Stanford’s Native community she is committed to transforming educational spaces for Indigenous learners.

Juyoung (pictured above)

Juyoung is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Juyoung is committed to supporting female students and researchers in physical science and engineering and being an ally to other underrepresented groups. She decided to take this course to be more proactive in creating an inclusive and diverse culture in research societies and engineering education.

Samuel (pictured above)

Samuel is a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioengineering Department and in Polly Fordyce’s lab at Chem-H. Samuel identifies as queer/agender (pick your pronoun, it’ll work), and has worked on DEI and LGBTQ-inclusion in science. Samuel is interested in being a better ally and expanding intersections with other marginalized communities in science.

Listening to the Community

Racism is still a widespread problem in research groups and departments. We first used two public sources to listen to personal experiences of our campus community (Padlet and Stanford DEI survey) and invited guests to anonymously interview (Consultations) to learn experiences more in-depth.

Padlet

We could hear experiences of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and/or bias from our campus community through a Padlet created by Jennifer R. Cohen.

From this Padlet, we heard lived experiences of students. We are sharing some posts here, and all posts were collected anonymously.

“My old, white, male PI said ‘I don’t see color’ in response to me confronting him about a biased incident.”

“A faculty member realized that they surpassed their ‘diversity quota’ for admissions one year and remarked that they wouldn’t need to admit any ‘diverse’ students the following year.”

“Being told that I should ‘focus on science while I’m a PhD student…’ rather than doing advocacy work, as if it’s just a distraction. What they fail to understand is that I would RATHER focus on just doing science, but the lack of support prevents me from being able to do that.”

“A graduate student said that black kids should be left to play sports or music in the summer instead of participating in research opportunities.”

Although most of them were related to professors (PI or advisors or instructors), many were from their peers.

Stanford DEI Survey

Stanford recently published their campus-wide DEI survey. The response rate of the survey was 36%, and the response rate was higher among faculty (38%) and staff (44%) than students, postdocs, and clinician educators (29–31%). The survey covers various topics, and we focused on the ‘microaggression’ section most.

In the survey, the percent of people who experienced each type of microaggression varied much with respect to their race/ethnicity. Four types of microaggression asked in the survey showed different frequencies in each race/ethnicity. However, overall the percent of respondents who experienced microaggression of any kind, at least once, was very high in Black or African American and high in all other races/ethnicities other than White or European.

After we reviewed Padlet and Stanford DEI Survey, we concluded:

• Racism and discrimination are still widespread on our campus, which means that we need to make meaningful efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable environment for everyone.
• As a community, we should get rid of racism and discrimination at interpersonal levels, such as microaggression, and we believe community agreements can play a critical role.
• In our community agreements, community members’ experiences and expectations should be reflected.

Consultations

In order to develop our prototype we held a series of one to one and group consultations. These consultations were held with key stakeholders who we saw as leaders in their anti-racist work here at Stanford. The consultations revealed information that helped us refine and develop our ideas. We heard that any anti-racism initiatives must include all members of the university community from contract staff to the highest levels of leadership. A common sentiment among our consultations was that peers are an important source of both racist and anti-racist practices and can have a huge impact on one’s experiences. Those with lived experience emphasized that racism at Stanford is perpetuated through interpersonal interactions more than specific policies. Our behavior has to change. These consultations also included sharing drafts of ideas. We heard that after creating community agreements, advertising the agreements (to new members), reminding people of the agreements, and updating agreements if necessary should be followed. When we had these consultations it was clear that there has to be a minimum impact to Anti-racist actions. It is too easy for non-marginalized individuals to feel satisfied with rubber-stamp actions but those who are impacted deserve real improvements.

Community-Centered Solutions

Next we synthesized the information we had drawn in, and centered on solutions that would meaningfully improve the experience of graduate students by creating more intentional academic communities.

• Why: Racism is still a widespread problem on university campuses, and it shows up in our 1-on-1 interactions
• Who: Graduate students (+ anyone else motivated)
• What: Anti-racist community agreements
• Where: A single lab, a class, a department, and institute
• How: A toolkit to empower community members to establish community agreements

What are community agreements?

Community agreements are a set of collaborative community values that a lab/institute/department adopts after discussion and consensus agreements. All current and new/incoming members of the community agree to abide by the agreements. As a community, members hold each other accountable to living and working by these agreements, and the community agreements are re-examined on a regular basis to revise, renew, and reaffirm them.

• Community agreements can be value or action-oriented.
• Examples of community agreements:
• Evaluate course grading for fairness racial bias
• Learn how to pronounce everyone’s name
• We value each other’s lived experiences

Pilot Survey Results

To assess what would be most beneficial to graduate students who experience racism, we sent out a pilot survey on community agreements.

Respondents were anonymous members of the Black Graduate Student Association, the Stanford Black Biosciences Organization, Stanford Native Graduate Student listserv, the Graduate Public Service Alumni listserv, Stanford Society of Women Engineers, and Womxn of Color in Engineering. A total of 13 individuals responded. (Please take our survey and expand our dataset!)

First, we asked respondents to relate their experience with and response to community agreements.

Reactions to the concept of community agreements were generally positive. None of the respondents chose our negative options, though one free response addition indicated a mixed response. While nearly half of respondents (6/13) indicated some experience with community agreements, the majority of these (4/6) indicated that they had not always been satisfied with those community agreements.

We then asked respondents about the scale of community that should develop agreements.

Free responses in association with this question revealed a complex set of trade-offs regarding the appropriateness and implementation of agreements at the different scales of community.

Broadly, department level agreements seemed to appeal to the largest subset of respondents, and this compromise seems reflected in the concerns raised in the free responses.

Next, we attempted to stimulate our respondent’s creativity by having them first evaluate a prospective set of community agreements and then recommend community agreements that would benefit them.

Free responses to this question were predominantly empty or raised related concerns rather than providing new suggestions.

A Roadmap to Community Agreements

Our surveys identified some of the pain points in the process of making community agreements: deciding what an agreement should be and how to maintain accountability. Furthermore, these two challenges are highly dependent on context (e.g. the scale of community developing the agreement). We cannot suggest any best course of action for anyone, but tools can be provided that would help individuals identify their own needs and best routes to success.

We pitched a product for a roadmap to community agreements and tools and templates to smooth every step of that process.

Of particular importance are the survey tools that should include a best-practice set of demonstrated agreements and the accountability tools that should focus on positive implementation rather than punitive enforcement. Tools will also be made using widely-available free software (e.g. Google Forms) and graphic designs will be provided under a Creative Commons Zero license. The entire toolkit will be formulated as a “clonable” directory with quick-start guides and READMEs for individual reflection.

Next-steps

Our next steps include working on creating a pilot incubation for a group to create a set of community agreements and reflect on the process. We also want to survey a broader set of graduate students from multiple campuses on their knowledge of community agreements and their needs. We want to create a recommended set of community agreements that set a standard for excellence while also developing plug-and-play templates for all key material. This project needs community commitment but the first step is to advertise to future champions of community agreements so we can have a core team assembled.