Audit 2000 - Survey

As part of the Environmental Studies senior project, students performed different analyses of the environmental stance of the Macalester College Campus. These projects incorporated a wide spectrum of policy, attitudes, and actions undertaken by the Macalester Community. To get a better idea of the community's opinion on environmental issues in general, we conducted a survey of students, faculty and staff that allowed us to generalize Macalester's attitude on those issues.

We created a survey that took into consideration two groups that we felt comprised the Macalester community, these groups were the students and the faculty and staff. To get an accurate and honest representation of these groups' opinions, questions were worded in such a way to elicit an unbiased response. To deal with any bias we made the wording very general and asked questions that allowed participants to give their opinion of Macalester's community as a whole, regardless of environmental issues. Furthermore, we wrote the survey in a way which gave as little information as possible linking the survey to the environmental studies program, e.g. survey had a vague and largely encompassing title; only one of us was mentioned as author of the survey with the first initial and last name (See the appendix for a sample survey directed to students) with the hopes that participants would have a harder time connecting us to the environmental studies seminar class.

The student survey was conducted through the Post Office the last week of March and a box was placed in the post office lounge to make it easier for the participants to fill out the survey and return it right away, or at their leisure. By mailing these, we were able to send out a greater quantity of surveys (a total of 400), and have them sent to random participants. Because of our decision to mail the surveys, and our knowledge of low return rate of previous mailed surveys, we chose to make the survey only a page long, with concise questions. The surveys directed to faculty and staff were placed in the mailboxes of all full-time faculty in every department, and randomly placed in the library, physical plant, campus programs, and residential life. Surveys for this group totaled 200. (See sample survey). The faculty/staff survey was worded slightly different for their role in the community:

Question 2 in the student survey asked what year the participant was at Macalester, while in the faculty survey, it asked how many years he/she worked at the college. Question 3 was changed from tentative major, to department the faculty/staff worked for, while Question 6 had the word Asupport@ changed to Aaffiliated@.

The first three questions on the surveys had the purpose of finding demographic characteristics of the respondents. The next question, #4, was designed to compare environmental issues to other major concerns around campus. Question 5 allowed participants to speak their mind on issues which they felt were of the greatest concern on campus. In this question we looked for answers that pertained to campus environmental issues. The last question in the survey was designed for us to infer participants political opinion by finding which organizations they supported as well as finding the organizations that were most likely to be supported . We also looked to see how much support campus environmental groups had compared to others. Some organizations were not included because we felt they lacked political nature, for example, MacWeekly, WMCN, and MacCinema.

Once surveys were returned, we proceeded to analyze student surveys separate from faculty/staff, because we wanted to compare the two basic groups that compose the Macalester community. Also we assumed that the response would be relatively different between these two groups. Likewise, if we were to analyze both groups together the results would be biased towards the students since they were a larger survey group.

Totals were found by summing the numbers assigned by each respondent to each issue. Faculty results were multiplied by a factor of 3.375 to compare more accurately the students' responses from the faculty's. Only 24 out of 31 faculty responded to this question. All 81 students responded.

Issues	Faculty/Staff	Students
Multiculturalism	101	356
Internationalism	77	321
Student/Faculty	93	320
Greening Campus	66	276
Safety	81	265
Other	32	137

Responses were categorized by the general topics of the problems We came up with 7 categories for both students and faculty. Faculty results were multiplied by a factor of 2.6 to compare more accurately the students' responses from the faculty's. Again, 24 out of 31 faculty responded to this question, while 63 out of 81 students responded to this.

Categories	Faculty/Staff (not normalized)	Students
Academic Quality	21	18
Community	19	48
Administration	13	45
Infrastructure	3	9
Public Image	7	11
Students' Needs	1	31
Environment	0	4

The next page shows the results of organizations at Macalester that faculty, staff and students would be more inclined to support or those they support already.

Our goal of having at least 10% of the surveys returned was reached possibly due to the broad nature of the study.

In response to Question 4 we found that students and faculty/staff did not feel the same way about the issues given to them. Greening campus issue ranked low for both students and faculty/staff.

In the next question, a greater discrepancy was seen between students and faculty/staff. Environmental issues and students needs were ranked the lowest in importance by students, while not being mentioned at all by the faculty/staff (only one faculty/staff response mentioned student needs). It appears that there seems to be a large division in opinions between faculty/staff and students in the categories of Academic quality and Students' needs.

For question 6 we found that students and faculty differed in the organizations they supported. Faculty tended to support organizations where there were staff positions that actively participated in these groups. The ones that students and faculty/staff showed the most support for, were organizations that were unique to Macalester, meaning there are no other organizations with similar agendas. None of the top ranked organizations had an environmental agenda.

Questions 4, 5, and 6 were aimed to find the Macalester community=s unbiased opinion on environmental issues. From the results of these surveys we found that the Macalester community does not actively support environmental issues unless they are pushed into it. This is apparent in the comparison between questions 4 and 5. Many times the issues given to participants from question 4 did not appear in question 5, where they spoke their own opinion. This inconsistency suggests that popular political issues on campus such as multiculturalism, internationalism and student-faculty relations may not be truly important for much of the Macalester community.

Suggestions for the future of Macalester Environmental Studies department should be to increase the visibility of environmental issues on campus. It does not appear to be a high priority for faculty/staff and students, but it seems that people are not strongly against it either. If perhaps the Macalester community had more accessibility to environmental issues it would become more of a concern. It seems for interdisciplinary majors such as Environmental Studies, African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies an integral part to these fields of study is to get people to think and care about issues related to these fields. High visibility on campus of pertinent issues to the ES program would help to persuade people to think about them. A dialog between other organizations on campus would be beneficial to find what techniques worked to attract publicity. It also might be beneficial to consolidate all environmental groups and organizations to one, not only to consolidate ideas and workforce, but also to show how encompassing environmental issues are. A more encompassing organization would yield more participants, and more people could see the importance of it.

Analysis of Survey Given to the Macalester Community