Wheaton Wire

Issue date: 3/4/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Nicholas Goode ’12 PACIE Co-Chair Associate Professor of Psychology Derek Price speaking in Hindle on Feb. 23.

Associate Professor of Psychology and PACIE (President's Action Committee on Inclusive Excellence) Co-Chair Derek Price gave the first presentation of the 2007 PACIE campus climate survey targeted at the student body, on Feb. 23 in Hindle.

Last semester, Price presented data culled from the PACIE survey to the Student Government Association (SGA) Executive Board, and he and talked multiple times to various staff and faculty. This semester, Price is hoping to reach as many students as possible, living up to the group's mission statement, as printed on the Wheaton website: "to oversee the process of achieving educational excellence through diversity and of developing a truly multicultural community."

The PACIE survey became a hot-button issue on campus earlier this semester with controversial graphs displayed in the dining halls and Balfour-Hood that some students found misleading. Students feelt that the graphs distorted the degree to which various social issues on campus were perceived as problematic.

PACIE, formed by President Crutcher in 2005, is now in the midst of presenting the results of the survey to various campus constituencies. Price is hopeful that student skepticism of the survey and the PACIE graphs will be dispelled by attending a presentation like the Feb. 23 one.

"We wanted to stir up interest [with the graphs]," shares Price. "But we never wanted to inflame. Our intention was to grab [students] attention."

The slideshow that Price presented offers a detailed yet digestible look in to findings of the PACIE survey. The slideshow begins with bar graphs representing data from questions that asked responders to rate, on a scale of 1-6, 11 campus qualities, such as "sincerity" (versus "insincerity"), with the positive attributes given the number 6 and the negative attributes given the number 1.

The results of these questions were examined in various slides, breaking down the results by race, gender, and campus role (student, staff, or faculty). The universal finding, as stressed by Price: "People at Wheaton are not a bunch of malcontents, overall, we're all pretty happy here." Price cites how no matter the question, no matter the selected demographic, not a single category surveyed carried an average under 4.

Continued...

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