University of Colorado Boulder quietly releases new results from 2014 survey mired by years of transparency controversy FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 19, 2017 BOULDER, COLORADO - The labor union for University of Colorado graduate student workers, the Committee on Rights and Compensation (CRC), celebrates the release of new results from the 2014 Graduate Student Social Climate Survey after years of suspicion and mounting pressure for transparency. The CRC has initiated a detailed study of the newly released findings to understand and publicize how they can help us improve graduate student experiences. The CRC has already noticed important previously unreleased items, including: “GLBQ+ students are twice as likely as Straight students to have withdrawn [...] without completing a degree.”

20% of women respondents in PhD programs experienced some form of harassment.

Of respondents, 29% of underrepresented minority group PhD students, 26% of GLBQ+ PhD students, and 19% of women PhD students indicated “I have had the experience of being excluded or marginalized from a lab or other work group due to my social identity.” The original public report on survey results identified alarming rates of workplace harassment and widespread misinformation about funding availability and student fees. But it also shows patterns of prevarication; the old report counts null values in question reponses differently depending on whether it looks better to suppress or inflate percentages. The survey was specifically designed to measure ways race/ethnicity affects graduate student experiences, but the old report features an irrelevant graph about the race/ethnicity of faculty hires instead of data actually drawn from the survey the report alleges to describe. Clamor for transparency began in 2015 when department heads were trying to get their hands on additional results that could help them improve their programs. Word propagated that transparency did not satisfy the hopes of students and faculty familiar with the survey, and administrators dismissed calls for more results with the excuse that they didn’t want to uncover personally identifiable information. The CRC escalated the issue to the Board of Regents in August of 2016. The union then demanded in a letter to Provost Russ Moore, dated September 2016 and signed by hundreds of graduate students, that the survey data be released to the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC) for uncensored review. The new analysis released this week is the long-awaited culmination of that review by OIEC. The new report quietly appeared this week on a university website the CRC monitors.