Promoting Culture Change

This page has resources that can assist academic institutions promote culture change by updating or creating policies within their departments and increasing capacity for BPC efforts.

Actions To Take

Below are recommendations – updating current policies in departments; creating new policies; increasing capacity for broadening participation activities; and corresponding resources that can be used to promote culture change.

Update Existing Policies within Departments

  • Revise introductory courses if they assume prior CS knowledge. This makes CS majors more accessible for students who did not have an earlier opportunity to learn CS.
  • Utilize NCWIT’s ES-Grad resources to assess and improve policies and practices related to graduate students, with attention to intersections of race/ethnicity and gender, along with other dimensions.
  • Use best practices in recruiting, mentoring, evaluation, and promotion, from the University of Michigan’s Advance Program. Departments should also aim to hire TAs that are committed to BPC efforts. NCWIT also offers advice for reducing the impact of bias on hiring practices.
  • Modify major admissions criteria to avoid competition and requirement of high school experience. Competitive major admissions policies in a department predict a lower sense of belonging among first year students (Nguyen & Lewis, 2020). Departments can follow the model at the University of California, San Diego, which seeks to reduce competition and avoid using high school access to CS to select CS majors because high school experience in CS is unequally distributed by race, class, and gender (Scott, et al., 2017). Evidence of pre-college participation gaps: Kapor center, Lim & Lewis)

Create New Department Policies

  • Draft new policy where faculty must submit their personal BPC plans and statements in their annual reports and during potential promotion or tenure evaluations. (Learn more)
  • Follow the University of Michigan’s model and improve recruiting and hiring policies for TAs that are committed to BPC efforts. TA applicants can submit an essay about how they plan on applying inclusive teaching practices and submit a 5-minute teaching video.
  • Current faculty and faculty applicants should submit a statement describing their commitment to BPC efforts. Rubrics from UC Berkeley, Cornell, Vanderbilt, can be used to evaluate submitted statements.
  • Faculty should draft and seek adoption of a new policy that suggests all hiring and promotion/tenure committees include a designated member from outside the department who will help the committee ensure that all practices for inclusive faculty hiring are followed as well as facilitate discussions about how implicit bias may shape the committee members’ evaluations. (Learn more).

Increase Capacity for BPC Related Efforts

  • Faculty that are serving on departmental and campus diversity committees should help coordinate and evaluate department and campus BPC activities.
  • Faculty and TAs should complete NCWIT’s self-paced online course on BPC. Faculty and TAs may also complete similar training or courses offered by their institution’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
  • Organize a speaker series to address BPC in one faculty meeting per semester. Or, implement three 10 minute faculty-led discussions from NCWIT’s description of BPC, during faculty meetings throughout the semester. A BPC speaker can be used for the aforementioned speaker series. (Learn more:  Robertson, University of Michigan)
  • Train faculty to lead groups to work through discussion questions and brief videos about gender, disability, race, ethnicity, and intersectionality using NCWIT’s Learning About Intersectionality: Videos That Spark Conversations as a resource.
  • Establish an alumni giving campaign for BPC purposes – a scholarship for underrepresented students, funding for faculty travel to computing events, or funding to create and host an on-campus BPC event.