What Should Boards Do? Assessing Campus Climates and Policies for Religious Students

AGB has advocated for college and university governing boards to prepare policies, practices, and communications in advance to enable timely decisions when incidents of campus unrest occur. An October 2024 blog post highlighted the tensions between the First Amendment, on the one hand, and institutional efforts to ensure different campus constituencies feel welcome and included, on the other. It recommended that governing boards be proactive about reviewing and ensuring that policy updates about academic freedom, freedom of speech, and campus climate align with institutional values.

A key issue that has surfaced around recent global events, however, is that many governing boards are unaware of their campus climate data and policies that relate to religious students.

Religious freedom, too, is enshrined in the First Amendment, with public universities charged with ensuring a learning environment where no singular religious or nonreligious perspective is privileged. Freedom of religion interacts with freedom of expression and academic freedom in the collegiate contexts of classroom academics, protests, and interpersonal incidents, such as acts of violence and harassment targeting Jewish and Muslim students in the wake of the Israel-Hamas War.

At the Ohio State University’s College Impact Laboratory, we study religious, secular, and spiritual worldview and campus climates in higher education and can offer some perspective on the role of a governing board in helping its institution successfully handle the issues surrounding the intersection of the First Amendment and religion. In this post, we would like to add to AGB’s previous recommendations for governing boards, share an assessment tool designed to help campuses benchmark and improve their practices, and provide some takeaways from a survey we recently conducted on how institutions have dealt with campus protests.

The key steps that we suggest boards regularly take to stay aware of First Amendment and inclusion issues are the following.

1. Request and review the worldview campus climate data currently available at your college or university. Is the information serving your institution’s mission and needs? How are those data being collected and shared—by which divisions and for what purposes? Does the mix include both quantitative and qualitative data?

Some campuses collect partial data through admissions, residence life, student organizations, or campus activities. They also gather information through bias incident reporting, and/or annual student surveys. Below, we introduce the INSPIRES Index that more than 300 higher education institutions, including public campuses, currently use to comprehensively assess and improve campus climate in ways that encourage and support religious, spiritual, and secular students.

2. Review established channels of communication with key faculty and staff experts as well as religious student and community leaders. How well do such channels function and serve as conduits of trusted advising and two-way communication in advance of crises? Does a religious advisory council exist? An office of religious or spiritual life? A multifaith chaplaincy? Has your institution appointed liaisons in student life, student success, belonging, or multicultural offices? Your institution and board should recognize that, too often, the labor to provide different religious perspectives falls to student organizations and underrepresented faculty and staff members right when they may be experiencing identity-based stress or discrimination themselves.

Make sure your institution cultivates multiple and balanced perspectives so the board and campus leaders are not receiving just one perspective among many diverse traditions. It is also important that your institution has established clear protocols for communication in times of crisis so board members and administrators receive needed guidance. Consider carefully, as well, the religious backgrounds and affiliations of various board members, whose perspectives might represent only one of many views within a tradition.

3. Involve students in the creation and communication of policy changes that impact their sense of belonging and/or freedom. Boards can set an expectation that as administrators begin to establish policies, they will involve student government or interfaith councils as a way to gain feedback. Most of the campuses we surveyed that updated their policies related to campus unrest this past year did so without giving the students who were most affected a voice in the process. Just as stakeholder buy-in empowers successful change at the administrative and faculty levels, student leadership engagement is critical in successful policy development and implementation.

The INSPIRES Index: A Tool to Assess and Transform Practice

The Interfaith Religious, Spiritual, and Secular (INSPIRES) Index is a benchmarking tool that gauges how welcoming campuses are for students who hold various spiritual, religious, and secular worldviews. INSPIRES provides administrators with research-based assessment and actionable recommendations to improve this facet of the student experience, as mentioned in Inside Higher Ed and the Washington Times.

One of us, Matthew Mayhew, professor of educational administration at the Ohio State University, designed INSPIRES, along with Alyssa Rockenbach, a professor of higher education at North Carolina State University. The tool is based on previous national longitudinal research about students’ experiences of their campus climate. Participation is free to campuses due to the generosity of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and Pew Charitable Trusts.

INSPIRES requires a college or university representative to complete just one annual survey per campus (no student surveys), though we recommend gathering representatives from across campus to assist in completing the survey, to debrief the results, and identify action steps.

INSPIRES gives campuses scorecards with star ratings and recommendations on seven domains that include academics, campus life, and institutional policy. The goal is to provide data about how each college or university can improve its campus climate, so rather than serving as a kind of ranking, the scores are criterion-referenced and benchmarked by institutional type. Many institutions choose to share their data publicly to show their commitment to continuous improvement, but others just use and share their data internally. To learn more or to designate your campus’ representative, visit https://www.inspiresindex.org.

Campus Protest Takeaways

Based on our recent INSPIRES module, in which we surveyed campuses that have experienced protests and inclusion incidents, we can share four takeaways for board members:

1. Ensure the safety of all students. While this recommendation may seem obvious, recent campus protests have often favored one community’s viewpoint over the other. However, the institutions participating in the survey reported that discriminatory incidents have targeted religious communities from both sides equally. Attend to the well-being of all students by inquiring into the experiences of those on multiple sides of an issue.

2. Include student affairs administrators in designing policies, protocols, and responses. Such professionals are trained in student engagement, de-escalation tactics, and student activism approaches. They also have access to robust networks such as NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education) and ACPA (College Student Educators International) for sharing best practices.

3. Revise incident protocols and enhance channels of communication to include religious experts in decisions the institution makes about any incidents with religious implications. We found in our survey that in-house faculty and staff experts on religions, as well as members of religious advisory councils, were under-consulted.

4. Cultivate a spirit of dialogue before and during incidents. Institutions that emphasized student-administrator dialogue and had such practices embedded in campus culture before unrest occurred had fewer incidences that escalated to the point where they involved the police or violence. A relational, restorative focus that prioritizes listening, channels for student-administrator dialogue, and student development appears more fruitful than a focus on regulatory compliance that emphasizes a policing or punitive approach.

Renee L. Bowling, Ph.D., is Worldview Research Director at the Ohio State University. Matthew J. Mayhew, Ph.D., is the William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor of Educational Administration at the Ohio State University.