Next week, Brown will launch a campus climate survey for students to inform how the University will move forward with diversity and inclusion efforts, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 announced early Monday morning. The University will share the anonymous, aggregated survey results with the federal government, as required by the July 30 agreement to restore federal funding.
“We want your voices to be central to the University’s future plans,” Paxson wrote. “Completing the survey is an important way to demonstrate a commitment to continuing the work of building a better Brown.”
Brown has previously administered campus climate surveys measuring faculty, staff and student sentiment, The Herald previously reported.
“While we have conducted climate surveys at multiple points over the last decade, the voluntary resolution agreements we signed with the federal government in 2024 and 2025 introduced federal reporting requirements for the first time,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.
As part of the July agreement, this fall’s survey will ask whether students feel safe reporting acts of antisemitism on campus and whether they believe Brown has adequately responded to “reports of alleged antisemitism.” The deal also requires the University to ask questions about social media harassment on campus.
According to Paxson, the survey will also ask questions about other forms of discrimination on campus such as “Islamophobia, racism and transphobia, among other critical issues.”
“Your honest answers are the only way we can understand and confront these problems head-on as a community,” Paxson wrote.
Within 45 days of the survey’s conclusion, the University will share the results with the Offices for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. Brown will also provide its analysis of the results, as well as “any appropriate action(s) Brown intends to take to improve the campus climate,” the agreement states.
After the federal government approves of Brown’s proposed actions, the University has 50 days to send “documentation sufficient to show its implementation of any action, including a description of each action and how it was implemented,” according to the agreement.
In the spring, Paxson plans to release results to the broader community.
This fall, the survey exclusively seeks student respondents to “help Brown understand the experiences and perspectives of the student body and inform how we can improve, what we should build on and how we can best move forward on matters important to our community,” Clark wrote. A similar survey of faculty and staff will be conducted in the spring, according to Paxson.
The results of this survey will help the Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and Inclusion at Brown — a group of faculty, staff and students that was created last month — draft a new action plan for diversity and inclusion at the University over the next 10 years.
