The Bearometer is an independent faculty project that poses a single poll question to Berkeley Senate faculty on issues of teaching and governance. It is unaffiliated with the Academic Senate or the administration and is modeled on MIT’s Faculty Pulse. Faculty propose and vote on questions, which are then selected by the Question Keepers (currently Chris Hoofnagle, Law; and William Fithian, Statistics) for distribution via university email. The Bearometer emphasizes anonymity to protect candid participation and typically receives responses from about 200 faculty per poll, providing rapid, faculty-driven feedback between formal Senate surveys. The Bearometer has run a dozen iterations on topics such as academic freedom, student preparedness, and faculty governance.
The Bearometer emphasizes anonymity to protect faculty speech, though this limits demographic representativeness.
Faculty speech is strongly protected by academic freedom, yet academics have many incentives to keep their views closely held. Thus, the Bearometer has both technological and procedural methods to ensure that any participant will not be identified. Anonymity is a fundamental feature of the Bearometer.
This anonymity leads to a problem: is the Bearometer valid? Or are its participants basically the same people every time?
On internal validity: we are confident that only Berkeley faculty are completing the Bearometer because we have an authoritative list of senate members, and because we distribute to email with unique links. We receive Qualtrics reports on possible fraud (typically someone has submitted twice) and these reports signal that double dipping is quite rare—typically just 1 or 2 submissions.
The unknown problem is representativeness: is the Bearometer a valid measurement of the faculty itself?
To answer this question, we examined response patterns from Bearometers 5-12 (the last 8 surveys, as we deleted earlier data consistent with privacy protections), focusing on our regular faculty (non-emerita).
In sum, this is what we found: Across eight surveys, 52% of regular faculty never participated. Of those that did, 60% have just done 1 or 2. Only 13% have done 5 or more.
Bearometer Participants
| # of Completed Bearometers | Faculty Count | Total Percent |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 819 | 52.3% |
| 1 | 290 | 18.5% |
| 2 | 159 | 10.2% |
| 3 | 119 | 7.6% |
| 4 | 77 | 4.9% |
| 5 | 49 | 3.1% |
| 6 | 27 | 1.7% |
| 7 | 15 | 1.0% |
| 8 | 11 | 0.7% |
As one can see, most regular faculty haven’t done Bearometers 5-12 (we no longer have data for Bearometers 1-4). Of those that do, the Bearometer is not dominated by any small faction. Only 11 people have done all 8. 15 have done 7. 27 did 6.
Some of these Bearometers were quite popular. We have an overall 14.6% response rate from regular faculty based on Bearometers 5-12.
| Bearometer | N |
|---|---|
| Bearometer 12: Attendance | 180 |
| Bearometer 11: Best of Berkeley | 138 |
| Bearometer 10: Student Evaluations of Teaching | 238 |
| Bearometer 9: Student Preparation | 238 |
| Bearometer 8: Getting Reimbursed | 237 |
| Bearometer 7: External Criticisms | 291 |
| Bearometer 6: Chancellor Vision | 155 |
| Bearometer 5: Free Speech Temperature | 335 |
| Bearometer 4: Intercollegiate Athletics | 341 |
| Bearometer 3: SAT/ACT Testing | 430 |
| Bearometer 2: Union | 179 |
| Bearometer 1: Welfare | 300 |
We also studied STEM versus non-STEM participation.
STEM and Non-STEM Participation
| # of Completed Bearometers | Non-STEM | STEM |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 375 | 444 |
| 1 | 151 | 139 |
| 2 | 77 | 82 |
| 3 | 62 | 57 |
| 4 | 39 | 38 |
| 5 | 27 | 22 |
| 6 | 9 | 18 |
| 7 | 7 | 8 |
| 8 | 3 | 8 |
| Total | 750 | 816 |
Berkeley has more STEM faculty (based on primary appointment). The different in participation between the groups is not significant.
There are no statistically significant differences across departments.
Few emerita participate in the Bearometer. Of the 1,016 in our distribution list, 824 have never completed a Bearometer. 100 have completed 1. Another 92 have completed more than 1.
What we do not know: we do not have data on sex, nor on pre/post tenure. Both of these variables, especially combined with departments, could undermine the anonymity of the Bearometer. But we also know that less powerful faculty may have the strongest speech concerns. Perhaps one might think that more senior faculty attitudes predominate, however, the Bearometer’s anonymity operates to protect these classes of faculty where other alternatives, such as the climate surveys, cannot because of climate surveys’ intense focus on demographics and combinatorial options.
The Bearometer has tradeoffs. It can rapidly and reliably get feedback from about 200 regular faculty in just days, using a single email invitation. Campus climate surveys can get higher participation, but only after weeks of recruitment, and these surveys come years apart (2009, 2011, 2019). In addition, the Bearometer is more democratic: the questions come from faculty members themselves. This helps give signals to decision makers free of the kinds of restraints on the senate and faculty administrators.