Create an environment with greater collectivist orientation

Finally, understanding the intense pressure African American students face at this institution, determining ways to improve the campus climate to include a greater sense of collectivist orientation may support a more inclusive climate for all students, but especially African American students facing the added pressures of stereotype threat. When analyzing the data

issue of institutional culture as a whole. The environment broadly is competitive with over half of incoming students in the School of Arts and Sciences declaring they wish to pursue medicine. First year courses are rigorous and are widely known as “weed-out” classes. It seems as if every student feels tremendous pressure to be better than their peers from their first day on campus.

Providing greater support for all students on campus and encouraging an environment where students work together to help one another succeed may improve perceptions of collectivist orientation. Some work is already being done in this area with flipped classrooms that encourage teamwork rather than individual success. Faculty and staff, as the main sources of cultural responsiveness for students, play a powerful role in student experiences and could contribute to establishing a greater sense of collectivist orientation in many ways. By being available to students and taking the time to get to know them, their goals and aspirations, faculty and staff could greatly influence how competitive students view their environment to be. A professor acknowledging a student’s goals and desire to be successful may lead them to provide information about resources to further develop those interests. This can signal to the student that the faculty member sees their potential for success and can support a student’s sense of belonging on campus. A staff member that notices a student is acting differently perhaps due to challenges with their financial situation or in their personal life can let students know that someone is willing to support them through such a challenge regardless of how it may relate to their academics. Interactions that students have at every level of the institution could help students feel as if people are here to help them succeed and believe that they can succeed.

Despite an overall lack of collectivist orientation in the campus environment, students interviewed spoke of the orientation of their peer groups or student organizations to be quite different. They found value in these groups in part due to the fact that they felt a sense of

collectivist orientation there that they did not feel within the broader campus community. Knowing that this contributes to reasons students choose to self-segregate if the broader campus culture could be improved to support an environment that values teamwork and mutual success, the pressure African American students face could be lessened. By improving the overall climate students may seek out support like this from more places on campus than just these student organizations, improving opportunities for cross-cultural engagement as well. In addition, an environment with a sense of collectivist orientation is one which would help all students be successful, not just underrepresented student groups, and therefore is in the school’s best interest to do so.

Collectivist orientation is at the core of the campus environment. By creating a culture in which all students have a greater sense of teamwork and mutual success, the separations between groups may lessen and students will see their peers as partners in their journey rather than competition. In order to address this issue, broad changes across the institution are necessary. Rankin and Reason (2005) call for a kind of transformative leadership that calls on every part of the institution in which “majority/privileged assumptions are replaced by assumptions of diverse cultures and relationships, and these new assumptions govern the design and implementation of any activity, program, or service of the institution” (p. 59). Before undertaking such a task, further research into the broader institutional culture may be necessary to gain a deeper understanding of how this could be done. Implications for this research are discussed later in this chapter.

This type of change needs to start within the values of institutional agents. This may mean a shift in how we think about faculty achieving tenure, for example. Promoting mentoring as an important component of a professor’s role on campus and also providing an incentive for

mentoring could give faculty the time needed to better address student needs. It would be a message that it is a valuable and important aspect of the professor’s role. With the many responsibilities of faculty and staff, structures may need to be put in place that allow these individuals to take on more responsibility for the culture we create. Such changes in structures must come from institutional leadership and needs to gain broad support in order to be successful. Infrastructure that supports faculty mentoring and recognition for faculty that take on this role for undergraduate students may better support more beneficial faculty-student relationships (DeAngelo et al., 2016). Transformational change is difficult but the work is important. Greater gains in educational attainment for all students may come when supporting students in ways that they need, by providing a culturally engaging campus, is made a priority at all levels.

This kind of transformational change will not come quickly. As Allison said when thinking about how to improve campus climate, “it’s hard to change people”; students, faculty and staff enter the campus environment with a wide variety of experiences and perspectives, changing those assumptions they bring with them is difficult. That is why such transformative leadership to begin to make such changes at every level of the institution is necessary. Even with more students of color on campus and more frequent cross-cultural engagement, changing the culture of the institution as a whole is difficult work, because at the core of it are people and the belief systems they hold.