BY RENEE L. BOWLING AND MATTHEW J. MAYHEW

Some good news for the new year: Over three hundred campuses have partnered with the Interfaith Spiritual, Religious, and Secular (INSPIRES) Index to assess and improve their campus climates for diverse worldviews. Encouragingly, many campuses participate repeatedly in the annual research-based assessment and share their names or data publicly through the INSPIRES website, therefore demonstrating their commitment to transparency and growth to become increasingly inclusive for multiple religious and nonreligious perspectives.

Also encouraging is that participating campuses range from elite, R1, and regional public universities to Catholic, evangelical, and private, religiously unaffiliated liberal arts colleges, demonstrating an appetite and commitment across institutional types for higher education leadership in creating pluralistic learning environments.

This national effort, which we serve as worldview research director and cofounder in the College Impact Lab at Ohio State University, is one of several applied research projects that are attempting, alongside dialogue and conversation programming, to provide campuses with tools to support and uphold academic and religious freedoms in higher education.

Rather than being a reaction to current events, INSPIRES was built on decades of empirical worldview research including the national Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Study (IDEALS) by principal investigators Matthew Mayhew of The Ohio State University and Alyssa Rockenbach of North Carolina State University. Supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and Pew Charitable Trusts, this multiyear, grant-funded project provides valuable assessment data relevant to the student experience at no cost to campuses. The index invites higher education institutions to evaluate their campus climates for diverse worldviews along seven domains identified by previous research as instrumental to students’ experiences of the campus climate, including structural diversity, academic and cocurricular programming, and institutional behaviors.

Partner campuses have used the assessment as a form of intervention, gathering representatives from offices of academic affairs, student life, human resources, and student success or belonging to complete one survey per campus, with resulting scorecards benchmarked by institutional type (public, private sectarian, private nonsectarian). The scorecards provide a star rating (not institutional rankings) for each of the seven domains of campus life addressed in the survey, and partner campuses can opt out of public naming or sharing of their results.

A community of practice is growing around the use of the INSPIRES Index in partnership with Interfaith America and university networks, through which campuses share how they have used the index to identify areas for improvement and build cross-divisional support for change.

The INSPIRES Index has offered additional modules to better understand statements by participating campuses in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the Israeli retaliation, as well as experiences of and responses to subsequent campus protests, but institutions have not been “scored” on these practices. Instead, data snapshots reflect trends in the aggregate to help campuses improve their practices.

Some of the key takeaways from the index in recent years are that all campuses have room to improve and that creating welcoming climates requires a broad web of support—it is not the responsibility of any one office or division. Student experiences in the classroom, with institutional processes, and in interpersonal encounters are all formative. Similarly, the impetus for enhancing a pluralistic learning environment can come from across campus. INSPIRES campus representatives include deans of students, diversity officers, faculty, religious life directors, chaplains, and wellness directors. Hence, it is important for senior administrators to invite multiple community members—including students—into the conversation as campuses begin thinking about this aspect of the student experience.

Over three hundred campuses are changing the narrative about higher education as a place that welcomes certain perspectives to one that embraces multiple viewpoints and supports both academic and religious freedom. Tools exist to improve this area of the student experience aligned with institutional mission, in ways that are proactive rather than reactive. This new year, we encourage you to try a data-informed approach to religious difference on campus. The current INSPIRES survey is open now, and campuses may begin by designating a representative at www.inspiresindex.org.

Renee L. Bowling is the worldview research director of The Ohio State University’s College Impact Lab in the College of Education and Human Ecology.

Matthew J. Mayhew is cofounder of the INSPIRES Index and founder of the College Impact Lab at The Ohio State University.