About 8,000 students, faculty and staff will have a chance to voice their opinions in survey form on campus climate near the end of November.

By conducting the survey, the climate assessment committee and subcommittees are trying to gauge how majority and diverse groups feel about campus safety and how included and valued they feel.

The idea for the survey came out of the president’s diversity initiatives, said Todd Herriott, coordinator for disability resource and chairman of the climate assessment subcommittee.

A survey on climate assessment will be e-mailed or mailed to students, faculty and staff on campus later this semester, said Carla Espinoza, assistant vice president for human resource services and director of equal opportunity.

“What’s important is how diverse and majority populations see the campus climates,” Herriott said.

The college has never done a cumulative survey across campus, Herriott said. The last time a survey was conducted about campus climate issues was in 1993.

“We’ve had some issues on campus [since then] that we certainly want to address,” Herriott said.

The surveys will be primarily distributed and conducted online because it is the most cost-effective method, Herriott said.

“Culturally it just makes sense … it will have a quicker turnaround on the data,” Herriott said. “[For] those who don’t have access to computers, we’ll make sure they know the survey is available.”

Espinoza, co-chairwoman of the president’s advisory council, said when the president’s advisory committee met more than a year ago, two subcommittees — one on climate and another on retention — were created to deal with a variety of issues and groups on campus, including women, physically challenged and ethnic students.

The two groups recommended the survey and chose Susan Rankin of Pennsylvania’s Rankin and Associates to conduct and analyze the results of the survey.

Rankin, who was hired this summer, used focus group sessions with students and employees to help her write the survey. The focus groups helped Rankin determine what the issues were on campus.

Espinoza said Rankin found issues exist with students feeling unwelcome on campus due to the verbal abuse, stereotypes and sexual innuendoes toward females and racial epithets.

A recent string of hate crimes on campus and violent attacks against students did not prompt the survey — climate assessment has been in the works for more than a year, Espinoza said.

However, the survey could help explain these crimes, she said. “It’s not a cause and effect sort of thing,” Espinoza said. “We’re certainly trying to minimize those sorts of things.”

Herriott said he can’t say the survey doesn’t have anything to do with the crimes.

“These four instances of attacks on the LGBT group and attacks on women are definitely a sign of climate issues needing to be dealt with,” Herriott said.

When the survey analysis is complete, Herriott said it will give ISU President Gregory Geoffroy a clear indication of what Iowa State is doing right and what it can do better.