The Columbia Action Collaborative

About The Columbia Action Collaborative

Columbia’s Mission
The Columbia Action Collaborative aims to identify, develop, implement and test best practices that support collegiality among colleagues and trainees and vis a vis students within departments, divisions and schools.

The Core Idea 
Sexual harassment and other harassment, discrimination and abusive behavior interfere with productivity and learning. These behaviors are much less likely to thrive in departments with a collegial climate. Put another way, a collegial environment makes clear that harassing and discriminatory conduct is well outside the norm and is unacceptable within departments, divisions and schools. 

Initial Goals
Led by a small steering committee of faculty across the University, the heart of the Columbia Action Collaborative is its Faculty Liaison Network, which includes faculty from every school and most departments across the University. This broadly representative group is advisory to the steering committee. The steering committee sets these initial goals, with a plan to refine them over time. The plan to date focuses on the ability to:

1. Increase awareness of University resources that are available to assist in problem-solving.

2. Increase faculty engagement with these issues and ideas and with others around the University who have relevant expertise.

3. Support a space for information-sharing and for generating, testing, evaluating and refining new ideas, promising practices and evidence-based strategies, all aimed at supporting collegiality and reducing and responding effectively to damaging behavior.

4. Develop an assessment plan to include formative and summative evaluations of interventions at the University level and/or for more focused efforts related to specific populations or schools, departments, and smaller academic units.

5. Develop a small group of peer schools within NASEM with whom to share ideas and measure outcomes from specific interventions.

Columbia Action Collaborative Timeline and Activities

The Columbia Action Collaborative launched formally in December 2019 and initiated a University-wide Faculty Liaison Network, with a central goal of strengthening efforts among faculty to support an inclusive environment across the University. In particular, the aim is to strengthen collegiality and decrease sexual harassment and other discriminatory and abusive behaviors, work that aligns well with anti-racism initiatives across Columbia. 

Convenings
The Faculty Liaison Network met twice in its first year, in December 2019 and October 2020, with spring 2020 meetings having been rescheduled because of the pandemic. In addition, steering committee members attended NASEM Summits in June 2019, November 2019, and October 2020. At the October 2020 meeting, to which all Faculty Network members were invited, the Columbia Action Collaborative participated in a poster presentation on the vision and work to date. See the Columbia Action Collaborative poster.

The Faculty Liaison Network met three times in Year 2: the April 2021 meeting focused on collegiality/civility, the June 2021 included an update and discussion about the anti-bullying effort at Columbia. These conversations continued during the October 2021 meeting.

Areas of Interest, Action Items and Strategies

Thus far, the Columbia Action Collaborative Faculty Network has identified these key areas of interest, action items and strategies: 

1. Understanding departmental climate: Climate surveys provide an organized framework for gathering faculty feedback on issues and areas of need and potential pathways forward. The Office of the Provost has created easy-access Tools for Developing a Climate Self-Assessment. 
2. Strengthening collegiality through informal and formal methods: Dinners, lunches, retreats and other gatherings create opportunities to set a collegial tone within a department or school. Including readings related to the Action Collaborative’s focus for discussion in departmental meetings or workshops can also strengthen attention to these issues.
3. Managing difficult situations in the workplace: Empowering faculty to effectively manage difficult situations is critical to developing a collegial and bias-free climate. Through enhanced skill-development opportunities, faculty can better manage the variety of issues that arise related to giving and using faculty feedback, transparency, explicit and implicit bias, microaggression, among others.
4. Creating a shared understanding of professionalism: Identifying explicit values and behaviors that define professionalism along with structures and training to support implementation of those values. 
5. Enhancing a workplace culture that is inclusive and collegial: This work includes Office of the Provost supported faculty anti-racism seed grants and the publication of the Columbia LBGTQ+ Resource Guide.

Mini-Library

Readings circulated among the Faculty Liaison Network include:

• Guide to Best Practices for Departmental Climate and Best Practices for Inclusive Remote Work in the Academy from the Office of the Provost
• National Academies Report on Sexual Harassment
• NASEM Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education
• NASEM 2019 Public Summit
• Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
• Nature Astronomy - Privilege, Power and Leadership in Academia
• Businessweek - The Dallas Mavericks’ New CEO Is Cleaning Up a #MeTooMess, on culture change in the offices of the Dallas Mavericks.

Looking Ahead

The Action Collaborative will continue to expand work on the goals described above, coordinating with other related efforts across the University to expand awareness and implementation of promising and best practices, including for students, staff, postdocs and trainees. Additional attention will go to both the challenges and opportunities presented by the hybrid nature of campus life at the time of this update.

Contact Us

The Steering Committee welcomes your questions and suggestions.

Steering Committee:

• Dennis A. Mitchell, Executive Vice President for University Life, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, and Professor of Dental Medicine (co-chair)
• Anne L. Taylor, Senior Vice President for Faculty Affairs and Career Development for Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the John Lindenbaum Professor of Medicine at CUIMC (co-chair)
• Laura J. Kaufman, Professor of Chemistry
• Robert D. Mawhinney, Dean of Science (Faculty of Arts and Sciences), Professor of Physics, Chair, Department of Physics
• Helen H. Lu, Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs and Advancement (Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science), and Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering; 
• Carol A. Mason, Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology, Neuroscience and Ophthalmic Science (in Ophthalmology and in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute); Chair of Interschool Planning in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute

You can reach Steering Committee members individually by email or collectively via [email protected].