2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full empirical research paper addresses how engineering faculty perceive their roles and responsibility in creating an equitable environment within academia, an understudied but important area to address in organizational change efforts. To begin to fill this gap, we developed a survey to understand the ways that faculty take up responsibility for driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) changes. The instrument included 7 scales measuring faculty perceptions of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belongingness (DEIB) policies and practices, professional development and support for faculty of Color, and efforts to recruit and retain faculty of Color, as well as their perceptions of personal responsibility and self-efficacy to enact DEIB change. We collected data from 179 engineering faculty at three private engineering institutions in the Northeast region of which 137 provided race/ethnicity data and make up our analytical sample - Asian faculty (n=29, 16.2%), Black, Latiné, Indigenous (BLI), and multiracial BLI faculty (BLI(M)) (n=18, 10.1%), and white faculty (n=90, 50.3%). Mean standardized factor scores were created for each scale and pairwise comparisons using t-tests with a Bonferroni correction were used to examine differences between groups. The results highlight differences and trends among Asian, White, and BLI(M) faculty in DEIB readiness and responsibility. The findings of this study have implications for understanding how faculty assess their environments and how they view their responsibility and readiness to engage in enacting equity-based initiatives.