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Pomona's Campus Climate Survey Reveals Faculty Dissatisfaction and Free Expression Concerns
The results of Pomona College's 2026 Campus Climate Survey were released on Monday. The summary report included demographic data and respondents’ concerns about political expression, exclusionary conduct and faculty compensation. The survey was conducted in the spring of 2026 as a follow up to Pomona’s 2020 campus climate survey.
The survey, conducted by Interwoven Insights (formerly Rankin Climate), collected data and responses from 1,259 students, faculty and staff, representing approximately 45% of the College community. A report produced by Interwoven summarizing the survey results examined themes including belonging, discrimination, freedom of expression and institutional support.
While the survey found that 66% of respondents feel comfortable with Pomona’s overall campus climate, its granular findings paint a more complicated picture. Only 41% of respondents felt free to express their political views without fear of consequences, while 22% reported experiencing “exclusionary conduct.”
Among respondents who witnessed exclusionary or hostile conduct, 60% of faculty and 35% of students identified political views as the basis.
Students also expressed concerns related to the inclusion of minorities. One student respondent wrote that “racial slurs are known by the student body to be commonly said.” Last spring, Pomona’s Black Student Union called Pomona a “racist environment” after alleged instances of a student and faculty member saying the n-word.
The survey identified concerns about discrimination and harassment among religious and ethnic groups. Among the concerns of exclusionary conduct, students and staff described a “climate of anti-Palestinian bias and suppression on campus.” Of Muslim students and students of Middle Eastern/North African ancestry, 26% indicated they felt safe on campus.
Jewish respondents also expressed concerns about discrimination. Thirty-six percent of Jewish respondents were concerned about being “penalized professionally because of their actual or perceived support of Israel,” while 32% of Jewish respondents indicated that they had felt a need to hide their Jewish identity on campus.
The survey also contained a section on sexual and gender-based harassment. Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated they had experienced sexual or gender based harassment at Pomona, with 90% of those respondents saying the harassment had occurred on Pomona’s campus.
While many student-facing metrics are improvements over the 2020 survey results, faculty satisfaction has declined across the board. Fifty-five percent of faculty respondents have seriously considered leaving the College, with many citing concerns about administrative transparency and unsatisfactory compensation.
In a comparison with the 2020 survey, the 2026 report found that “significantly lower percentages of Faculty respondents in 2026 felt that salaries for tenure-track faculty (32% vs. 49%) or non-tenure-track faculty (19% vs. 28%) were competitive, that health insurance benefits were competitive (53% vs. 75%), that Pomona effectively communicated information and decisions that influenced their work (32% vs. 49%), or that Pomona provided a transparent process for communicating institutional information (30% vs. 41%).”
Faculty and students both expressed frustration with the College’s senior leadership in the survey's qualitative responses. One respondent characterized the administration as "both basically absent/indecisive and overbearing/authoritarian."
“This spring’s Campus Climate Survey does report increasing Faculty concerns about salaries, about the rising cost of living in our already very high cost of living environment,” Chair of the Faculty Ben Keim wrote in a comment to the Independent. “These concerns are not new, nor are they a surprise. Faculty leaders on our Executive Committee and on the Ad Hoc Budget & Inflation Committee have been engaging over the last year with members of Executive Staff to discern the best path forward, and I envision those conversations carrying on and hopefully progressing as this academic year unfolds.”
Pomona’s decrease in faculty satisfaction is accompanied by troubling retention figures. While 55% percent of faculty respondents reported having seriously considered leaving Pomona, so did 47% of staff and 32% of students. Respondents indicated “good weather, good location” as one of the top reasons they stayed at the college.
Despite these findings, the survey documented improvements in some areas of campus climate. The proportion of respondents experiencing exclusionary conduct declined from 26% in 2020 to 22% in 2026, while those observing exclusionary conduct declined from 32% to 27%.
Notably, while the report's concluding “Key Takeaways” section emphasizes the College's strengths in campus comfort and safety, it does not specifically highlight the finding that fewer than half of respondents felt free to express their political views without fear of consequences. The 2026 report does not provide a demographic breakdown of respondents’ political affiliations, unlike the 2020 report, which found that only 2% of students were conservative and the number of conservative faculty was too small to represent on a bar graph.
“Information about group differences was only included in the report if those differences were statistically significant, i.e. not likely to be attributable to random chance,” a Pomona College spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. They also said that Pomona plans to start their own analysis and noted “while this process will take time, it will help inform the College’s efforts to make Pomona a place where all students, faculty and staff can flourish.”
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