The INSPIRES Index is an opportunity to examine your institution’s efforts to create a welcoming campus for students of diverse religious, secular, and spiritual identities on campus. The Index is composed of 53 questionnaire items that map onto specific campus climate dimensions. Many of these questions are objective (yes/no) in nature and related to departmental and university-wide structures, spaces, policies, positions, and groups.

The Index is an opportunity to assess what you are currently doing and what you could or want to accomplish in the future to improve campus climate for religious, secular, and spiritual diversity on campus. Even if you answer “no” to a question now, you may use that as grounds for important next steps to make your campus more welcoming.

Any college or university may participate in the INSPRES Index! As the project enters its third year, participation remains FREE due to the generosity of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

To begin, a campus representative will simply complete a questionnaire; please allow for 30-90 minutes to complete the questionnaire. Once completed, each university will then receive an individualized report that can be used for benchmarking and improving institutional practice. There will also be an opportunity for institutions to show their commitment to welcoming students of diverse worldviews by participating in a public website (campuses must opt out to sharing information online). To confirm your institution's participation, please contact us to complete and return the agreement form. You will receive a link to the survey in the Fall.

Participation in the INSPIRES Index remains free due to the generosity of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

The campus representative is the liaison and point person for inspiring enthusiasm around this initiative on campus and gathering information needed to complete the Index. The liaison does not have to know the answer to every question. We encourage a team-oriented approach in which relevant campus constituents (e.g., administrators, faculty, students, and staff) are invited to help gather the information needed.

While timing will vary campus to campus, we expect the Index to take between 30-90 minutes to complete in total. It will likely be challenging to complete all of the items in one sitting if you have not prepared materials beforehand. To help with this, we will provide PDF of all the items and made sure that you can complete the survey incrementally.

The survey will open mid-August and close mid-December. Participating institutions will receive a link from the INSPIRES team to complete the survey during this timeframe.

We strongly encourage institutions to publicly share their data on the INSPIRES website. The public-facing INSPIRES Index website is designed to help prospective students and families make informed decisions about the higher education institutions they are considering. Participation demonstrates that your campus values students’ religious, secular, and spiritual identities and is committed to continuous improvement toward fostering a welcoming climate for all. Your institution will have an opportunity to review the results for your campus before confirming participation in the public-facing index. You will have to specifically opt-out of the public-facing component.

We provide you with the average scores for institutions within your group to contextualize your results. You can use this information to compare your institution to institutions that may share many of the specific characteristics, needs, and capacities related to religious, secular, and spiritual diversity. Because the stars are based on ranged scores, two institutions with the same star rating may not necessarily be identical in all aspects. An institution may have a lower overall star rating but higher sub-scores on certain dimensions of the INSPIRES index. The overall scores should be considered in the context of the sub-scores as well as the average score for that institutional type.

Results from one institution aren’t shared directly with other institutions. Other institutions will be provided with the overall scores for the collected institutions of their same type (e.g., public, private nonsectarian, etc.).

We encourage everyone who completes the INSPIRES Index to allow their results to be explored by students. While some institutions have been doing this work for a while, the importance of students’ spiritual, religious, and secular worldview identities has become more of a conversation in just the last 20 years. That means that participation in any way is, on its own, fairly innovative and worth publicizing. Additionally, as this is a benchmarking effort, institutions that score lower than they would like probably have some “low-hanging fruit” in terms of policies, practices, and programs and are likely able to improve their ranking significantly in a short amount of time. Institutions can also update their scores each fall to demonstrate continuous improvement.

Yes! The information provided reflects how the campus representative responded to the survey during the previous academic year. Our suggestion is that institutions plan to complete, or update, the INSPIRES Index every Fall to reflect the ongoing work they are doing to improve the welcoming worldview climate on campus. Sometimes that might improve an overall score, or perhaps there is something that is very important for a specific group (e.g., dining accommodations, student group expansion) that will be important to represent.