Peer review – for an entire department

The APS Climate Site Visits program offers “expert eyes” to assess internal culture

Demands on physics and on physicists seem to increase each year. With resources scarce and external pressures mounting, it’s easy to overlook the vital work of building a positive climate for everyone in the physics community, ensuring all can fully participate and thrive.

As part of its efforts to make the study and practice of physics available to diverse communities and populations, the American Physical Society offers the Climate Site Visits program, which helps physics departments, labs, and consortia take action that will improve their environments for all members of the physics community.

Visits by APS leaders and volunteers assess the climate of the physics institution for everyone in its community, ensuring all can fully participate and thrive. It’s easy to request a visit, and typically anywhere from three to eight are conducted each year.

Talat Rahman, a member of the APS Climate Site Visit Leadership Group and a physics faculty member at the University of Central Florida, says the role of a visiting team is to think through the environment’s implications for every member of the department, from undergraduates, graduate students, and doctoral students, to postdocs, faculty, and staff.

“You're thinking about it in terms of the different stakeholders in the department, and you think about what is important to each one of them,” she explains.

Evangeline Downie, Interim Vice President for Research at The George Washington University and a former member of the Climate Site Visit Leadership Group, also stresses the importance of many voices informing the process, including through a pre-visit survey.

“The climate survey is designed to elicit a lot of narrative responses from people,” Downie says, “in the hope that the Climate Site Visit group coming in can read in advance what the hotspots are and things they should concentrate on during their visit.”

Site visits typically last two days, include three physicists representing APS, and employ a process that has been carefully calibrated to allow participants to speak freely on issues or problems they might experience as constituents of the physics institution.

“There'll be a series of meetings scheduled with the climate site visit group and different groups of constituents in the department,” Downie says. “And what they try to do is separate people by power and status,” the better to encourage honest discovery with no fear of awkwardness or retaliation.

The process can be exhaustive. Site reviewers gauge diverse elements including curriculum, pedagogical style, equity, and faculty advancement opportunities. Then reviewers compile a report — based on the site survey, site self-study, and site visit experience — to provide recommendations that sites can take to improve their department.

“We don't just go and look at how everybody's feeling,” notes Rahman. “We look at how courses are being taught, you know? Are the undergraduate majors and the graduate students getting the courses that they need to make them competitive?”

The process can even encompass the effectiveness of physicists’ office space. Downie recounts one anecdote of a department struggling to understand why the doctoral students didn’t spend much time in the office dedicated for their use.

The culprit, as determined by the site visitors? “The Ph.D. students' office was right next to the bathrooms, and the smell from the bathrooms was leaking in!” Downie laughs.

It’s not always so straightforward, of course. Rahman identifies “the reluctance, the barriers that different groups feel, particularly students, to talk to others in the department” as a common theme in some physics communities.

So, why would a physics department, lab, or consortium want to subject itself to such scrupulous review?

“You’re providing a vehicle and an opportunity for the department to start to take stock of things and set up some internal mechanisms by which they can make the place conducive and nurturing for everyone there,” Rahman says.

And that, Downie explains, is the start of a recipe for sustained, positive change.

“We should be building things into the structure of physics that ensure that we're casting the broadest possible net and recruiting into the field,” she says, “removing barriers to participation that are socioeconomic or gender-based or race-based, so that we can have the people who are really interested and want to engage in physics get to go through that system.”

“We do it in our science, right?” Downie continues. “We write a paper, and then we submit it to peer review. Because even though sometimes we're reticent about it and we get annoyed at the reviewer feedback, ultimately the paper ends up stronger because someone looks at it with expert eyes.”

To request a site visit or learn more, visit the Climate Site Visits webpage.

For more information about site visits and department climate and culture, see Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) Guide Sections: How to Undertake an Undergraduate Program Review, How to Serve as an Undergraduate Program Reviewer, and Departmental Culture and Climate.