This semester, the Ithaca College administration created a discussion group to review the results of the Fall 2012 Campus Acceptance, Inclusion and Fairness Survey. Though this is a step in the right direction, it is still not enough, as there are still no plans to release the results of the survey to the student body.

Mark Coldren, associate vice president of Human Resources, said after the survey data was collected, there were discussions about forming a group with student representatives to interpret the results, but no concrete decisions were made. Clearly, the college conducted this survey without any real intent to interpret or release the results.

Cedrick-Michael Simmons ’14, last year’s Student Government Association president, and other members of the campus community repeatedly called for the administration to release the results, to no avail.

Crystal Kayiza, current SGA president and a member of the discussion group, said the SGA representatives in the discussion group believe the college should release the results in the form of an executive summary and continue to withhold the raw results, as half the students who filled out the survey are no longer at the college.

However, the campus community should not have to rely on the discussion group’s interpretation of the survey to get a sense of what the college was like at the time. It’s time for the college, which frequently gives lip service to the concept of transparency, to trust the members of the community to view and make sense of this information
for themselves.