Informal interaction and faculty projections of student ratings of the institutional climate

This study employed the Semantic Differential technique to investigate the relationship between informal interaction with students and the accuracy with which faculty members project students' perceptions of the institutional climate at two colleges of Arts and Sciences. When subdivided into nominal categories of high, moderate, and low interactors on the basis of their frequency of informal, out-of-class contacts with students, high interactors were found to project consistently more accurate student ratings of the climate on a bureaucracy factor than low interactors. A similar, though not consistent, relationship was found between high and low interactors on an intellectualism/scholarship dimension.