After three meetings and months of informal discussions, Northwestern’s Faculty Diversity Committee will issue recommendations Spring Quarter for improving the university’s efforts to recruit women and ethnic minorities.

Members of the diversity committee said the group will make a variety of suggestions, including providing additional support to minority graduate students and involving minority faculty and graduate students in candidate searches.

“We want to emphasize the importance of the pipeline issue,” said Provost Lawrence Dumas. “We need to continue to attract as many minorities as we can to our graduate programs so that the newly minted Ph.D. pool is as rich as possible.”

Dumas said he has encouraged search committees to make special efforts to recruit minority applicants.

But even as the 12-person committee studies the issue, administrators said they are not optimistic that they can rapidly increase faculty diversity.

“There’s not an easy solution,” University President Henry Bienen told The Daily last week. “We’ll do what we can, and we’ll have the diversity committee take a look at things, but leaping way ahead – I don’t see that we’ll be able to make great progress.”

Blacks and Latinos each comprise about 2 percent of NU professors, Dumas said. In 1999, the last year for which data is available, about 83 percent of NU faculty was white.

Dumas said he re-launched the committee in September to examine more ways to recruit women and minorities. Although NU’s level of faculty diversity is similar to peer institutions, Dumas said, he still is not satisfied.

“The number is just too low,” he said. “Being in the middle of the pack isn’t good enough. We want to be a leader in attracting minority faculty. I want to see some real momentum here.”

Bienen said that with more minority college graduates entering the job market instead of graduate school, NU competes for a smaller pool of applicants.

“We haven’t seen the pools grow very rapidly,” Bienen said. “That’s not an answer to stop trying for diversity, but I just think that on this issue some people don’t like to hear that there’s no magic wand to wave.”

Though some departments have enjoyed “pockets of success” in recruiting minorities, others have struggled to diversify their faculty, Dumas said. The sociology department, he said, has been especially successful in training doctoral candidates and attracting minority faculty.

But departments have not been aggressive in competing for highly qualified minority applicants, said Monica Olvera, a McCormick professor and committee member.

“We are going to be looking at the top ten candidates in a given field,” she said. “They are in demand, and they are very few. We have to go after them. It’s something Northwestern hasn’t been very clear about.”

The committee also will recommend ways to make the university more sensitive to women’s needs, Dumas said.

Eighteen percent of tenured professors in 1999 were women, and females comprise about one-third of professors hired each year, according to statistics from the Office of Administration and Planning.

McCormick Prof. Joseph Schofer, another committee member, said NU can attract more women by becoming more friendly to families.

“You want to be able to recruit people who have families,” he said. “That certainly makes a difference when you try to recruit women. It’s important for the university to lower the barriers as best we can.”

Administrators first formed the Faculty Diversity Committee 10 years ago but moved toward focusing on student diversity in the mid-’90s. Dumas said he decided to form the committee again in September when it became apparent that faculty diversity was not improving.

“Northwestern believes very strongly in the value of having a diverse faculty and student body that reflects the population of the society in which we live,” Dumas said. “The more diverse the ideas we bring (to) our students and faculty, the better their learning experience.”

Olvera said she hopes the committee recommendations will make diversity a bigger factor in faculty hiring.

“The faculty of Northwestern did not have diversity as a top priority – period,” Olvera said. “Now we’re forcing it to be a priority.”