CORRECTION APPENDED (SEE BOTTOM):After the University reported "modest results" in increasing faculty diversity last year, administrators said financial contraints continue to complicate the hiring process.

According to the University's self-study last fall, issued during the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' reaccredidation process, the faculty was reported to be 90 percent white, six percent Asian American or Pacific Islander, two percent Hispanic and two percent African-American.

"We continue to strive to have a diverse faculty, with modest results to date," the study said.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe, who is responsible for monitoring the distribution of faculty, said he's not sure how Brandeis measures up to its peer institutions, but said it's easier for universities with more money to attract racial-minority professors. Brandeis' endowment exceeded $580 million this year.

Because Brandeis is a relatively small university, it does not have the capacity to add new professors to the faculty and instead, it generally hires professors to replace retiring ones, Jaffe said.

"I don't, frankly, track whether we're ahead or behind. There is no formula by which I do this. You don't get three points for being African-American and two points for being gay," Jaffe said. "We just do the best we can."

Another problem, Jaffe said, is the "relatively small number of [diverse] candidates."

"And if you're Harvard you can just sort of go out and buy them," he said.

According to a recent self-study at Harvard University, whose endowment is about $30 billion, less than 15 percent of tenured professors are racial-minorities in 11 of 13 departments assessed, the Harvard Crimson reported last August.

Between 1986 and 2001, Tufts University reported 43.7 percent racial minority hires (31 professors). According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month, Columbia University has one of the most diverse faculties in the Ivy League, with minority faculty members making up 21 percent of the faculty in 2005. Columbia has also hired 21 new female professors through a special $15 million fund created to increase faculty diversity.

Despite Brandeis having no similar fund, the University has hired 24 new female faculty members in the past three years.

Brandeis has a faculty diversity representative whose role, according to a document on the Brandeis Web site, is to outline a search plan to recruit minority and women professors, help the search committee develop standards and criteria for evaluating the applicants, and assess the emerging applicant pool to determine how diverse it is. If the diversity representative pool isn't considered sufficiently diverse or representative, the search process may be expanded. The representative then verifies that the search plan was followed, attends candidate interviews, and possibly attends departmental meetings in which the search committee's recommendation is presented.

Tips on the University Web site for achieving greater faculty diversity include searching databases and directories listing details of potential minority candidates, using the web to find information about minority caucuses, calling chairs of graduate programs to find out who their best minority students are, and asking women and minority faculty at Brandeis and other institutions for assistance in identifying possible candidates.

Prof. Javier Urcid (LALS), chair of the Latin American and Latino studies program, said diversity is an integral part of any university, but he agreed budget contraints make attracting candidates difficult.

"It's not the fault of anybody, it's just the way it is," Urcid said."Everybody wants more diversity, but we must confront the truth that the budget is limited."

One strategy that Jaffe said Brandeis uses to attract racially diverse applicants is to define positions in ways that may appeal more to minorities; however, this does not always work out.

Jaffe recalled a post-doctorate position in fields such as hip-hop music and related topics, expecting African American applications. "Turns out, we didn't," Jaffe said. "The best candidate happened to be a white male, so we hired him . we do think about [diversity] but at the end of the day, we don't discriminate when it comes to actually hiring."

Prof. Wayne Marshall (AAAS), the professor Jaffe referred to, is teaching a course in "Digital pop from hip-hop to mashup" this semester.

Prof. James Mandrell (ROCL), chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, said perhaps designing positions to attract minority professors often leads minorities to concentrate in the department that studies their minority.

"I think it seems it's an easier fix or a more obvious fix to have either woman faculty or minority faculty in positions that are either linked to gender as an aspect of the field or to race or ethnicity," Mandrell said. "I think one of the challenges is to see diversity looking into areas in which it's not necessarily linked to the position itself."

In the future, Jaffe said that while diversifying the faculty is a priority, it's even more important to make sure that the Brandeis community does its best to make its incumbent minority faculty feel welcome.

"Paying attention to the faculty we have who are diverse, is at least as important as finding new diverse faculty," he said.

"Education is understanding and experiencing the world and its cultures and its peoples," he said. "And you can do some of that through books and other resources but there's no substitute for interacting with people who come from different backgrounds and different perspectives."

Emphasizing the need to explore differences between different people and explore them, Mandrell said, "There needs to be a commitment about a culture of diversity. We need to respect and articulate differences, and it's not about pretending differences don't exist. We need to embrace differences and I'm not convinced that Brandeis has fully embraced diversity yet, but I hope that it will."

Provost Marty Krauss said she thinks that the committee's recommendation on diversity was more of a comment than criticism.

"It is not uncommon in these kinds of reports for a comment to be made on the diversity of the student body or of the faculty or of the curriculum itself, because we put such an emphasis on ensuring as diverse a faculty as possible, she said. "I didn't take it as a criticism."