Slightly more than 10 percent of the University’s professors, research assistants and administrators identify themselves as members of a minority, causing some to charge that the University is not doing enough to increase diversity in the college’s faculty.
“I think that ‘diversity’ has become a catch phrase,” ASUO Multicultural Representative Mario Sifuentez said. “(University administrators) throw a little money at things and call it a day.”
Sifuentez said that despite the University’s stated commitment to affirmative action, administrators are not doing enough. While support has been shown for projects like the Bias Response Team, the Center on Diversity and Community, and the Ethnic Studies Program, Sifuentez said more needs to be done to improve recruiting and retention of minority faculty members.
“We don’t need more minority professors in fields like ethnic studies, we need them in math and biology,” he said. “We’ve failed to renew contracts with instructors in those fields. I know students are concerned about that.”
Minority faculty members are professors, research assistants and administrators who identify themselves as African American, Asian American, Hispanic, Native American or multiethnic.
* According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1997, minority members made up 14.3 percent of the 648, 574 faculty members at public four-year universities in the United States. As of Sept. 30, 2001, 10.3 percent of the University’s 2,100 faculty members belong to a minority group.

* According to the 2000 U.S. Census, minorities make up 16.5 percent of Oregon’s population. While the faculty’s minority population falls short of that number, it stacks up well against other schools in the Oregon University System. At the University, 11.1 percent of the instructional faculty belong to a minority, while in the OUS, only 6.8 percent are minority members.
But numbers may not tell the whole story. Some faculty members say things are starting to get better. Shari Huhndorf, director of the University’s Ethnic Studies Program, called the University “a very different place from when I arrived five years ago.”
Huhndorf said that while she agrees with Sifuentez that some departments on campus haven’t done enough to diversify, others have. The English department, for example, has done a good job diversifying in recent years, she said.
“Things have gotten better,” she said. “But we still have a long way to go.”
Sid Moore, human rights investigator for the Office of Affirmative Action, said that the University recognizes there is a problem and is addressing it.
“We’re doing everything the law allows us to do to increase diversity on campus,” he said. “I think we are making strides. I’ve seen a lot of people who are making a difference.”
The biggest problems faced by the University in hiring minority faculty members are money and geography, Moore said. Because Oregon has a small minority population — and a particularly small African American population — it is sometimes difficult to recruit minority professors to the University.
“People in general want to be near people who are like them,” he said. “It’s a vicious cycle.”
That vicious cycle can make it very challenging for departments trying to recruit professors, Moore said. Particularly when taken in conjunction with the fact that schools in major cities — where minority populations tend to be much higher — generally pay a higher salary in order to offset a greater cost of living.
However, those challenges are not insurmountable. Moore said that he has seen a marked increase in diversity in the ten years that he has been at the University — first as a student in the political science program and the law school and finally as an employee. Often times, he said, students aren’t around long enough to appreciate the changes that they make.
“Things do get changed as a result of student actions,” he said. “But sometimes changes take more than four years.”