While Rutgers prides itself on being a diversified institution, President Richard L. McCormick said the University must do better.
Currently, 3.7 percent of the full-time faculty is black and 2.3 percent is Hispanic or Latino, McCormick said during his annual address.
"Our student body may look like the people of New Jersey, but our faculty does not," McCormick said. "We need more women on the faculty in many areas and more faculty of color everywhere."
In an effort to strengthen diversity at the University, a number of high-level administrators have instituted a hiring policy that aims to search far and wide for prospective faculty members of all creeds, ethnicities and genders, said Karen Stubaus, associate vice president for Academic Affairs.
"Essentially, the effort [aims] to make sure when we do a faculty, staff or high-level executive leadership search in the University, that we are casting the broadest possible net and that we are looking at the broadest range of people that we can," Stubaus said.
The national mark for black full time faculty at Universities is approximately 5.5 percent, Stubaus said.
Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski said that the effort - which originated in the Office of Faculty Diversity Initiatives when he established it in 2004 - would allocate funds to departments that might otherwise be unable to afford an extensive search for new faculty.
"If a department has an opportunity that would add to its diversification that is not part of its curriculum hiring plan or cannot otherwise accomplish this with the resources that are available…we provide the financial support," he said.
Stubaus said this policy is different from what she described as the 1970's affirmative action quota system - which is now illegal - because rather than forcing departments to employ a certain number of people of a particular gender or ethnicity, it fosters a more broadminded hiring policy.
"Diversity literally means anything other than what you currently are," she said. "The more different kinds of people you get, the more likely you get 'thinking-outside-the-box' in regards to approaches to the discipline."
In addition to revising the University's hiring policy, the current initiative will create centralized diversity offices on each of the University's campuses as well as the President's Council on Diversity and Equity, whose members will include both administrators and students.
"The President's Council is going to be a group composed primarily of high-level faculty whose job will be to meet with the President periodically to keep track of where we are with these issues," Stubaus said. "[It will] essentially hold the University's feet to the fire with regards to diversity efforts and diversification of the faculty and staff and curriculum."
Stubaus said it would be up to the council to decide exactly how these policies will be implemented, but in measuring their success, both diversity of staff and curriculum would be considered.
"You keep having to shift your notion of what diversity means," she said. "The way we see it is that every opportunity to hire is an opportunity to diversify."
Furmanski said that some of the blame for the low percentages can be attributed to the University's recent budget issues, which affected Rutgers across the board.
"For the past four, five, six years we have been in a very serious budget situation in which all faculty were affected," Furmanski said. "Faculty from underrepresented groups are in high demand. [During the budget cuts] we lost some faculty because we couldn't afford to keep them and we could not replace them."
Furmanski said that with the establishment of the President's Council, the University is prepared to move forward and try to tackle the issue.
"We need to refocus ourselves, we've established this as a very high priority, and will marshal the resources that we can," he said.
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