President Pete Likins released a comprehensive plan to increase diversity among faculty, staff and students at the UA in a memo Wednesday.

The "Diversity Action Plan" lists both short term and long term steps that the entire UA community must take in order to recruit and retain diverse faculty, staff and students, ensure academic fairness, and incorporate diversity into campus activities.

"One of the most important parts of the plan is the hiring of new faculty," said Elizabeth Ervin, vice-provost of academic affairs. "Hopefully we'll be able to locate more qualified minority faculty and persuade them to become candidates."

Rather than advertising job openings solely in mainstream journals, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ervin said that search committees will begin advertising in journals that are circulated more among minorities.

Taking more aggressive hiring tactics is identified in the diversity plan as one of administration's short term steps.

Other short-term actions include encouraging diversity to be a factor in the selection of university leadership and initiating a speaker series that addresses diversity issues such as race and gender.

Long-term action steps include encouraging graduate and postdoctoral students to remain as faculty at UA and developing a university-wide plan to retain underrepresented students.

Patti Ota, vice-president of executive affairs, said that while the plan lists many steps to take, it is not finished yet.

"It's an incomplete document in the fact that at this point we have not assigned responsibility, accountability and a timeline for when (and how) these issues will be addressed."

Once those decisions are made the action plan will be put in an online database.

"Then anyone can call and ask for the list of steps that are to be completed by Spring 2003, and we will be able to pull that up," she said, as an example. "We'll keep better tabs on how we'll be (improving diversity)."

Administrators are also planning to renovate a space in the Martin Luther King building soon that will be designated as the diversity office.

More than $177,100 was designated to fund new diversity initiatives this year, said Karen Filippelli, director of finance and administration for the presidents' office.

Ota has already set aside $40,000 to hire a diversity consultant and pay for a workshop for management on subtle discrimination, Filippelli said.

This $177,119 is only a small part of the funding that will go towards the Diversity Action Plan, Ota said. "There are a number of diversity projects that have a budget. If we pool this amount, then there would be much more."

She cited the President's Council on Diversity and the various multicultural centers as other sources of revenue.

The President's Council on Diversity is allocated $81,330 each year, which goes towards staff and operations, Filipelli said.

Although budget cuts threaten the diversity funds, Filipelli said that the administration would try to protect diversity as much as possible because it's an important part of Likins' Focused Excellence plan.

Likins tried to address diversity last year when he proposed hiring a vice provost to address diversity issues.

"Some people felt that (hiring a vice provost) was not the right approach because it would become that person's responsibility when it should be everyone's responsibility," Ota said.

So Likins proposed a university-wide plan, saying that the UA needs to respond to business' demands for a more diverse pool of prospective employees, during an interview last month.

College life should imitate life off of campus, in which people of various cultures and ethnicities live and work together, he said.

Likins has a multicultural family with adopted children from multiracial backgrounds.

"There is an ongoing phenomenon in the United States to have faculty be more representative of students and not just have white men teaching students," said Helen Henderson, associate professor of anthropology.

Henderson pointed out that during the 1980s there was a big effort to hire more women faculty.

"That was diversity," she said. "Now we don't discuss it because we have a lot more women faculty in certain areas."

The Diversity Action Plan comes two years after the North Central Association, which accredits the university, observed that UA needs to work harder to increase the diversity of its staff. North Central expects UA to have a plan in place to increase diversity by Spring 2003.