Diversity among faculty and staff at Iowa State may be low, but suggestions from a University of Washington dean may help address the problems.

Denice Denton, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, addressed a group of more than 30 Monday in the Campanile Room of the Memorial Union about the importance of having a diverse staff and how to hire the right people for the job.

Denton touched on interviewing techniques, retention of staff and University of Washington’s new Center for Lasting Change.

The Center for Lasting Change addresses a wide range of issues including leadership development for current department chairs and policy transformation.

“If you want to have the best engineering program in the country you need to have the best people in the program,” Denton said.

“These people come in all different shapes and sizes.”

According to a report from the ISU Taskforce on the Recruitment and Retention of Women and Minority Faculty, in nine years Iowa State has hired 163 minorities and 52 have left, a resignation rate of 31.7 percent.

Judy Vance, professor and chair of the department of mechanical engineering, said she would like to see a change in the numbers at Iowa State.

“We can do better with recruiting and retaining diverse staff,” Vance said.

More women faculty and staff members leave in the first three years than men at Iowa State, she said.

“We don’t get enough [people] in the door,” Vance said.

Denton said hiring for diversity is a new arena for most people.

Hiring a more diverse staff is hard; the dean and the department chair have to be “rowing” in the right direction, she said.

“It might take five years or more to see the cultural change,” she said.

“It might even take decades in a truly dysfunctional department.”

Vance said Iowa State is taking steps to address the problem of retaining minorities and women faculty.

“We are writing a grant for an Advance [recruitment] program to figure out why we are losing women and people of color,” she said.

Arun Somani, professor and department chair of electrical and computer engineering, said Denton’s suggestions were “extremely wonderful,” but thinks Iowa State still has culture issues.

“We need more people of different types on campus,” he said.

Having more people will bring the cultural change Denton spoke about, Somani said.

The Advance program grant would be for $3 million.

Vance said the Advance program could do “fantastic” things with that much money.