The vast majority of senior administrators, deans and professors at UW are white men. Women fill only three of the 19 top academic positions at UW. Barely 25 percent of professors are women, and even fewer — 19 percent — of tenured academics are female. Although women comprise 39 percent of the school’s associate deans and associate chancellors, this is the highest number of women you will see anywhere in the staff rosters. With statistics like these, do we need to question why students feel diversity is not a top priority for the administration?

The lack of diversity at the top of Bascom is problematic. But there is no evidence that UW is malicious in its hiring practices. In fact, it is likely that the chancellor takes every effort to recruit a diverse base of candidates for dean positions. And a 20-plus-member search-and-screen committee is used for most top academic hires. But when Wiley chose Peter Spear as his provost last year, he chose the only male candidate for the position, a man who happened also to be an internal candidate.

The hiring of Luoluo Hong, the new dean of students, is a welcome counterexample to the trend of plugging in white males from within UW to top academic positions as they open up. As a person of color, Hong contributes to a diverse image for the university, and she also has experience as dean of students at a West Virginia university, which gave her the familiarity with racial tensions this campus is recently prone to.

Fortunately, administrators like Wiley and Spear say they are making every effort to diversify their staff. They admit that progress needs to be made on getting more women and people of color in Bascom, but do not have a solution in mind.

UW needs to create an environment friendly to diversity of all kinds — gender, ethnicity, age and viewpoint. By recruiting a broader base of candidates and retaining the existing women and minorities on staff, UW can turn around this lack of diversity, whether it is merely a façade or the surface manifestation of a deep-rooted insensitivity students feel the administration harbors regarding diversity on campus.