Cornell has made good progress in the past 10 years in recruiting a diverse faculty of academics early in their careers. Now the university must focus on retaining them as they climb to the middle and upper ranks.

That was the message Elizabeth Mannix, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Management, delivered to the board of trustees May 22. In her role as interim vice provost for equity and inclusion, she reported on the university's challenges, progress and initiatives in creating a diverse faculty. "One of the things we need to concentrate on is achievement," said Mannix, "How do we help faculty members achieve their full potential?"

The good news is that women faculty members at Cornell have increased by almost 6 percent in the past decade, said Mannix. Women now represent 26 percent of all faculty members.

However, Cornell is facing challenges from its peer institutions, who have also increased their women faculty members by about the same percentage during that period. "Even as we make progress, our competitors are not standing still," Mannix said. "We have to compare ourselves to our peers, because they are the ones who are able to take our great folks away from us."

Endowed chairs may be the solution, because professors value them so highly, she said. "Salary and research funding is important. But an endowed chair denotes status and is an important achievement for professors. It's a marker that you have really made it in your career. They are one of the most valuable things we can offer people."

However, endowed chairs are a scarce commodity. Faculty who hold named chairs -- the large majority are white men -- retain them for many years. And donors are slowing down on endowing chairs. Of Cornell's 1,600 professors, only 243 hold endowed chairs. Of those, 15 percent are women, and only 9 percent are people of color. "This [endowed chairs] is a very scarce and valuable resource," Mannix said. "And our competition is thinking about that."

She concluded by saying that the university's next step, beginning in the fall, is to understand why women and minority faculty members choose to go to other universities once they climb to the upper ranks.

People often attribute departures to Ithaca's isolated, rural location and small size, but that may not necessarily be the case, Mannix says. Dartmouth College, which is also located in a rural area -- Hanover, N.H. -- has the highest percentage of women faculty -- 35 percent -- among the Ivy League universities and their peers.

"We don't know the full story on why people leave. Are other schools acting more quickly and aggressively to create more endowed chairs and to keep people at the higher ranks than we are?" Mannix asked. "We don't know the answer to that question. We have to be careful to look at multiple factors. Then we can focus on initiatives that focus not only on retention but also on how to help faculty achieve their full potential. That's where we're going next."