The Massachusetts Institute of Technology should broaden its faculty recruiting efforts to include highly regarded institutions known for ethnic diversity or it risks losing the best professors and minority students who feel drawn to universities with more diverse environments, according to a report on the climate at MIT for minority faculty.

The report tries to drive home the point that excellence and inclusion are not competing concepts. They can be achieved in unison by opening up frank, albeit at times awkward, dialogue and forging new strategic alliances.

"We would like to be able to create a template that other institutions can use in recruiting graduate students and developing post-doctoral programs, which are often extremely important in generating potential for an academic career, and in recruiting and hiring minority faculty," said Dr. Paula T. Hammond, Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the committee that prepared the report.

The report released Thursday from MIT's Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity is the product of 30 months of research and analysis by a team of nine MIT faculty members. Provost Dr. L. Rafael Reif launched the initiative in 2007. At issue is how race affects recruitment, retention, professional opportunities and collegial experiences for Black, Hispanic and Native American professors at MIT. The report encompasses all the schools in the university. While there has been progress for under-represented minority (URM) faculty, their experiences are still different from their nonminority peers. Experiences appear to be even more negative for URM females.

One point Hammond emphasized in the report is that MIT recruits heavily from its own graduates and from a few peer institutions such as Harvard and Stanford universities. A key recommendation of the report is to broaden that recruiting base.

 "We really need to make partners of our peer schools in a way we perhaps haven't in the past," Hammond said. "Be very strategic and focused on working with peer schools to not only build our pipeline, but then to channel our students to these other institutions and vice versa. So that we increase the number of graduate students across the board in these fields and ultimately increase the number of viable faculty candidates in these fields."

MIT has been grappling with faculty diversity for a number of years and the issue gained national attention in 2007 with the hunger strike of a Black biological engineering professor who was denied tenure.

Although MIT has made some progress- 11 percent of faculty hires in the last five years have been underrepresented minorities and their representation on faculty rose from 4.3 percent in academic year 2001 to 6.4 percent now- turnover is a problem.

The report noted that a higher percentage of URM faculty leave before or after they are promoted to associate professor without tenure, suggesting a professor's first three to five years at MIT are crucial. It also notes poor or negative faculty mentoring experiences are more frequent for URM, and mentoring across MIT lacks consistency. There is also "great awkwardness" in addressing race and racial differences openly at MIT.

With regard to overcoming the awkwardness, Hammond noted, "When we begin to discuss this report among our faculty what we hope to do is engage our faculty. There is a sense that if we talk about excellence in science and technology then we can't pay attention to diversity or background. What we're trying to do at MIT is help faculty feel more comfortable with the idea that diversity can contribute to excellence in a very unique way. Bringing unique perspectives and view points is beneficial."