"We're not doing well enough," he said.

"Many faculty members find it embarrassing to deal with issues of race, gender or sexual orientation," he added.

The students presented Nye with a list of recommendations, including sensitivity training for faculty members, active recruitment of minority faculty and an assessment of how diversity is addressed in existing courses.

Many students said they wanted to see a more aggressive approach to addressing diversity.

"If someone who uses terms like 'faggot,' 'nigger,' 'chink,' 'spic' graduates from here, what's called for is not an incremental approach... but a radical change," Leigh said.

At times, Nye appeared visibly frustrated by the students' demands.

Leigh called on Nye to take more forceful steps to make faculty members more sensitive to diversity issues.

"What would you like me to do? Would you like me to fire the tenured faculty?" Nye asked in response.

"What gets my back up is when you say, 'Do this. Do that. Give me a timetable,'" he later added.

After the meeting, many students said they wished Nye had committed to a more concrete set of proposals.

"Without timelines and deadlines, I don't care what he said," Manvel said.

"He was able to get off relatively easy," Perez said. "He didn't have to commit to any difficult or hard-to-enact changes."

Nye said after the meeting that he found the discussion "helpful."

"A couple of the points I could call unrealistic," he said. "But I thought most people were very reasonable.