Alissa D. Gardenhire had no intention of going to graduate school when she was an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

But when the university hired a black professor in her environmental studies department, she was inspired. Today, Gardenhire is a sixth-year graduate student in urban planning at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

University administrators, faculty and students alike clamor for greater diversity among college professors, but hiring more members of minority groups is only part of the problem.

Before colleges and universities can create diverse faculties, they need a diverse pool of applicants to choose from.

In university-speak, it's the "pipeline problem."

With minority applications to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) down slightly in recent years, officials say they will continue to recruit aggressively for he diverse faces that will be the professors of the future.

And Harvard--like all institutions of higher learning across the nation--needs those diverse faces.

In the upper echelons of its 10 schools, Harvard has had only one full fledged dean that is a member of a minority group, Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.