The aid budget was flat this year, and Nye said he could not rule out cuts for next year but thought they were unlikely.

Before addressing the budget deficit, Nye touted improvements in the diversity of the student body and said that for the first time in school history more than half of incoming students were women. Racial diversity increased as well, he said.

But these figures were challenged by students who said that faculty diversity remained low.

Nye said that when he became dean in 1995, the school had only one tenured female professor and that although it now has five, any major changes would come slowly.

“When you have a large stock, changes on the margin take a long time to show changes in the average,” he said.

“We only have two years here, so ‘on the margin’ doesn’t really do much for us,” countered Allen Smith, a second-year student in the master of public policy program.

Smith added that Nye had focused on “quantitative” aspects of diversity rather than the “qualitative.”

“In the classrooms, a lot of times our voices are silenced, or you feel like you represent that one black man, or one Latino, who’s in the classroom,” Smith said.

Nye said he encouraged students to “exercise leadership” by organizing discussions on controversial or uncomfortable issues. He said the school had held faculty seminars on classroom diversity but added that he could not force faculty to attend those or student-run meetings.

Nye and one KSG student, Esther Hernández-Medina, had a heated discussion on whether the school had responded sufficiently to sexual harassment.

Hernández-Medina said several women had been victimized this year and had not received support from the school.

“In one of the cases with sexual harassment, the victim has been going around to different people in the administration without having a specific answer,” she said.

She added that few students actually read the school’s sexual harassment policy.

“If people don’t feel safe and don’t know where to go, that might be an indication that there’s a problem in terms of policies and procedures,” she said.

But Nye said all students were given a copy of the harassment code and a list of ombudspeople who could investigate complaints.