“I have not yet seen a black SEAS professor, but it hasn’t really been an issue for me,” Augustine says.

Several SEAS professors say they are skeptical as to whether these efforts would actually draw more African-American or Latino students.

“I’d love to see some data...It’s one of those issues that is somewhat speculative,” Lewis says, adding that he himself has never seen any evidence that underrepresented minority students did not study computer science because of a dearth of minority faculty in CS.

Seltzer also expresses doubts about the efficacy of such a plan, drawing on her own experience teaching introductory computer science as a female professor.

“When I taught CS50, I had no better success recruiting women than any of my male colleagues,” she says. “From my experience, diversifying the faculty is not enough.”

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Besides faculty diversification, Murray says that she hopes to attract underrepresented minorities to SEAS by dispelling the notion that the school is a “Darwinian” place of intense competition and interminable problem sets.

“I would like to get away from [the] notion that you have to go over many hurdles before you can become an engineering concentrator,” Murray says. “I think if you make those first few courses more exciting, then it will be more inclusive.”

According to Lewis, SEAS makes “special efforts” to get in touch with minority students who have been admitted to Harvard and mentioned an interest in engineering or applied sciences in their applications.

Even if some African-American and Latino students choose majors outside of those offered by SEAS, Rutter, the SEAS communications director, says that popular introductory classes still allow the school to reach out to them.

“SEAS doesn’t educate just concentrators,” he says.

—Gautam S. Kumar contributed to the writing of this story.

—Staff Writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.