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A University of California report released Tuesday showed that minority representation in faculty does not mirror the state’s population, an issue UC officials say is connected with the problem of declining admissions of underrepresented minorities.

Of the 65 UCLA faculty appointed in the 2004-2005 academic year, 45 were white, 12 Asian and three black, in addition to one Chicano/Latino faculty member and one American Indian, according to the UC President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity.

Currently, underrepresented minorities make up about 8.7 percent of UCLA faculty, and when including Asians minorities they account for 19 percent.

The task force included methods for the UC to improve diversity, such as outreach programs and ensuring the environment at its campuses is welcoming toward minority faculty.

But the existence of the task force, which provides a forum for addressing diversity, is in itself important for the UC’s move toward a more diverse faculty, said Jody Kreiman, chairwoman of the Academic Senate Committee on Diversity and Equal Opportunity, which advises the university administration on how to improve diversity in the UC.

The relatively low number of underrepresented minority faculty have concerned university officials because of the academic atmosphere they believe it creates and the image of UCLA they said it may project, which are some of the reasons officials have found the recent admissions statistics troubling.

“If we come to be perceived as a ‘ghettoized’ institution, serving only some racially limited elite of either whites or ... some other not-fully-representative mix, we are not going to be a very attractive institution for the state to support,” said John Oakley, chairman of the UC Academic Senate.

The difficulties facing UCLA in hiring a diverse faculty are some of the same ones that have brought about the decrease in underrepresented minority students, Oakley said.

He attributed the numbers of underrepresented minority faculty members to Proposition 209, which UC and state officials have pegged as a major cause for the decrease in underrepresented minority students being admitted to the UC recently.

“Proposition 209 ... seems to have had some sort of immediate adverse effects,” he said.

But there are other explanations for the number of underrepresented minority faculty. Kreiman pointed to a cyclical trend, where low numbers of underrepresented minority students and faculty deter others from attending.

“If you’re recruiting someone and they perceive they would be the only person like them on campus, it makes them feel a little more unwelcome,” she said.

There is also a connection between the diversity in the undergraduate population and that in the faculty population, Oakley said

He said the low number of minority students in undergraduate and graduate schools directly affects the group of faculty who go on to be professors.

“If you don’t train a diverse pool of undergraduates and then encourage them to go on to graduate school and then encourage them to be a faculty member ... you’re never going to solve the problem,” Oakley said.

The UC has set out various ways to approach the problem, such as more outreach programs to attract a more diverse pool of applicants and improving retention of faculty by creating a more inclusive environment at UCLA, said Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty Diversity Rosina Becerra, who chaired the UC President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity.