The report found that CSU has given its campuses very little direction on how to hire professors. State Auditor Elaine Howle says there’s no real emphasis on making sure the search committees are as diverse as possible.  

"Many of the search committees that we looked at did not have minority members and did not have female members." 

In the past five years, CSU has spent more than $7 million defending and settling job discrimination lawsuits…although Howle says the audit didn’t look for a correlation between the hiring process and the legal actions. 

"But clearly the high number of lawsuits related to race and gender was of interest to us."

Paul Browning is a spokesman for CSU.  

"The total number of lawsuits filed against us the CSU is better than average for a public university system of its size."

The audit recommends CSU issue consistent hiring guidelines to all 23 campuses. Browning says they agree and will act on it as soon as feasible.