The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will formally examine the hiring, advancement, and experiences of minority faculty members, in a move announced just days before a black professor started a hunger strike over the denial of his bid for tenure.
James L. Sherley, an associate professor of biological engineering, began a planned fast last week with a vigil lasting several hours outside the offices of MIT’s president and provost on the first day of its spring semester.
Mr. Sherley did not respond to requests for comment, but he told the Associated Press that he would refuse to eat until MIT admitted that racism had played a part in denying him tenure. He will continue to drink water and take vitamins and other supplements, he told the AP.
In an e-mail message to a number of his colleagues in December, Mr. Sherley said that if MIT officials failed to correct “wrongful deeds” by February 5, he would fast in protest and would “die defiantly.”
MIT’s chancellor, Phillip L. Clay, said there was no connection between the timing of MIT’s announcement about the review and Mr. Sherley’s hunger strike. He said the decision to take a closer look at the representation and experiences of minority professors followed a commitment by the faculty at large to several resolutions promoting diversity in May 2004.
A biology professor who is a leading figure on issues of gender equity on the MIT faculty, Nancy Hopkins, called the decision “profoundly important.” Ms. Hopkins’s own complaint of sex discrimination in 1993 kick-started a similar examination of the status of women on MIT’s faculty. That analysis ended with the university’s acknowledgment that it had discriminated against female professors.
“When you look at a number of cases,” Ms. Hopkins said, “often patterns emerge that you can’t see in a single case.”
Like other large research universities, MIT has struggled to deal with obvious inequities in the representation of female and minority professors on its faculty.
“We’re making efforts, but we are not nearly as far along as we’d like to be,” Mr. Clay said. Out of 998 professors of all ranks, only 188 are women, and only 54 are members of underrepresented minority groups.
Only 4 percent of the institute’s tenured faculty members describe themselves as black, Hispanic, or Native American, said Lydia S. Snover, director of institutional research.
She pointed to a higher percentage of minority professors among the nontenured faculty — 8 percent — as evidence that minority hiring had increased in recent years. “They haven’t come up for tenure yet,” she said. “They’re still new.”
Letter from Professors
Noam Chomsky and 10 other MIT professors circulated a letter suggesting that Mr. Sherley’s complaints may not have been given “fair, diligent, and thorough consideration.” The letter questioned the “integrity of the grievance process” but not the tenure decision itself.
In a statement issued last week, Mr. Sherley’s colleagues in MIT’s biological-engineering department said race had played no role in his tenure case.
“We believe in our hearts that, as in all cases in our department, it was a fair and honest process executed at the utmost level of integrity and ethics,” they said.
Ms. Hopkins said she believed the new study on the experiences of minority faculty members was needed. “In the case of the women, they discovered that inequities did happen, and the way to deal with it was just to review it once in a while — just look at the data and make sure it wasn’t happening,” she said. “It’s very small things usually, but it is the perception of unfairness that you have to get rid of.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 24, Page A15
