Federal Agency Rejects Former MIT Professor’s Claim of Racial Bias

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has rejected a discrimination claim by a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who drew national attention last year by going on a hunger strike to protest his tenure denial.

According to The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT, the commission said that the professor, James L. Sherley, who is black, should have filed his complaint with the agency sooner than September 2007. The newspaper said the commission ruled that the clock started ticking on the 300-day window in which complaints must be filed on the day in January 2005 when he learned he would be denied tenure.

The agency cited a decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “harm” was done to a professor on the day he heard that he had lost his bid for tenure, not on his last day of work.

Mr. Sherley, in a letter he provided to The Tech, contends the clock actually should have started on June 30, 2007, when MIT terminated his employment.

The commission also told Mr. Sherley, in a letter, that even if his complaint had been timely, the university “articulated bona-fide, legitimate, and nondiscriminatory reasons for its actions that may have been unfair to you but … were not causally connected or directly related to your partition and opposition in a legally protected activity that is enforced by the EEOC.”

Mr. Sherley, who ended his hunger strike after 12 days and later was locked out of his lab, has responded to the commission’s decision by asking state and federal officials to investigate the agency’s ruling. —Audrey Williams June