At the time of the initial decision against tenure in January 2005, Sherley had applied for 12 patents, a number that has since grown to 18, he says. All but one was filed while at MIT.
Sherley acknowledge that some chatter on campus attributes the adverse tenure decision to his outspoken opposition to using embryonic stem cells in research, not to his race. “My position is that embryos at their earliest stage are living human beings, and my view is we shouldn’t use them for research,” he says.
But Sherley says a racial disparity in his treatment was evident from the start at MIT, when he was allocated less than a fifth of the lab space he had been promised. Despite that continuing handicap, Sherley insists he and his lab assistants performed “superior work,” mostly in a lab shared with a senior faculty member.
Faculty members who are denied tenure rarely prevail in fights to get the decision overturned, but Sherley notes optimistically, “sometimes they do.”
Over the past quarter century, the hiring and promotion of Black faculty at MIT has proceeded at a glacial pace. Currently, 27 of 740 tenured faculty members, or 3.6 percent, are Black or Hispanic, according to the college. In the early 1980s, 1.8 percent of MIT’s full-time faculty was Black, according to a Boston Globe article published in 1983.
--Kenneth J. Cooper
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