MIT’s Black Hole
Dr. James L. Sherley is just the latest professor to protest the lack of Black tenured faculty at MIT.
By Kenneth J. Cooper

Cambridge, Mass.
For at least 25 years, faculty diversity has been a recurrent, vexing issue at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Past president Dr. Paul E. Gray confessed to having failed to reach his goal of greater faculty diversity at the science and engineering powerhouse. “We have not gained on this in the better part of a decade,” he said in 1988.

Gray’s successor, Dr. Charles M. Vest, expressed the same disappointment during his 14 years as MIT’s president. In 2004, he told the faculty his greatest regrets were not achieving more diversity among professors and graduate students.

Now that MIT has its first woman president, Dr. Susan Hockfield, who says she too wants to advance diversity, the issue has surfaced again in a dispute over the denial of tenure to Dr. James L. Sherley, a Black biological engineering professor.

MIT administrators dispute his charge of racism in the tenure denial. Last month, Sherley called off his 12-day fast and daily protests after he and the administration entered talks, whose scope neither side has spelled out.

It was not the first time a Black professor at MIT has gone on a hunger strike over faculty diversity. In 1991, Dr. James H. Williams Jr., a tenured professor of applied mechanics, fasted and protested one day a week for a month, in part, to spotlight the small number of Black faculty.
In response to Sherley’s recent protest, Hockfield and MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif have launched a review of MIT’s hiring, promotion and grievance procedures.

“We’ve had an ongoing effort to recruit minority faculty,” says chancellor Phillip Clay, who is Black. “We’re trying to make improvements.”

Progress in hiring Black faculty, in particular, has been slow at MIT. The first Black professor, Dr. Joseph Applegate, arrived in 1956. There were three Black professors in 1970 and 16 in 1983. Today, there are 30.