EDUCATION-US: Ivory Tower Still Blindingly White

By Adrianne Appel Reprint | | Print |

Adrianne Appel

BOSTON, Feb 27 2007 (IPS) - A premier U.S. research institute has agreed to address possible racial discrimination in hiring, following a 12-day hunger fast by one of its African American scientists.

James Sherley, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), went on hunger strike to protest his being denied tenure, which he attributes to entrenched racial bias at the institute. Racial discrimination is at the root of the low number of black scientists at MIT and other U.S. science departments, Sherley and others say.

“This isn’t about me getting tenure at MIT, it’s about why I didn’t get tenure at MIT,” Sherley told IPS.

“My situation isn’t unique,” he said. “Race is still a problem in this country. The country is asleep.”

Sherley ended his fast on Feb. 16 with a public statement by MIT that it “bears responsibility for ensuring an environment in which all members of our diverse community feel welcome and respected. Professor Sherley’s protest has focused attention on the effects that race may play in the hiring, advancement and experience of under-represented minority faculty.”

MIT also announced during the protest that it would begin a new initiative to study why it is not hiring more people of colour as professors, especially in the sciences.

“This most recent announcement is a sham, analogous to observing someone being lynched when you know already that lynching is illegal. It’s basic foolishness,” Williams said in an interview.

Williams went on a hunger fast in 1991, to focus attention on the education of minority students at MIT. At the time he was the only African American at MIT in all of science and engineering, he said.

Of 974 professors at MIT, 54 are black, Hispanic or Native American, according to the institute. About 740 professors are tenured, and among them, 27 are under-represented minorities. About 20 percent of undergraduate students at MIT and five percent of its graduate students are people of colour.

Negotiations about Sherley’s situation at MIT are ongoing and secret. Without tenure, he must leave Jun. 30. “My demands are still on the table,” he said in an official statement on the MIT website.

Caesar McDowell, an MIT professor in urban studies and planning, said that faculty of colour have for years been calling for a comprehensive review of racial disparities at the institute.

“I do think in this day and age a complex institute like MIT has to realise that within the system there will be lots of issues around race it has to deal with,” he said.

The problem at MIT is widespread throughout the U.S., said Shirley Ann Jackson, a physicist and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and former head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The U.S. has reached a “quiet crisis”, she said in a recent speech at Harvard University, because it is not preparing enough students to take the place of scientists who are retiring.

“Young women and ethnic minority youth are more than half of the student population,” Jackson said. “It is from this group, the underrepresented majority, that the next generation of scientists and engineers must come.” About 12 percent of the U.S. population is African American.

“Race shouldn’t matter. The problem is… we’re seeing few people of colour and few women included in science. You have to ask what is happening to cause that,” said Donna Nelson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, who recently conducted a survey of the number of African Americans in the sciences.

Nelson found that in 2004, fewer than two percent of professors in any science discipline were black.

Even in computer science, where 12 percent of B.S. degrees went to black students, just one percent of the faculty was black. About three percent of all Ph.D.’s were awarded to African American students.

Nelson is part Native American and was the first female tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma. “Native Americans are vastly underrepresented in faculty,” Nelson said. “That is a problem if you start to wonder where will Native Americans find their role models and mentors if they want them of their same race.”

At MIT, Sherley, the only African American in his department, said that he had to work in a laboratory that was just a fraction of the size of his colleagues, and that his accomplishments in adult stem cell research were not heralded by the chair of his department.

Sherley has said his achievements are on par with those who win tenure at MIT. He has published more than 50 papers on his research, won awards and recently received a 2.5-million-dollar grant.

“I’m a good catch,” he said.

Sherley said he resorted to the protest after two years of trying to go through the institute’s normal appeal channels.

Chi-Sang Poon, a neural engineer with the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, told IPS, “This is about a problem that has been plaguing this institute for all of its history. Practically everything James has been through I have been through.”

Discrimination often happens unintentionally and subtly. The stereotype that scientists are white or Asian works against African Americans, and harks back to a time when the U.S. opened its doors to Asians only if they were professionals, said Rinku Sen, executive director of the Applied Research Centre in New York, which studies racial discrimination.

“Many people in his position crawl away and keep it to themselves or take a legal approach. He’s done really well taking his problem public and relating it to a pattern,” Sen said of Sherley’s protest.

Throughout the high-profile protest, which garnered national press coverage and the support of MIT’s Noam Chomsky and others, MIT defended its decision to deny Sherley tenure and said racial bias was not a big issue on campus and did not enter into the deliberations.

During the time of the protest, a large student exhibit inside an MIT building honouring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was vandalised.

Sherley studied at Harvard in 1976 and there was just one African American professor in the sciences. “Today, when I look down the river at Harvard, and here at MIT, I see nothing has changed,” he said.

Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at MIT, said the situation for women there is changing very slowly. She and a handful of other women conducted a study in 1996 that pointed out that there were 22 women faculty in the sciences at that time. Today, there are 36, she said.

A big aspect of the problem is a continuing lack of awareness on the part of departments that by not recruiting minority faculty, they remain part of the problem. “In some cases those people have not discussed the problem and unaware of the data,” Nelson said.

Nelson said she does hope MIT will play a leading role in changing the face of U.S. science faculty.

“To make a public statement means that we can expect to see something outstanding from them,” Nelson said.