Following on the hunger strike at MIT in February by James Sherley, an African-American bioengineering professor who accused the university of racism when he didn’t get tenure—MIT yesterday announced the members of a faculty committee to study the issue of race in faculty hiring and promotion. MIT first announced this initiative in February so it seems to be moving quickly on this important matter. I hope this committee will come with data that show whether/how much racism is a problem at MIT.

According to MIT’s press release, the provost said that he hopes this initiative will have the same impact as the earlier one that focused on gender equity in faculty hiring. That initiative has been credited for increasing the number of women hired as professors at MIT during the late 1990s (though the overall number still remains quite small!).

It’s a shame that Sherley had to go to such extremes to get the university to seriously study the issue of race. While there was an existing committee on faculty diversity at MIT, it wasn’t able to come together to do a comprehensive study on minority faculty the way women faculty did successfully in the 1990s.

I attended a talk a few weeks ago given by Nancy Hopkins, the MIT biology professor who spearheaded the studies on gender equity, about women and science (Ben Barres, a neurobiology professor at Stanford who has spoken out about women in science issues, was also on the panel).

A few African-American professors/researchers were there and so the question came up: why does there seem to be more attention and progress on gender equity in faculty hiring than on racial equity at MIT? One reason given was that the minority faculty community, being still a rather diverse bunch, just isn’t has unified as a group of white women. Some members of the audience said that racism in science runs much deeper than sexism and so has been (and will be?) more difficult to root out.