MIT Prof Begins Hunger Strike

A professor at MIT began a hunger strike yesterday in protest of the university’s decision to deny him tenure.

Alleging racism in the workplace, Associate Professor James L. Sherley ’80 has vowed not to eat until MIT offers him tenure and fires Provost L. Rafael Reif.

“I will either see the Provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office,” Sherley wrote in an e-mail to the MIT faculty in December.

Sherley claims that he was unfairly denied lab space and was treated poorly throughout his career at MIT due to his race. Sherley is African-American.

The university denies that racism played any role. In a statement released to the public yesterday, twenty of Sherley’s colleagues in the MIT Division of Bioengineering said “with certainty and a clear conscience that race did not play any role in the decision that resulted in Prof. Sherley’s tenure case not being taken forward.”

Sherley will sit outside the office of MIT’s Provost from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, and will swear off food until he resigns. According to The Boston Globe, about 30 supporters joined his protest yesterday.

Sherley has undergone extensive preparations for his strike. He said he has undergone tests for kidney, liver, and heart function, and has read up on the effects of starvation so he knows what to expect. A certified M.D., he will check his own blood pressure daily. An MIT medical team will be on call, he said.

Sherley said he has had to resort to such desperate measures because he has “tried everything else,” and official channels within MIT have yielded no substantial results, and because legal procedures would not have the same impact as a public campaign.

“I needed a way to get people to stop and listen and to bring attention to this problem,” Sherley said.

In December 2004, MIT’s division of biological engineering decided not to advance his tenure case, according to the MIT Tech newspaper. Sherley appealed, claiming that he had been denied independent lab space for his entire seven years at MIT due to his race.

Sherley’s appeal was handed to the then-provost of MIT, Robert A. Brown, who currently serves as President of Boston University.

Sherley also disputes Brown’s handling of his appeal. He alleges that Brown carelessly brushed aside his complaints. He further charges that he was improperly contacted by a member of the MIT corporation, and that Brown’s replacement as provost, Reif, was also unfair to Sherley.

Brown and Reif refused to comment.

Sherley also said in his letter that Reif asked him to provide layoff notices to the members of his lab in November, before the committee had even finished its investigation.

MIT claimed that fair procedure was followed.

“The ad hoc committee [formed after Sherley’s first complaint] concluded that the process that led to the decision not to advance Professor Sherley’s case for tenure was fair and did not differ in any significant way from the standard process used in tenure reviews at MIT,” MIT’s press office said in a statement concerning Sherley’s tenure case.

Sherley contends that racism was a factor in not only his tenure decision, but also his treatment at MIT since he arrived.

“I hope that what is happening at MIT will spur discussion at Harvard and other universities about how processes like tenure enable racism,” Sherley said yesterday.

Sherley graduated from Harvard College in 1980 with a degree in biological sciences and said that the lack of tenured minority professors is a problem that pervades many top-tier academic institutions.

“At the time of my graduation from Harvard there was one African-American professor in biology, so when I came to MIT I was disturbed and troubled to see that nothing had changed in 25 years,” he said.

—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.