Discriminations

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that MIT is initiating a study of

the hiring, advancement, and experiences of minority faculty members, in a move announced just days before a black professor started a hunger strike on Monday over the denial of his bid for tenure.

MIT Chancellor Phillip Clay said there was no connection between the study and the impending hunger strike. Famous radical linguist Noam Chomsky and 10 other MIT professors circulated a letter that “questioned the ‘integrity of the grievance process’ but not the tenure decision itself.” Biology Professor Nancy Hopkins, who was afraid she would vomit and “walked out in disgust” from an off the record speech by then- Harvard president Laurence Summers (putting him on the road to becoming Harvard’s ex-president),

said she believed the new study on the experiences of minority faculty members was needed. “In the case of the women, they discovered that inequities did happen and the way to deal with it was just to review it once in a while, just look at the data and make sure it wasn’t happening,” she said. “It’s very small things usually, but it is the perception of unfairness that you have to get rid of.”

Leaving aside the question of whether an inequity can happen (perhaps Prof. Hopkins can ask Prof. Chomsky about that), to me the most striking thing in this article is an assertion by the Chronicle reporter, Sierra Millman, that

[l]ike other large research universities, MIT has struggled to deal with obvious inequities in the representation of female and minority professors on its faculty.

The Chronicle is usually a model of fairness and balance, but this casual but extreme assertion by its reporter reeks of bias. Do faculties have an obligation to represent all racial, ethnic, gender, gender persuasion, religious, etc., groups? If so, how much representation of each is “equitable”? At what point do “inequities” become “obvious”?

Faculties, like all other organizations, should eliminate all racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination. But in the absence of agreement about what constitutes equity, they should leave “inequities” alone.