Almost a month after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report highlighting its too-loose grip on minority faculty ‘- specifically confessing that only six percent of its faculty are nonwhite ‘- Emerson College released the findings of a small, nonaffiliated group it hired to assess the school’s professor recruitment and retention practices.

The team, which conducted the study last summer after two black professors disputed their denial of tenure on basis of discrimination, examined the structure of the school’s hiring process and retention policies over a span of years during which diversity was seemingly nonexistent. More than a quarter of Emerson’s 117 faculty members are tenured or on track for tenure. But of that fraction, only three black professors have tenure, and two had to take the school to court to get the distinction and corresponding job security. Another is on track for the distinction.

The report’s findings do not indicate intentional racism on the part of the hiring committee, the group said, but rather demonstrate a subconscious extension of more general societal racist tendencies. Still, it seems a losing battle to try to justify a significant mismatch between Emerson’s proportional representation of blacks in its faculty and that of blacks in the state or country. It is too weak an argument for too substantial a problem.

Emerson should not focus its efforts on covering its tracks and should, instead, direct its attention on a restructuring of its behaviors and procedures. Fortunately, much of the report prescribed advice surrounding how Emerson can improve upon widening its career availability to nonwhite professors and educating those unfamiliar with the plight of minorities to be more empathetic.

The team says Emerson should make a more concerted effort to accommodate and support its minority staff so that that staff does not feel alienated or panicked. Moreover, it urges senior professors take their jobs to mentor junior professors more seriously, as it is generally a neglected responsibility and one that could yield greater retention if effectively undertaken. Finally, the team suggests the school should take its recent apprehensions surrounding hiring into consideration when it looks for a new president, as this could set the tone for a new and more open-minded administration. This should be the stuff of the college’s new efforts.

For a school that teaches progressive media and for one in the middle of a major metropolis’s downtown, Emerson’s practices in professor retention are unarguably outdated. Should the college take the report seriously, it could set a precedent for schools in similar predicaments, rather than remaining as one that is deep-rooted in apathy.
‘