Faced with a public controversy over its limited faculty diversity, Emerson College has responded with a spate of hirings and promotions of minorities, capped by the installation in July of its first African-American president, Dr. M. Lee Pelton.
Though many other higher education institutions have struggled to effect real change in response to institutional bias allegations, Emerson, a private liberal arts college in Boston, broke from that pattern, first by naming an expert panel to conduct an external review and make a public report on its findings.
The three-member panel reported in 2010 that stigma and bias had left Emerson’s Black faculty in a “caste-like position” that devalued their intellectual work and slowed their advancement. At that point, the college, founded in 1880, had tenured only three Black professors in its history — and two of them had to sue to obtain that status.
In less than two years since that critical report, Emerson has granted tenure to two other African-Americans and an Asian-American and hired or promoted a number of other minorities. A Black professor, Dr. Jerald Walker, has been promoted to an interim department chairman after only a year on the faculty.
“One would wish that more institutions, when faced with this kind of challenge, would respond as positively as Emerson has,” says Dr. Theodore Landsmark, president of Boston Architectural College, who was chairman of the external review panel. “The college has taken impressive initial steps to diversify the faculty.”
Weeks before the report was released, William Smith left Emerson in frustration after five years as executive director of its Center for Diversity. “There have been a number of people that have been hired.
There’s been some progress,” concedes Smith, executive director of the National Center for Race Amity at Wheelock College, also in Boston.
