This was meant to be the year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be remembered for making the contents of 1,800 courses freely available online. Instead, the prestigious American university looks set to attract more online attention because of an offline academic dispute.
The racially and scientifically, charged case involves James Sherley, an associate professor of biological engineering, who went on a 12-day hunger strike earlier this year after claiming the institution denied him tenure because he is black. MIT did not change its position, saying that race was not an issue in their decision.
Sherley, who counts the ultraliberal Noam Chomsky among his chums, had been scheduled to leave later this month.
This week, however, a prominent MIT professor, Frank Douglas, announced he would also be resigning in a show of solidarity.
Douglas, the executive director of the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation and one of only 23 black professors among MIT's nearly 1,000-strong faculty, also accuses the institution of racism in the Sherley case, the Boston Globe reports.
According to his protest page, Sherley also opposes, controversially, embryonic stem cell research, with his own research focusing on the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of adult stem cells. In an op-ed in the Australian last year, he argued that cloning human embryos was wrong and that embryonic stem cell research would not lead to a cure-all.
It does rather beg the question of why an academic would be prepared to starve himself to death in order to work in an intellectually inhospitable - at least in terms of his view on stem cell research - environment like MIT. The actions of his colleague also raise the question of what it would take for anyone to resign from a tenured position at a international university. And are America's top institutions of higher learning in any way, shape or form racist?
