Including the Excluded: Concepts for Successful Integration of the US Academy, 2014

Publisher Abstract

James L. Sherley delivered this lecture at the Second Annual Retreat of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Minority Faculty, on March 26, 2007. Hopkins cardiac surgeon Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr. invited him to present the retreat‘s keynote address as a 1988 graduate of the School of Medicine. Dr. Watkins recruited Dr. Sherley to Hopkins along with other black students in 1980. 

On the occasion of the lecture, Dr. Sherley had recently ended a 12-day hunger strike undertaken to protest his claim that racial discrimination was a key factor in the decision to deny him tenure promotion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When giving the lecture, he believed that MIT was fulfilling its part of an agreement to undertake a review of his complaint with an external arbiter. 

However, later in April, MIT Provost Rafael Reif notified Dr. Sherley that MIT would not meet its agreement. Dr. Sherley was summarily evicted from MIT on June 30, 2007. The lecture is presented in its original form to convey to colleges and universities of higher learning, not only its ideas on principles for improving fair inclusion in the US academy, but also to convey those principles in the context in which they were drafted and shared. 

This is an Open Access item