The long path to inclusivity, 2020

Excerpt

Ten years after the Hammond report [2010 Report on The Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity] recommended ways to increase faculty diversity at MIT, little has changed...In July [2020], President L. Rafael Reif announced plans to address systemic racism at the Institute, acknowledging that multiple previous initiatives haven’t done enough. Those efforts, which have proceeded in fits and starts since at least the 1960s, aimed to create a more inclusive environment on campus and to increase the number of students and faculty from underrepresented minority groups. But the work has involved “great heartache and frustration,” Reif noted, and created an “invisible, uncompensated burden” for minority members of the MIT community. It also remains unfinished.