After six years of living and working in the greater Boston area, Pierre Desir’s transient life began to settle down just a few years ago. He moved into a sun-lit loft spacious enough for the artist to practice his hand at sculpting and woodwork, while developing the film curriculum at Emerson College.
Filled with optimism, Desir relished laying permanent roots at the communication arts school when he applied for tenure in the 2008 spring semester. Sure of his work, the 62-year-old Black man’s sanguine disposition soured after his application for tenure was rejected on the basis of what he determined to be racial discrimination.
The news began to spread of the tenure dismissal of Desir and a colleague, Roger House — both Black males — reaching the local NAACP chapter and resulting in an Emerson faculty committee calling for an independent review of Emerson’s tenure practices and policies. Earlier this month, the college released a report produced by an independent panel that found fault with Emerson’s tenure process.
“It is not intended, but it’s the result of patterns that perpetuate forms of discrimination,” Ted Landsmark, a civil rights activist and president of Boston Architectural College, who headed the panel, told The Boston Globe.
The review panel, which, besides Landsmark, included Dr. Evelynn Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, and JoAnn Moody, a national consultant on faculty diversity and development, found that Emerson’s pre-tenure faculty receive little mentoring and professional development and unclear tenure requirements, and suffer from a lack of multicultural competency from administrators and other faculty.
In its 129-year history, Emerson has awarded tenure to only three Black professors, but two of them — professors Mike Brown and Claire Andrade-Watkins — had to sue the college, alleging racial discrimination.
African-Americans are the most vulnerable tenure track faculty because “their energy and sense of belonging are being taxed,” the report said. Tenure rejections are the result of “unintended bias” that undervalues the intellectual worth of African-American scholarship, Moody said.
