Holiday Cheer: The Hungerstrike

There's an unsettled feeling in Boston at the end of the semester. The undergrads start pouring out of the city when they turn in that last paper assignment or take the last test until they have to do it all again the next year. Professors and TA's are busy grading, trying to get their own work complete so they can find a break in the winter recess. Associate Professor of Biological Engineering James Sherley is looking to stir things up and dominate an otherwise quiet time in academia. He's vowed to avenge the injustice done to him when MIT denied him tenure, he'll protest using a tried and true method of non-violent protest: the hunger strike.

Harvard seems to have taken plagiarism for the 2006 defining issue they really shouldn't be making the news for. MIT is making sure that 02139 has their own hot topic this year - hiring practice seems to be their issue du jour. When a rising star in neuroscience was passed over because Susumu Tonegawa (the resident Nobel Laureate and founder of the rival neuroscience lab) felt threatened he acted inappropriately to push away a junior faculty person from MIT. A committee was convened, investigated, and decided that Tonegawa was in the wrong. He stepped down from his directorship of the lab, though remains a professor at the University, and it was all done voluntarily – or so it's been said. James Sherley is hoping that his use of the media and a possible hunger strike will be able to create a shake up at MIT, though more to the principle he's hoping that no one need stand for the racism he says runs throughout the system. We can't find more information (proof or anecdotal) than what little we've found quoted from Sherley of systemic racism. But he's mad and won't stand for it. He's calling for his tenure to be granted and for Provost Robert Brown to resign. If his demands are met there will be no hunger strike – if not the strike commences on February 5. The process of getting tenure and therefore a job for life has always been a bit mysterious. Perhaps Sherley's quest will not only help to reform race relations within the MIT faculty but also provide a little more transparency on the system of obtaining tenure.

Photo of James Sherley courtesy of MIT News Office