Last time we visited Emerson's campus on the Common, we realized that it was white, white, white. At a school where a mere 3 percent of the students are black, and only four black faculty have ever been tenured, you might wonder what a black person's gotta do to get a professorship. The answer, as we found out, is bring a lawsuit. Half of those four black professors had to bring discrimination suits against the college before getting their tenure.
That's a problem. A recent panel on the issue found that Emerson's black faculty find themselves in a "caste-like position," the result of decades of institutional deafness to the needs of black academics. The panel's report is a study in white privilege—Emerson might not actively discriminate against black people, but its lilywhite environment makes it hard for black academics to break out.
It's been a bad month for things named Emerson. A few weeks ago, a cadre of English professors proposed kicking Ralph Waldo Emerson out of the American literature canon because he wrote "the prose of a crazy person."
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