Gates' Liberal College Town No Stranger to Racial Dust-Ups

Racism Allegations in Recent Past at Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
By PATRIK JONSSON
The arrest of an African-American professor at his home near Harvard University gives a rare view into racial tensions in a seemingly unlikely place: America's ivory tower and its liberal environs.
At least in the popular mind, flare-ups between police and minorities tend to occur in the 'hoods and barrios of poverty-ridden American cities. But the liberal bastion of Cambridge, Mass. (per capita income: $31,156; black population: 12 percent), the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has its own complex encounters with racial attitudes.
Five years ago, Harvard's S. Allen Counter, a black professor of neuroscience, was stopped by Harvard campus police in what many saw as a racial-profiling incident.
About three years later, an assistant professor at MIT, James Sherley, raised a ruckus over his failure to get tenure, a decision that he claimed was race-based.
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Those claims were never proved, but MIT has embarked on what it calls the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity to address the university's problems in hiring black faculty.
And last week, Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested after one of his neighbors called police saying that two black men were trying to break into Gates' house. The scholar, who had a tense encounter with the police, was charged with disorderly conduct.
To be sure, there's debate about whether Gates engaged in a battle of wills with a Cambridge police officer. But whatever the case, authorities dropped the charges Tuesday.
Gates, for one, is still angry and considering his legal options.
These incidents indicate that for liberal institutions and communities like Cambridge, race can be a complicated and, at times, paradoxical issue.
On the one hand, U.S. universities have created hundreds of departments for African-American studies -- of which Harvard's is arguably the most preeminent. But on the other hand, racial diversity among faculty at U.S. universities -- which columnist Stephanie Ramage calls "bastions of equality and enlightenment" -- is, on the whole, lagging.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/story 7-25-2009