Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans.” But, alas, there is also bad news: “There are to be found at Emerson unexamined and powerful assumptions and biases about the superiority, preferability, and normativeness of European-American culture, intellectual pursuits, academic discourse, leadership, and so on.” (Emphasis in original.) Left unexamined, these biases result in the “disproportionate undervaluing of African Americans and the disproportionate overvaluing of European Americans.” You can read the entire report here, and I urge you to do so, if you like self-parody.
