Word: belle
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard undergraduate taking a leave of absence in Chicago, I was dismayed to read about Professor Derrick Bell's recent actions at Harvard Law School in the Chicago Tribune. It cannot be denied that currently there are no Black female tenured professors at the Law School. Dr. Bell's leave of absence without pay is an attempt to rectify this situation by influencing the administration in their hiring practices. I agree with Dr. Bell in believing that the Law School's predominantly white tenured faculty should be expanded to include non-whites, especially women. However, Professor Bell's ill-advised...
Since Dr. Bell is so closely affiliated with Harvard, he may not realize the negative effect of his recent, far-reaching publicity outside the Harvard community. Whether or not Harvard appoints a Black female to the Law School faculty, the publicity has already labeled Harvard's reputation based on a single, one-sided incident. The press coverage portrays racial discrimination so severe that it requires a well-respected, tenured professor to forfeit his salary to rectify a racist hiring policy at Harvard Law School...
Silber graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, received his doctorate from Yale and maintained a mercurial profile as a philosophy professor and later as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas. He almost succeeded Terrel Bell as Secretary of Education under Reagan, a job he craved, but lost out to his friend William Bennett...
...early 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both discovered the possibility of voice transmission, but Gray ignored the potential of the telephone in the erroneous belief that telegraphy would remain the dominant means of communication. In the early 1950s, technicians used the newly invented transistor simply as a substitute for bulky vacuum tubes. Only later did designers realize that the transistor could revolutionize electrical engineering by providing a tiny, universal electronic component that could be organized into integrated circuits and programmed to perform millions of different tasks...
...pressure on Harvard's administration, if applied indiscriminately, can have damaging side effects as well. Bell's ultimatum raises the specter of tokenism in its purest form. Is the hiring of one Black woman proof of a true commitment to faculty diversity? And if Harvard does hire a Black woman to assuage Bell, will she only be known as The Black Woman on The Faculty? Will her role as a scholar be undermined by suspicion about why she was hired...