[rfp1234]

Interesting. Why did he leave Harvard ( I thought he was tenured)?

[SumProVita]

“Why did he leave Harvard ( I thought he was tenured)?”

“In 1980 Professor Bell left Harvard to become the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned from that position in 1985, ostensibly as an act of protest against the fact that the school had failed to grant tenure to an Asian female professor. A number of Professor Bell’s colleagues at Oregon, however, viewed this as a contrived, face-saving pretext for leaving a position from which he was about to be fired. They believed that Bell, who had largely become an “absentee dean” known for spending more time on the lecture circuit than at Oregon, was slated for imminent termination.”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2175

[philman_36]

@Derrick A. Bell, Jr. National VisionaryIn 1971, Bell became the first tenured professor at Harvard of African-American descent, but left the position in 1992, after a two-year leave of absence that he took to protest the school's lack of African-American women in the faculty. Essentially, he had himself fired for purposely violating a rule limiting the amount of faculty leave time.

Watch the video and then read that snippet again.

[SumProVita]

More:

“Derrick Bell, the first tenured African-American professor of law at Harvard, was probably more Old Left than New Left, having worked on school desegregation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. When one of the faculty members associated with critical legal studies was denied tenure, Bell staged a sit-in, causing a leading member of the faculty (and later dean), Robert C. Clark, to tell him, “This is a university, not a lunch counter in the Deep South.” Bell ultimately left Harvard.”

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Postradical-Legal/65623