A federal agency has told an African-American MIT stem cell researcher, who last year went on a 12-day hunger strike in to protest his tenure denial, that his claim of racial discrimination was too little, too late.

According to MIT's school paper, The Tech, The US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) rejected James Sherley's claim that the university refused him tenure based on his ethnicity, telling Sherley that the charges lacked merit and that he filed them too late. Sherley filed the discrimination claim with the commission on September 11, 2007, more than 300 days after being denied tenure on January 2, 2005. Federal law mandates that such claims must be filed within 300 days of the incident at issue. Sherley contended that the incident that did him the most harm was being fired from MIT on June 30, 2007, and that his claim was thus within the 300 day window.

The commission also wrote in a letter to Sherley that even if he had filed the claim on time, that MIT's decision to deny him tenure was warranted and non-discriminatory.

According to The Tech, Sherley has asked Massachusetts politicians to investigate the EEOC's refusal to consider his case.

To read more correspondence between the commission and Sherley, which he provided to The Tech, click here.

Last June, after Sherley was fired from MIT, another African-American researcher at MIT, Frank Douglas, resigned for what he called the "insidious nature of discrimination in a university context." To read Douglas' full explanation of why he resigned, which he wrote for The Scientist last July, click here.

Hat tip to The Chronicle of Higher Education's News blog.