Less than five years ago, professor Keith Jones received an award from the Chancellor’s office for his “years of dedicated service on behalf of Boston’s vulnerable and marginalized communities” and “landmark role in contributing to building a university that lives up to its mission.” Now, he is being terminated from his position in the Africana studies department.
Jones received a letter May 30, 2025 informing him that his contract would not be renewed after spring 2026, making him the first faculty member in the past five years to be denied continuing appointment, according to the Faculty Staff Union. The termination letter cited “a reduced need for non-tenure-track faculty in Africana Studies as a result of the recent addition of tenure-track faculty positions in the department; the comparatively lower enrollment of majors and minors in Africana Studies relative to other comparable CLA programs, and; the related broader imperative to responsibly steward CLA’s resources and funding.” It was reportedly “not a reflection of the work” Jones had “performed within [the] department and for the University.”
A complaint filed in November 2025 with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the second Jones has filed in recent years, alleges that the university refuses to reinstate him “because he has opposed the discriminatory actions taken by the Administration against himself and colleagues of the remaining faculty in the Africana Studies Department” — namely, unfair disciplinary action against professors within the department, the handling of three searches for tenure-track faculty in the Africana studies department, and hostile relations with university administrators.
“There’s been a series of extremely unfortunate retaliatory acts that have required me to file multiple grievances,” Jones said. “And this is not anything that I would have ever thought would have been the pathway forward in the midst of all the work that we were doing.”
Provost Joseph Berger and Dean of CLA Pratima Prasad both declined to comment on the decision. Director of Communications DeWayne Lehman declined to comment on behalf of the university.
Similar filings with the Department of Labor Relations claim that Jones, alongside professors Anthony Van Der Meer and Jemadari Kamara, were unfairly targeted for protected union activities, disciplined and passed over for promotions for seemingly little reason, and subjected to a “pattern of mistreatment and abuse.”
The first of these complaints, filed in December 2023, accused the university of unfairly disciplining Van Der Meer and Kamara. Van Der Meer was reprimanded for traveling to Cuba, allegedly without sufficiently notifying the university, and Kamara for not playing a video of Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco before an event. According to the complaint, the administration “provided trivial and insubstantial reasons for the disciplinary action” and issued discipline at the same time both professors began to speak out against what they believed to be discrimination by the university.
“There was no real accountability reflected by the administration to the campus community or the broader community,” Kamara said. “The department has attempted to use these internal channels, and the lack of responsiveness is what really required us to go external.”
Then, Jones filed his first MCAD complaint in March 2024, claiming the university retaliated against him for speaking out against the discipline of his colleagues. Another complaint was filed with the DLR in November 2025, as well as a second MCAD complaint. Both alleged continued discrimination by the university.
Jones said that he, Van Der Meer and Kamara hoped to “reconcile things with the administration” without pursuing legal action and that “prior to filing the MCAD… our private lawyer sent out at least two or three letters to the administration inviting them to have a conversation with us so we could begin mediating what was clearly a conflict.” Those efforts, according to him, “were rebuffed.”
Many of the discrimination claims stem from two tenure-track positions which the department had open throughout 2020. Late that year, the College of Liberal Arts cancelled a search for candidates to fill these positions, then reopened the search October 2021 without consulting the department or its then-chair, Dr. Kabibi Mack-Shelton. After Jones and Van Der Meer were labeled as finalists in the faculty search, it was again cancelled in March 2022. Jones was then demoted by Berger and the incoming dean of CLA, Tyson King-Meadows, in June 2022.
“The searches were canceled to allow the university to ensure that rigorous best practices were utilized and to better assess the long-term needs of the Africana Studies Department and the Trotter Institute,” the university wrote in an FAQ page. “This assessment brought a better understanding of the nuances of their unique and rich histories and provided a foundation for making thoughtful plans for their futures.”
Another search for tenure-track faculty was launched in May 2023, resulting in the hiring of three new faculty members and the instating of Bayyinah Jeffries as department chair. Jones was once again a finalist for tenure-track, but he was not selected for the position. After assuming the position for the fall 2024 semester, Jeffries stepped down just before the spring 2025 semester began. Jeffries could not be reached for comment.
“The whole restructuring of the Africana studies department is retaliatory action,” Van Der Meer said of the searches. “The university wants to maintain control versus engaging in shared governance with all the faculty members. You have the university dysfunction or negligence, and they’re putting that on the department. They want to put it on us.”
After the searches were cancelled, the university announced that a law firm, Prince, Lobel & Tye LLP., would investigate the Africana studies department. The firm found that “the [Africana studies] Department’s problems are largely of its own making and… without a substantial change in culture and leadership, are likely to persist.”
Shortly after they released their summary to the university in August 2022, Kamara was demoted from his position as department chair.
“There was a brief summary done,” Kamara said, “but no one has ever seen the report. There was a nearly unanimous vote of the CLA senate and faculty council that… the report be fully disclosed to the community so that there could be a clear assessment of what was being stated, what allegations were, and what was the basis for policy recommendations coming from the university. And they have refused.”
In February 2026, the university again hired Prince, Lobel, & Tye LLP to perform a second investigation into the department.
“The administration says that they’re firing Professor Jones because of issues of fiscal management and responsibility…but that same semester, they pay $250,000 to a consultant,” Kamara said, citing the university’s report on the cost of the investigation. “They reduce the non-[tenure] track faculty by 30% in our department. These are the kinds of contradictions that have gone on.”
In response to these demotions and other issues with the university’s treatment of Africana studies, Mack-Shelton retired in protest in December 2022. “If I were to remain at UMass Boston, I, too, would be complicit and culpable in this ongoing unfairness, disrespect, humiliation, elitism, racist, and unshared autocratic-style of governance that I have witnessed since January 2020 from UMB’s upper administration,” he stated. Mack-Shelton had left the department in May 2021 to serve as the chair of the history department.
Jones was hired as a lecturer in 2016, then promoted to an assistant visiting professor in 2019 after stepping in for an ill colleague the previous semester. His contract with the university was renewed in 2020, the same year that the Africana studies department’s advocacy efforts majorly increased in response to the killing of George Floyd. According to the MCAD complaint, Jones, alongside Van Der Meer and colleagues, were the first to provide “a framework for the institution’s direction in becoming ‘a leading anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution.’”
Jones and Van Der Meer were responsible for the Undoing Racism Assembly, which, according to the complaint, “called for curricular interventions, campus-wide anti-racist training, and greater equity in terms of promotion, retention, and pay for faculty of color.” They also directed the Sankofa Conversation Series on Structural Racism with Kamara in 2020 and a campaigned for a series of Restorative Justice demands.
“The Africana studies department is a very important department, not just for Black students,” Van Der Meer said. “The work that we have done was trying to get the university to shift its culture to be truly inclusive and…address the question of not just anti-Black racism, but whiteness and how it’s dealt with institutionally.”
In June of that year, Jones received a letter from Joseph Berger, then the dean of the College of Education before his promotion to provost that fall. The letter thanked Jones for his service and dedication to “these very real ideals that must define who we are and what we do.” Jones and Van Der Meer jointly received the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Service in December 2021, but the complaint alleges they did not receive a call from Chancellor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco like the other award recipients did — from Jones’ perspective, the start of a long decline into poor relations between them and the university.
The Faculty Staff Union created a petition in conjunction with the Massachusetts Teachers Association to demand that Berger reinstate Jones. The petition reads, “Professor Jones’s unjust termination is a direct result of both his union activity, which has sought to hold the administration accountable to its urban mission, and his efforts to root our campus culture in anti-racist pedagogies and a restorative justice framework. His termination is not simply about a single UMB community member — it represents an enormous loss for the university, our students, the Africana Studies Department, and our neighboring communities.”
“This is larger than me,” Jones said. “When they come for me, they come for the students. They come for this knowledge project which is Black studies… a knowledge project which is critical of the way in which this society has continually organized itself for centuries. And the question is, when are we going to take a stand and say, ‘another world is possible?’”
Correction: A previous version of this article, in one instance, referred to professor Jemadari Kamara using incorrect pronouns. Kamara uses he/him pronouns.
