This article discusses how a Harvard-educated scholar of English and poetry, Dr. M. Lee Pelton puts a prominent face on changes that are underway at Boston's Emerson College. Faced with a public controversy over its limited faculty diversity, Emerson College has responded with a spate of hirings and promotions of minorities, capped by the installation in July of its first African-American resident, Dr. M. Lee Pelton. Though many other higher education institutions have struggled to effect real change in response to institutional bias allegations, Emerson, a private liberal arts college in Boston, broke from that pattern, first by naming an expert panel to conduct an external review and make a public report on its findings. The three-member panel reported in 2010 that stigma and bias had left Emerson's Black faculty in a "caste-like position" that devalued their intellectual work and slowed their advancement. At that point, the college, founded in 1880, had tenured only three Black professors in its history--and two of them had to sue to obtain that status. In less than two years since that critical report, Emerson has granted tenure to two other African-Americans and an Asian-American and hired or promoted a number of other minorities.