Prescription for death?
The obsession with “diversity” in American higher education has spread like an epidemic, beginning in the humanities and social sciences and moving on to most undergraduate education and grad schools. There have been a few pockets of resistance like mathematics and the physical sciences where answers are right or wrong and getting them wrong has serious consequences.
Medicine is a field where wrong answers can have really, really serious consequences so you’d think that medical schools would shun the diversity obsession and focus entirely on individual competence. Unfortunately, at least one medical school, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has succumbed and now has a three-person http://www.med.cornell.edu/diversity/.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a softball piece on this http://chronicle.com/article/Longtime-Advocate-for-Women/49326/
What is the justification for this office, which undoubtedly uses several hundred thousand dollars of tuition money annually? According to Dr. Debra Leonard, the Chief Diversity Officer, it is to “change the Weill Cornell environment to a diverse and inclusive community, so all people feel welcomed, accepted, and part of the team.”
A good follow-up question would have been, “Is there any evidence that the faculty of Weill Cornell as currently constituted makes some people feel that they are not welcomed, accepted, or part of the team?” Or, “How many complaints have been issued against faculty members for improper treatment of students, patients, or other employees of the school?”
Apparently, no such skeptical questions were asked. You have to wonder, though, how often it happens that medical professionals in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities make people feel unwelcome simply because they’re from a different background.
The main rationale Dr. Leonard gives for her office is that American medical schools need to “model diversity” but aren’t doing a good enough job of that because black and Hispanic professors comprise only three and four percent respectively of the faculties at American medical schools, less than the percentages of those groups in the general population.
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2271