Progress Through Persistence: A 60 Year History of Yale School of Medicine’s Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion (MORE)

Dual Speeches

Around the country, momentum from the Civil Rights movement to increase the diversity in academic medicine waned considerably in the late 1970s and 1980s, making for a time of stagnation and frustration. Most residual effort centered the recruitment of minority students to medical schools but neglected their experience at the school, retention to further training stages or hire as faculty. [1] The AAMC collected longitudinal statistics that revealed that Yale's recruitment and retention of faculty of color was especially poor, although the school had a comparatively high rate of Black student enrollment. 1988 became a particular year of reckoning when the steadily decreasing rate of Black medical school applicants reached its lowest point around the country. [2]

To address this moment and call out this concerning trend, dual speeches were given by Yale School of Medicine's Dean Rosenberg and Dr. Forrester Lee at the turn of the 1990s. While Rosenberg's speech was a broad and administrative appeal that leaned on statistics and zoomed out to the national level, Lee took a personal and specific approach that brought out narratives of the Black community at Yale through his own family's story and made concrete suggestions for action. Rosenberg's "what" combined with Lee's "why and how" and helped bring YSM to the notion that promoting diversity was not just an immediate priority but also their own responsibility.

Statistics on Black medical students published by the AAMC in 1994

Rekindling the Torch

To kick off the academic year of 1988-89, Dean Leon E. Rosenberg delivered a speech entitled “America’s Disadvantaged Minorities: Rekindling the Torch,” to the medical school's entire student and faculty body. As clearly and frankly as he could, he established the problem of racial inequality as an urgent one at all levels, from the whole of the United States to academia to Yale School of Medicine, to specific groups such as tenure track faculty. Rosenberg shared dismaying national statistics of different minority groups' educational, economic, and health outcomes as collected and published by the recently formed US Office of Minority Health before honing in on Yale School of Medicine’s own “no more satisfactory" statistics. "What makes these Yale numbers most disheartening is that none of them have changed in the past 6 years." [3]

Dean Rosenberg's 1988 "Rekindling the Torch" Speech, Yale Medical Magazine Cover Page (above) and Excerpt (below)

Minorities at YSM: Are We Competitive?

In January of 1990, Yale School of Medicine held an event to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., and Forrester Lee gave a striking address entitled "Minorities at YSM: Are We Competitive?" In it, he shared candidly about his family's history as well as his own path to obtaining a doctorate at Yale. He offered a concrete plan to increase the number of medical students of color, suggesting Yale take lessons from a plan implemented at University of Wisconsin. The MLK day event continued into a panel discussion held by Professors Griffith and Comer in addition to Lee, and together they answered questions and discussed strategies for working toward racial progress. Overall, the day was an important touchpoint to inspire the Yale medical community about why diversity was such an important goal. [4]

Forrester Lee's 1990 "Minorities at YSM: Are We Competitive?" speech, Yale Medical Magazine Feature (above) and Excerpt (below)

Endnotes:

[1] Ruth Hanft, “Minorities and the Health Professions in the 1980s.” Health Affairs vol. 3, no. 4 (1984): 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.3.4.71. 

[2] Milton Moskowitz, “The Black Medical Schools Remain the Prime Training Ground for Black Doctors.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 5 (1994): 69–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/2962412.

[3] Leon E. Rosenberg, “Rekindling the Torch,” Yale Medicine: Alumni Bulletin of the School of Medicine, 1988, 23–26. 

[4] Forrester Lee, “Minorities: Are We Competitive?” Yale Medicine: Alumni Bulletin of the School of Medicine, 1988, 10–13.