Progress Through Persistence: A 60 Year History of Yale School of Medicine’s Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion (MORE)
MORE's Precursors
Groups such as the Minority Advisory Council and the Office of Minority Affairs provided MORE with context and precedent of how to work with the YSM administration to promote ethnic and racial diversity. Although the MAC served Yale University at large and the OMA focused much of its effort on medical students rather than faculty, both groups’ goals and findings aligned with MORE’s later work and sentiment. SWIM, the Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine, would later play a catalytic role within MORE's history due to its function of bringing female minority faculty together.
Minority Advisory Council (MAC)
The MAC makes a 1980 Yale Daily News Headline
By the spring of 1979, there were enough faculty of color and frustration about racism across various schools of the university for a group to begin meeting to look comprehensively at minority life at Yale. This group did extensive work reviewing policies, measuring statistics, and contacting students and faculty to understand the climate and workings of Yale pertaining to minorities. The group was officially named the Minority Advisory Council and, chaired by James Comer, included representatives from the Black Student Alliance at Yale, Council of Third World Women, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano De Aztlán, and Asian-American Student Association. [1]
After a few years, the group gave the university leadership specific recommendations and proposals such as how to recruit more applicants and how to support functioning minority programs. The Yale administrators failed to respond to the proposals, leading a senior member of the council, civil rights activist Karen Narasaki, to comment, “As we are meeting and discussing issues, minority students are rapidly losing ground.” [2]
The Office of Minority Affairs makes a 1989 Yale Daily News Headline
Office of Minority Affairs, later Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA)
One decade later in 1989, Dean Rosenberg's “Rekindling the Torch” speech catalyzed a sort of alphabet soup. Two groups, the Office of Minority Affairs (the first OMA) and the Minority Affairs Committee (the second MAC) were established. The Office of Minority Affairs operated under the directorship of Maxine Whitehead with the goals of recruiting more minority students and faculty and providing support to those already at YSM. [2] Unfortunately, Asian and Latine students felt disconnected from the OMA, and Black students felt the office was ineffective. [3] They turned to the MAC as a forum for their frustrations and in 1995, it was announced that Forrester Lee would be stepping up as Assistant Dean of Multicultural Affairs and overhauling the office. Lee’s OMA was renamed the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and he would go on to direct this for 30+ years.
Flyer for Women's Support Groups, part of an initiative of the Office for Women in Medicine in the 1980s
Status of Women in Medicine (SWIM)
Operating in parallel to the MACs and OMAs were various groups for Women in Medicine. In 1979, via a charter from Dean Robert Berliner to improve gender equity, these combined to officially form the Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine (SWIM). SWIM was primarily composed of white women, but some racially and ethnically underrepresented women joined as well. Contending with the double burden of compounding minority identities, they faced different challenges that were not wholly addressed by SWIM's agenda and became less active in the group.
Endnotes:
[1] Lisa Nadine Slade, “Council Discusses Racism Minority Problems at Yale,” Yale Daily News, February 1, 1980. ; Linda Schupack, “Minority Students Request Greater Influence for MAC,” Yale Daily News, February 13, 1980.
[2] Sutton Keany, “School of Medicine Opens Ethnic Office," Yale Daily News, February 24, 1989.
[3] Forrester Lee, "Report on Minority Affairs Committee Meeting," October 19, 1995.
[4] Margaret Bia, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, May 27, 2022.