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

The Leaky Pipeline

Though the minority faculty community was quick to grow through the 1990s, the discriminatory treatment of faculty and students of color would be much slower to change. Beyond such attitudes by colleagues and superiors, deeper-rooted systemic issues that prevented minority faculty at YSM from gaining seniority became clearer and came to a head during the first decade of the 2000s. 

Robert Alpern, MD, Dean of Yale School of Medicine 2004-2020

Attitudes 

Robert Alpern, MD, became YSM Dean in 2004, and described the attitudes of many white faculty as “not in my backyard.” Dean Alpern noticed that some faculty advocated for diversity until it came to promotions within their own department, at which time they became markedly less supportive, citing reasons such as an abstract and unfounded fear of lowering academic excellence to achieve diversity. He suggests that these attitudes stem from a lack of acknowledgment of the racial history of the United States, of the education system, and of Yale specifically. 

Cindy Crusto, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Dean for Gender Equity

Promotions: 

The system perpetuated inequalities for faculty of color beginning upon their hire and plaguing them up through tenure. New faculty members who joined YSM were immediately placed onto one of five ladder tracks; this was the institution’s promotional schema. Advancement along a given track required them to meet specific checkpoints, whether those were in research publication, clinician hours, or something else. Yale had no formal procedure to inform its faculty of these checkpoints, or even what type of tasks they were hired to do. Crusto explains that faculty of color tended to receive less guidance and were often slower to climb the ladder than their white counterparts. 

A “Real Emergency”

Yale Daily News headlines on diversity in Yale School of Medicine, 2004

Inginia Genao, MD, Vice Dean of Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

These types of invisible but pernicious issues led to a chain reaction that resulted in terrible retention of young minority faculty members, referred to as the “Leaky Pipeline.” Without mentors to point them in the right direction and remove obstacles from their paths, and without the certainty that their supervisors always had their best interest in mind, new faculty of color became disillusioned after only a handful of years at Yale. “You don’t know it until you’ve lived it,” says MORE founder Dr. Inginia Genao of the realities of work-life at Yale. [3]

Things reached a head in 2006 when six junior minority faculty, five of them women, left YSM after only about one year of working there. It was a demonstration that something in the institution was seriously wrong. Genao said that the departures were a result of the way that underrepresented faculty were sick and tired of being treated, and if it continued without change, YSM would soon lose all its diverse faculty. Désir said the medical school had to treat the incident like a “real emergency.” [4]

Duly alarmed, a handful of junior female minority faculty who knew each other through SWIM began meeting, prominent among them Lisa Walke of Geriatrics. Walke suggested creating a Minority Faculty “Interest Group” where members could discuss issues and differential treatment related to their identities. SWIM Leaders Carolyn Mazure and Linda Bockenstedt connected her with Drs. Désir, Lee, Comer, and Griffith. [5] A working group of minority faculty began meeting during their only common free time: lunch. If they were to establish a formal group, what would its goals be and what would faculty engagement look like? Months passed and their initial brainstorming turned into formalized planning to form a committee entitled “MORE,” for the Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion. [6]

Endnotes:

[1] Robert Alpern, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, July 7, 2021.

[2] Cindy Crusto, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, October 9, 2021.

[3] Inginia Genao, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, July 30, 2021.

[4] Gary Désir, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, June 23, 2021.

[5] Linda Bockenstedt, interviewed by Sabrina Mellinghoff, August 3, 2021.

[6] Forrester Lee, "Notes from MORE Interest Meeting," January 27, 2005.