Harvard Medical gets a B-minus in racial equality: Advocacy group

‘Racial Justice’ rtrt card dings Harvard Med

An advocacy group recently gave one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country an average grade regarding the school’s work in fostering racial equality.

White Coats for Black Lives, a group which bills itself as “a medical student-run organization born out of the National White Coat Die-In” that seeks to “safeguard the lives and well-being of our patients through the elimination of racism,” gave a B-minus grade to Harvard Medical School, in part because “the school does not make data publicly available,” according to The Harvard Crimson.

The group also cited the presence of an academic society named after Oliver Wendall Holmes, who the group claims “led the faculty in expelling” several mid-19th-centuy Harvard Medical School black students, The Crimson reports.

In the group’s inaugural report card, Harvard is also criticized for the fact that its anti-racism workshops are “not comprehensive or are not attended by all faculty and students.”

The group also criticized the fact that there is “no evidence that [the campus police force has] sought to address racism in policing.”

From The Crimson:

Johns Hopkins received a C+, and three schools—the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University, and Yale—received Cs.

“Racism is a powerful force in American medicine. This is apparent in population-level health outcomes,” reads a press release announcing the report card.

“Medical schools and their affiliated hospitals receive massive amounts of public funding, provide care to millions of patients, and are often the largest employers in their regions. The Racial Justice Report Card seeks to encourage these powerful institutions to play an active role in fighting racism in medicine,” the press release continues.

Joan Y. Reede, the Medical School dean for diversity and community partnership, said she thinks the report card did not take all factors into account in an interview Wednesday.

“When you try to capture the nuances across all medical schools in short clips, you lose that,” she said.

The lowest grades on the report card list were Cs, awarded to the University of Pennsylvania’s Pereleman School of Medicine, the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Jefferson, and the Yale School of Medicine.

Read The Crimson‘s report here.

MORE: Students of color accuse Stanford Law School of being steeped in racism

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