Harvard Medical School just received its first ever “racial justice report card,” receiving a score of B-. The unconventional assessment was done by a group called “White Coats for Black Lives.”
The group clarifies that the report card should be utilized as a resource for “justice-oriented medical students,” and aims to engender an “anti-racist environment” at Harvard, and presumably other prominent medical schools across the nation as well.
The organization evaluated racial justice at Harvard Medical School using 15 different metrics, largely correlating around issues regarding underrepresented minorities on campus.
The group states that certain Harvard Medical School students “with troubling racist histories are publicly celebrated” and that further focus on “public artworks and monuments” is needed. They also dinged the medical school because there isn’t any “publicly available information about grade disparities at Harvard.”
Other institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University, and Yale each received C’s on their racial justice evaluations.
“Many students of color, LGBTQ students, women, and members of other marginalized groups, experience incidents of bigotry, harassment, or discrimination in the course of their medical school careers,” the group stated.
“In order to ensure a safe learning environment for all students, medical schools must have well-described procedures for reporting such incidents to trusted members of the administration, ideally individuals who share the student’s relevant identity (e.g. a URM faculty member should be available to receive reports of racism).”
According to Harvard Medical School’s website, 20 percent of its student body is made up of underrepresented groups in medicine. These demographics include African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, as well as Mexican Americans.
“We acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of our history and actively promote social justice, challenge discrimination and address disparities and inequities,” the school expresses in their Diversity Statement.
White Coats for Black Lives also assessed the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The Racial Justice Coalition At HMS did not return a request for comment.
