The School of Medicine's quest to boost all forms diversity stems from two distinct, yet related, imperatives, Dean Lloyd B. Minor, MD, told the 100-or-so students and faculty members at the second Town Hall on Diversity last evening.
First, it's part of the school's mission, Minor said. "We have an obligation, a responsibility to ensuring we're promoting diversity in our society," Minor said. "We do that through the students we admit, the faculty we hire, to the way we speak."
But of equal importance: Without diversity, Stanford Medicine just wouldn't be Stanford Medicine, Minor said.
"Imagine what we would be like if we had a group of monolithically thinking people," he said. From a melting pot of backgrounds and opinions and personalities comes innovation, challenges and excellence.
To ensure this melting pot, Stanford Medicine must stand strong against a society that is perhaps even regressing in its views on race and bias, said sociologist Doug McAdam, PhD, one of two panelists who fielded questions from the audience and moderators Malcolm Pyles, president of Student University Minority Medical Alliance, and Julie Huang, president Biomedical Association for the Interest of Minority Students.
Everyone who hopes to make a change must leave their comfort zone, McAdam said. "These are not normal times," McAdam told the audience. "I think they call for us to step outside our [normal] roles."
That means everyone must consider how they support -- even through unconscious biases -- the current system and take steps to counter it, he said.
Paula Moya, PhD, an associate professor of English, emphasized that the role of the university is different from the job of a budding researchers or doctor.
"The university has the obligation to make these topics of conversation," she said. "Students have the responsibility to learn about history and how what you do on a daily basis affects the maintenance of pernicious ideas like race."
Both panelists recently published books on race. McAdam is a co-author of Deeply Divided: Social Movements and Racial Politics in Post-War America, while Moya penned Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century and has another book coming out this year.
Photo by Nemo
