Diagnosing A Dilemma

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 22, 1999 by Ronald Roach

The anti-affirmative action climate appears to have infected the Association of American Medical College's Project 3000 by 2000

For many higher education administrators, the steamy days of summer constitute a season for rest and renewal. For Rubens J. Pamies, M.D., associate dean of student affairs at Case Western Reserve University medical school, they're some of the busiest days in the year.

Pamies spends much of his summer preparing 125 Black and Hispanic undergraduates for the Medical College Admissions Test. As director of one of the eight Minority Medical Education Program (MMEP) sites around the country, he credits this program with helping Case Western to become a leader among traditionally White medical schools, in terms of enrolling Black and Latino students over the past four years.

"[Black] students' want to come here because they've been exposed to our program," Pamies says, citing that Blacks represent 16 percent of Case Western's medical students. "They've gotten to know us."

"I had a wonderful experience here when I first went to the MMEP," says Semhal Abbay, an Ethiopian-born African American woman who participated in the program during the summer of 1997. She signed on earlier this year to work as a resident advisor at Case Western's MMEP. "The environment here is very supportive of minority students." Later this summer, Abbay, a graduate of the University of Michigan, will enroll at Case Western medical school as a first-year student.

The MMEP is just one of a number of programs undertaken by institutions affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges in the past decade as part of an aggressive affirmative action effort to boost the numbers of Black, Latino, and Native Americans entering the nation's 125 medical colleges.

The effort initially focused on building the medical school pipeline, but has since grown to include a variety of math, science and health education pipeline programs. While they experienced promising early successes, recent years have been marked by a disturbing downturn.

Many observers blame this recent phenomenon on the nation's growing anti-affirmative action climate which they say is thwarting efforts to grow the medical school applicant pool of Blacks, Hispanics, and

Native Americans. Complicating matters even further has been the tragic death of Herbert Nickens, M.D., who served as vice-president of community and minority programs at AAMC.

During a tenure that spanned 11 years, Nickens helped steer the association's most ambitious campaign ever to diversify the medical profession.

"The challenges are more difficult than they've ever been," says Reed V. Tuckson, M.D., senior vice-president of the American Medical Association and former president of the Charles F. Drew University School of Medicine and Science.

AAMC BRINGS ON NICKENS

The legacy of racial discrimination among the nation's medical schools dates back to the 1800. By 1964, only 2.2 percent of the 32,000 students in American medical students were Blacks. Howard University and Meharry Medical College, the nation's only Black medical schools at that time, enrolled two-thirds of all Black medical students

The AAMC's organized efforts to foster diversity within the medical profession began in 1969, when it urged medical schools to open their doors to underrepresented minorities, especially African Americans and Mexican Americans. Despite modest gains between 1969 and 1974, the numbers of underrepresented minorities enrolling in the nation's medical schools remained stagnant until AAMC hired Nickens in 1989. The seasoned African American physician and former government official was charged with leading AAMC's community and minority affairs program.

With Nickens as the architect, the AAMC began pursuing Project 3000 x 2000, a program that would seek to increase the number of underrepresented minorities to 3,000 entering by the year 2000. The program's strategy relied heavily on the AAMC's getting commitments from medical school deans by providing them workshops and extensive research data on minority student populations by state. Aside from the Minority Medical Education Program initiative, Project 3,000 x 2000 initially had no "external funding" going into the medical schools, according to the AAMC.

"It was clearly an ambitious goal. It called for a doubling of underrepresented minorities entering medical school," says Jordan Cohen, M.D., current AAMC president and former dean of the SUNY-Stonybrook medical school.

Nickens helped steer AAMC on an ambitious course that would not only lead to a 36.3 percent jump in first-year medical school enrollment of underrepresented minorities from 1990 to 1994, but would eventually put medical schools in the lead to increase minority professionals in all health professions.

Even the medical profession, following the lead of AAMC, grew visibly more supportive of affirmative action. The American Medical Association has endorsed AAMC diversity initiatives, and medical professionals joined campaigns to defeat the anti-affirmative action referendum in Washington state.