We Demand Action by the Yale School of Medicine
We are a group of medical students demanding that our University and our School of Medicine deploy our considerable academic, political, and financial resources to act against systemic racism, white supremacy, and related systems of oppression—through teaching, research, policy, and activism.
This is a summary of the demands. Please see the full demands and action plan for additional detail.
The recent, publicly documented murders of multiple Black people by the police have laid bare the urgent and mortal threat posed by institutionalized racism and white supremacy to Black lives. Administrators at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and Yale University responded to these events by sending us numerous emails expressing their shock, anger, and fear, and identified these incidents as "reminders of a Yale gone-by." This characterization is objectively untrue: institutionalized racism at Yale is alive and well, and the current administration is complicit in maintaining it.
Ten years ago, Black and brown students and faculty wrote an extensive report demanding immediate curricular reform and creation of a multidisciplinary research center addressing structural determinants of health inequity and injustice. That report, like so many before it, was buried and ignored. Five years later, a group of students called NextYSM stood up at a town hall very similar to this one and delivered a set of demands to Dean Alpern that outlined concrete steps to address systemic racism at YSM. Another detailed report in 2018 formally outlined very similar priorities. It is now 2020. After 10 years of endless meetings and committees, considerable effort from students, faculty, and the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, Community Engagement, and Equity (DICE), little has changed. Our curriculum remains racist. Our faculty is overwhelmingly white. A private police force employed by this University is empowered to terrorize Black and brown students and to use deadly force against the citizens of New Haven, yet is accountable to neither group. And, of course, Yale commands the resources of a small country in a city which struggles to pay for primary education.
Today, we again demand action. We demand a YSM that is anti-racist, a YSM that actively dismantles its own complicity in systemic and structural violence against Black people. We acknowledge that racism does not act within a vacuum, but rather is enmeshed with other systems of oppression that must be dismantled together. Although many of our concerns extend beyond the School of Medicine––to Yale University or to Yale-New Haven Health system (YNHHS)––these bureaucratic entanglements are no excuse for inaction. We expect that our Deans will actively work to ensure fulfillment of these demands across these artificial boundaries, just as they did for the response to COVID-19. The actions we demand are not radical. They are the bare minimum essential steps toward rectifying the inequities and harm perpetuated by this institution. They are not negotiable.
We have 9 core demands, each with a detailed list of actionable items. All unmet items from the original 2015 NextYSM demands are included in these significantly expanded demands.
Our Demands
1. We demand increased support for the wellbeing of underrepresented students in medicine.
This will require expanded funding and personnel for the DICE office to support a wide variety of initiatives, a more accessible advising system, expanded financial aid support, and mental health professionals for underrepresented students.
2. We demand curricular reform that is anti-oppressive and anti-racist.
Implicit bias training is ineffective and inadequate; racism and oppression are drivers of disease and are ubiquitous in healthcare, and nothing short of a comprehensive, anti-oppressive curriculum does justice to students or our patients.
3. We demand the creation and maintenance of a genuinely inclusive environment at the Yale School of Medicine for students, faculty, and staff who are underrepresented in medicine.
Institutional culture change requires changes to systems (rules, procedures, leadership structures) as well as individual behaviors. A process for addressing unacceptable behavior—through replacement of punitive measures with restorative justice and education whenever possible—is essential if people of all identities are to be welcomed and included.
4. We demand increased diversity among the faculty and student body.
Beyond recruitment, Yale must develop and retain a diverse faculty; this includes compensating faculty and students for the vast, racialized equity labor that currently falls overwhelmingly to those who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. This burden is especially heavy on women of color.
5. We demand expanded financial support and recognition for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), health disparities research, and anti-oppression scholarship as well as implementation of anti-racist practices in research across the medical school.
Through a multidisciplinary research center, Yale will guide national policy and develop gold standard institutional practices to invest in diversity, respond to sexual harassment and assault, promote anti-oppressive education, and exist without police. Yale will guard against racist and oppressive research through it’s Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).
6. We demand that Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, and Yale New Haven Health System end all ties with and practices involving police forces.
In the United States, police historically enforced the enslavement, segregation, and terrorism of Black and brown people. Decades of reform have resulted only in the increased incarceration of these folks and diversion of community and mental health resources to carceral spaces. The Yale Police Department must be abolished and YSM must commit to fighting police violence and mass incarceration as a public health crisis.
7. We demand Yale and Yale New Haven Health System prioritize the protection of marginalized patients in clinical care.
Yale Medicine and YNHHS must expand services and protect the rights of marginalized patient populations including: patients who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color; patients without formal immigration status; patients who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+); patients who are intersex or with differences of sexual development (DSD); and patients who are uninsured and underinsured.
8. We demand Yale School of Medicine, Yale New Haven Health System, and Yale University use their financial and political capital to directly benefit people from oppressed groups and make financial reparations to Black and Indigenous communities and the people of New Haven.
Yale must increase the amount of money it invests in the New Haven community, including increased voluntary payments to the city. It must divest from perpetrators of structural violence such as private prisons, and change its unethical investment policies that personally enrich the members of the board of trustees while robbing the people of this city of basic necessities. Yale must reckon with its historical and ongoing legacy of profiting from slavery and colonization and pay reparations to the communities that it has exploited and continues to exploit.
9. We demand full institutional accountability, transparency, and follow-through with these demands.
The goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion should be enshrined in the YSM Mission Statement. The administration must publish a strategic plan with quantitative goals, benchmarks, and a timeline for implementing these demands, including annual reporting and re-assessment of progress.
These are our demands. A detailed version with explicit action items and detailed references is available here. We expect a written response from the Office of the Dean expressing intent to fulfill these demands by Wednesday, July 1st, sent to the entire School of Medicine. Upon intent to fulfill, we expect a written plan to implement these demands be delivered to the Committee for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (CDISJ), the ongoing and active inclusion of students in all aspects of implementation, as well as transparent updates to the entire medical school on the status of these demands on, at minimum, a bi-monthly basis.
In its mission statement, YSM claims that it will educate us to become leaders who will “advance the practice of medicine” and “alleviate suffering caused by illness and disease.” But much of the illness and disease that plagues our society, both domestically and globally, is directly linked to European colonization, chattel slavery, and cisheteropatriarchal oppression. The medical community has done significant harm in perpetuating these violent systems, both through inaction and willful participation. If YSM truly stands by its mission, it needs to create the intellectual, social, and institutional environment to foster diverse leadership and strong communities to meet the complex challenges facing both the field of medicine and humanity as a whole.