Harvard Med School Takes All the White Guys Off the Wall

Harvard Medical School is deeply ashamed of its own dark past: The prestigious university has had 31 former medical school deans…and all of them have been men. Worse yet, 30 of them were WHITE.

Can you imagine celebrating such a thing in this day and age with a series of portraits lining the halls? What does that say about Harvard’s commitment to diversity? To social justice? To its undying wish to be front and center in the Age of Political Correctness? They might as well fly a Confederate Flag from the top of the Bornstein Family Amphitheater!

So yeah, the hospital’s president, Dr. Betsy Nabel, said that the decision to take the portraits down was not made overnight. Indeed, she has worried for years that the sight of all of those white men (pause for head-shaking and hand-wringing) would “upset women and minorities who are training to become doctors,” as Campus Reform puts it.

“I have watched the faces of individuals as they have come into Bornstein,’’ Nabel told the Boston Globe. “I have watched them look at the walls. I read on their faces ‘Interesting, but I am not represented here.’ That got me thinking maybe it’s time that we think about respecting our past in a different way.”

One wonders if “reading people’s faces” is really within Nabel’s realm of medical expertise, or if she is not, perhaps, projecting just a little.

Harvard Medical School spokeswoman Gina Vild promised that dispersing the wall of whiteness would not be the last diversity effort that students could expect to see at the college. “Change is coming,” she said in an email. “It is vitally important to know that the lack of diversity seen in art at HMS reflects the school’s past, not its present.”

Of course, Harvard has diversity problems that go well beyond the photos on the wall, and they don’t have anything to do with white men. They are being sued by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit representing Asian-Americans who say they have been unfairly passed over for admission due to the school’s affirmative action policies. Harvard doesn’t deny making it harder for Asian-Americans to get into the school; they are simply arguing that they have the right to do so in the name of…you guessed it…diversity.

The blatantly obvious fact is this: You don’t end racial discrimination by doubling down on a different form of racial discrimination. You don’t fight one evil with another. You do everything possible to take racial considerations completely out of the picture and then you let the chips fall where they may. Anything else – while it might sound good in a liberal academic setting – is simply unfair and only leads to lower standards. Once we accept that as our guiding premise, we are essentially giving up on the idea of this being the greatest country on Earth.

Sorry, but we’re not ready to do that.