Controversy Over Minority Student Assessments

Yeah, so what happened was Academic Medicine published an article, a pretty interesting

and important article, that examined how minority students were assessed by a number of internal

medicine residency programs over a few-year period, and really top-notch programs,

Harvard programs, University of Virginia, Emory, one in the Midwest. And what they found was

that the minority students as a group were performing less well in the eyes of the faculty.

They were performing less well on their assessment of their knowledge, of their database,

of their professionalism, and of their preparation for practice. This is before all these

entrustable performance assessments were being put together and all. This was early on, but that was

the way the faculty was assessing students. So I read this article, and what got me about the

article was that the conclusion of the article, which was published in Academic Medicine, was

that either the faculty were racist, that the assessment tool was somehow racist,

or the school was not welcoming enough to minority students. And I read this,

and the tweet I put out was, I said, here's the article, here's the link. They offer three

explanations. Could it be they weren't so good at being residents? That's what I wrote, which

seemed to me a logical conclusion, one of the possible conclusions. They may have been right

in their three assumptions, but at least raised the possibility that there really was a performance

problem, that all these faculty in these multiple institutions had identified. And that's actually

when Penn really went crazy, when my faculty friends denounced me, the people I worked with

denounced me. I had one woman who was the administrator of the medical school then,

and she and I were very close. We were great friends. She denounced me. I think they all had

to do it in order to keep their jobs. And again, the reason was because...

these young activists on social media were saying,

you know, this pen is horrendous, nobody should go there, it's terrible.

So they had to put up a big performance of getting rid of me, if you will,

at least virtually.

And that was the thing that precipitated, I think, the Stat News article

and more than anything else,

along with the articles in the Wall Street Journal.

And finally, it all came to an end.

And the firing from up to date occurred when I was visiting in Paris.

So it was quite a dramatic thing because it was six hours out of sync

and they were on the phone with me and I was going to resign.

And then I said, this is ridiculous.

Why should I resign? I didn't do anything wrong.

I just quoted an article and made a comment about it.

It was flippant and I shouldn't have done it that way.

I haven't written tweets like that since.

But that was the story about the tweet.