CHM Celebration Luncheon 2001

Donald Williams, MD, Wanda Lipscomb, PhD., Vence Bonham, MD, Christine Shafer, PhD. and Kenya Sekoni, MD, were among the faculty and alumni members at the CHM Celebration Luncheon 2001, on Saturday April 28.

With about 30 attendants seated in a rectangular formation and every person nicely identified, the setting made for an exciting interaction. Words of exhortation and advice flowed from all corners. Other personal and career experiences were also shared from faculty and students alike.

Lipscomb, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs and Director, Center of Excellence for Minority Medical Education and Health, traced the unique history of the CHM noting that it was a different kind of place to which the hallways attest. "When you walk the halls," she said, "you get a sense of how very early in the history of the college, the CHM opened its doors to more diverse student body than the rest of the medical schools in the country would do."

She stressed that from a historical standpoint, it is very important to recognize that this was a different kind of commitment at the institution.

"And you see it in a lot of levels, for example, we were the first medical school to have over 50 percent who are women. Every body thought it was a fluke. But in the last decade we have been able to sustain it. To me, that is just a snippet of what we have been as a college."

The MSU CHM students are selected from varied backgrounds and life experiences. Women comprise at least half the class and approximately 20% of matriculated students are from underrepresented minority groups. The mean age of the entering class is 26.5 years, with ages ranging from 21 to 40 years or more.

Donald Williams, MD	Wanda Lipscomb, PhD.

Turning to the subject of diversity, Lipscomb said that the same is true when you look at groups that have been historically underrepresented in medicine. Such groups as, African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. "The percentage have sort of changed from year to year. But for the most part, in my opinion, we have not fallen below 15 percent. And 15 percent of 100 is 15 persons. So we are not like big numbers. Wayne State University for example, has a 258-person entry requirement. So they don't match us per percentage but they beat us in absolute numbers because they have more seats to fill."

And for those students who would be joining CHM as first year students in the fall, having that perspective, she said, is very important. "First of all, it tells you that we have a commitment to see you receive your MD degree. We are not successful at this until you receive your MD. The other thing that is important for you to recognize, is that there is probably no experiences that you are going to have that someone didn't have ahead of you. So there is a lot of experiences of others that you can learn from if you choose to open yourself up to learn.

"We have a lot of unique opportunity here in the college to do some things differently. We have a richness that is very, very unique in medical education. A lot of work is done in the college because of the diversity of our students."

As if the emphasize the obvious, Lipscomb declared that, "The medical school is hard. The quantity and the level of difficulty which you have to master, is hard. And as a non-physician I want it to be hard so when I'm rolled into the ER, I want you to be very knowledgeable. That is why the medical education is very different profession."

To drive home her point, she compared the demands of a medical degree to that of being trained as a Ph.D. "In medicine you are not only supposed to think profoundly, in addition you have to develop interpersonal skills to work with patients, work with other health care providers, the system, and you have to build on so many fundamental disciplines of knowledge to be able to practice as a physician."

Lipscomb dwelt on the mindset of the college to recognize that the students walking into the door have the potential to become great physicians. "So the faculty at the college have worked very deliberately to develop a curriculum which we are very proud of. It's not perfect, and there is no perfect curriculum. But we try to expose our students to a broad range of not only the basic sciences but, the behavioral and social sciences. We hope that we help our students learn to interact with patients, so that they develop a comfort level because of the reality that if you don't connect with patients you would not change the health status of anyone."

In essence, she said, the college has tried to be very holistic in its training of students. "The fact that we have has lent itself to be an institution that allows us to look different than others. So when you begin to reflect on the graduate lists on the halls - the Radiology Building, the Life Sciences Building, etc., you would realize that it cannot be a fluke that year-in year-out we have students who come in, and year-in year-out we have students who graduate, and year-in year-out we get these wonderful accolades of our students who have worked in their residency training programs."

Lipscomb concluded that there are too much in "our foundation to suggest that it was an accident that have happened of any one individual or any one incident. I think it is very much indicative of who we are. We think as a college as having a family connection. As a family we allow ourselves to give loving comments as well as tough advice. That happens in our medical school. We have student who have learned from stumbling and have had the confidence to share it with other students. That doesn't happen in a lot of places. And so the college is certainly unique and different than what you would find in other places."

Following her was Williams, a CHM professor of psychiatry. Coming from a humble background like many of the people in the audience, Williams informed that "Like many of you, I was the first from my immediate family to graduate both from college and from medical school. So I can remember what kind of feeling that I had. And also very importantly, what role I served for my cousins and others who followed me because they saw that it was possible and they knew me personally, and if I could do it, certainly they could. And so I was the first but not the last."

Williams reminisced one of his childhood memories of the "Most revered persons growing up was my family doctor who was an African American. In those days (1930s and 1940s), when he was visiting, my mother will clean out the house and wash me up, and make me wear clean cloth, with no holes, for this honored man to come and treat me. And I think for us both now and in the future, you have responsibilities to your patients, your family and your communities. A major part of why we are here is based on the support of our people who see us as one of their leaders and that is something we must always keep in mind and remember."

On a lighter note, Williams added more in the list of his first scores. First he noted that he was the first African American chair of the department to be a tenured professor in the medical school. Then he said that he would turn 65 next October at which time he would be eligible to apply for social security, and as a result of one of the unusual events of his life having become a father at 50, "I'm probably going to be the first tenured professor to use his social security check to pay for his daughter's tuition to high school."

But on a serious note he reminded everyone about the touchy issue of affirmative action at different institutions of learning.

Kenya Sekoni, MD	Vence Bonham, MD

"There is a strong feeling that some of us are not supposed to be here. You have heard all about how affirmative action has been under attack, for example at the UM recently. And indeed, while medicine sees itself as a science-based profession, medicine is also very importantly shaped by social forces. While we may be very learned about how the pancreas works or what have you, we are no more knowledgeable than the average person about race issues, etc. And so you are going to be going into situations at times, where you are going to feel uncomfortable or be made to feel uncomfortable, and so on and so forth."

He exhorts further, "You are not here just to learn things. You are here also to share and help shape the profession into a more humane profession by your being here and by having the values and knowledge from your background and bringing that into medicine. Medicine can sometimes be very conservative, it could be really very inhumane especially when it treats people who are poor or minority. So I hope that no matter what the outcome is that you would think that you belong here, and that you are doing us a favor. You are doing medicine a favor because you are bringing values and knowledge that we otherwise would not have."

Reinforcing Lipscomb's earlier remark about bonding with friends and families, Williams concluded that stand alones don't survive. "You didn't get here by yourself. You got here through the support of relatives, friends, and others. This is what you need to establish here - the extended family, the support system. It may not be all that we would like it to be, but we want to strongly urge you to seek it out and turn to people who want to be of help and support. Because we know you need to be here, we need you here and our people need you here."