UMass Medical to invite freshmen (with 10% minority or low-income set-aside)

Boston Globe ^ | January 25, 2010 | Tracy Jan

[reaganaut1]

WORCESTER - The University of Massachusetts Medical School, seeking to bolster the number of minority physicians in Massachusetts, plans to offer high school seniors the rare opportunity to gain admission to college and medical school at the same time.

Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state’s only public medical school will partner with UMass campuses in Boston, Amherst, Lowell, and Dartmouth to create a joint baccalaureate-MD program that would ensure admission for aspiring doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

UMass officials say they hope the Medical Scholars Program - among a few of its kind in the country - will begin enrolling students in fall 2011. It is expected to boost the prestige of the state university system, providing an incentive for high-achieving students to attend a state university instead of a more prestigious private college.

“This helps other UMass campuses to attract more highly qualified students and helps us to entice those very talented individuals to stay in the state and practice medicine here,’’ said Dr. Terence Flotte, dean of UMass Medical School.

The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-year class for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.

Students of any ethnic background from low-income families or those among the first in their families to attend college would also qualify.

“The bulk of the class would remain open to free competition,’’ said Flotte, adding that there is no cap on the number of students accepted from any ethnic group or undergraduate school. “If you don’t fit into the pathway program, you will still receive a fair shot.’’

[reaganaut1]

Racial quotas are illegal, and income-based quotas are not a good idea. Admit the students most likely to be good doctors.

[dumpthelibs]

You mean you want to attract underrepresented groups like people who can’t name their fathers, have siblings that are crack dealers or are members of Latina gangs? By all means go for it, but if (LOL) they graduate, put their sorry a**es in their home neighborhoods, that way we get population control simultaneous with incompetent medical care. Win-Win!

[kabar]

Maybe we should have the same system for the NBA and NFL.

[Mobties]

A condition of their graduation should be that the first 500 surguries performed by each graduate be performed on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts and the legislators of the Commonwealth who voted for this program.

My guess is these “important guys” wouldn’t let their laborador retreiver be operated on by affirmative action “doctors”.

[Pearls Before Swine]

This is just great, especially if it gets coupled with institutional or government appointed physicians. /s

[Nepeta]

Absolutely witless.

Medical school admissions should not be handled like the casting of extras in a movie crowd scene.

[oldvike]

Wow! This is pretty dang frightening and a DAMN good reason not to ever, ever let a minority doctor work on you. I’m sure some of them will be very good, but why take the chance.

[acoulterfan]

“Medical school admissions should not be handled like the casting of extras in a movie crowd scene.”

Bravo for that analogy!

[SamuraiScot]

The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-year class for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.

Thanks for naming all those groups that people will now be avoiding when looking for a doc in Mass. Most unfair to the qualified ones, who will now skedaddle out of state to avoid being suspected of incompetence.

And by the way, since places like Harvard and Yale already can't fill their quotas of these "under-privileged" groups with qualified applicants, and are forced to recruit and subsidize anyone from such groups who can fog a glass, just who does UMass think will be left to apply to to UMass? Looks like they'll be matriculating some doozies.

[sergeantdave]

Oh, goodie! Boyz-in-da-hood who can’t hold a glock straight. Imagine what they can do with a set of scalpels and a defibrillator.

[DecentAmerican]

aargh.....affirmative action still rears its ugly head yet again!!!!

So schools still want to reward placements on RACE as opposed to MERIT. Meanwhile, in many countries in Asia, students work their butts off to COMPETE for such university spots, and only the BEST of the BEST make it in. They reward EXCELLENCE. We stress mediocrity.

all in the name of political correctness, we have surrounded ourselves with mediocrity. Heck, that is how we elected a president.

[Wahoo82]

“A condition of their graduation should be that the first 500 surgeries performed by each graduate be performed on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts and the legislators of the Commonwealth ...”

I think this is an excellent idea.

Affirmative action for professions like medicine can cause people to die. Stupid plan.

[gidget7]

True, but at the same time, one is hard pressed to find but one or two in ANY hospital in MA, that isn’t from one or more of those groups listed, already!

[doc11355]

Medical school provided my first glimpse of Reverse Discrimination (aka Affirmative Action) in 1964/65.

We had only one black freshman student in our class and he was very bright, personable and popular. However, he just could not take tests.

No matter how much special tutoring and mentoring the faculty and his fellow students gave him, he could not pass the tests the rest of us were expected to (naturally, without any tutoring or special treatment).

Eventually, he flunked out at the end of our first year.

Since we were aware of the extensive special treatment he had been receiving, it surprised us all and angered some when we heard that he had filed a racial discrimination complaint, alleging that the reason he was failed was his race. Of course, this was before such suits became commonplace.

In the end, however, he was not reinstated and he went off, we heard, to a successful career as a jazz trombonist (something he was really good at).

[BobL]

I’m just about to the point where I’ll tell a black surgeon that the reason he is not permitted to operate on me (or my kids) is because I have no way of knowing if he’s qualified.

Welcome to modern America.

[mountn man]

So, would you have a problem if this minority doctor were operating on you or your spouse or one of your kids?

Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother, Sonya Carson, had dropped out of school in the third grade and married Robert Solomon Carson, a much older Baptist minister from Tennessee, when she was only thirteen. When Carson was only eight, his parents divorced, and Mrs. Carson was left to raise Benjamin and his older brother, Curtis, on her own. She worked at two, sometimes three, jobs at a time to provide for her boys.

Early on Carson experienced difficulty in school, eventually falling to the bottom of his class. He became the object of name calling and subsequently developed a violent, uncontrollable temper. Determined to turn her son's life around, Carson's mother limited his television watching and refused to let him go outside to play until he had finished his homework each day. She required him to read two library books a week and to give her written reports on his reading, even though, with her own poor education, she could barely read what he had written. Soon Carson was amazing his instructors and classmates with his improvement. "It was at that moment that I realized I wasn't stupid," he recalled later. Carson continued to amaze his classmates with his new found knowledge and within a year he was at the top of his class.

After determining that he wanted to be a psychiatrist, Carson graduated with honors from high school and attended Yale University, where he earned a degree in Psychology. From Yale, he went to the Medical School of the University of Michigan, where his interest shifted from psychiatry to neurosurgery. His excellent hand-eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon. After medical school he became a neurosurgery resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At the age of 33, he became the hospital's professor and director of Pediatric Neurosurgery.

Early career
In September 1987 Carson performed a procedure to separate a pair of seven-month-old German conjoined twins, who were joined at the head. Carson was the lead surgeon on the team which performed the complex procedure. Both children survived the surgery.

In 1997 Carson and his team went to South Africa to separate Luka and Joseph Banda, infant boys from Zambia. Both boys survived, and neither one suffered severe brain damage. The Bandas were the first set of twins joined at the tops of their heads to be successfully surgically separated. The operation lasted 28 hours.(From 10:15-4:46)

In 2003, Carson was a member of the surgical team that worked to separate conjoined adult siblings Ladan and Laleh Bijani. Neither survived the surgery. When asked why he had performed such a risky surgery, Carson stated that they conveyed to him they would rather die than stay conjoined.

Personal life
Carson married Candy Rustin—whom he met at Yale—in 1975; she holds a M.B.A. degree and is an accomplished musician, and both are members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, an evangelical Christian denomination. They have three sons, Murray, Benjamin Jr., and Rhoeyce.

Awards and honors
Carson has received numerous honors and many awards over the years, including over 40 honorary doctorate degrees. He was also a member of the American Academy of Achievement, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, the Yale Corporation (the governing body of Yale University), and many other prestigious organizations. He sits on many boards including the Board of Directors of Kellogg Company, Costco Wholesale Corporation, and America's Promise. He was also the president and co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund, which recognizes young people of all backgrounds for exceptional academic and humanitarian accomplishments. In 2007, Carson was inducted into the Indiana Wesleyan University Society of World Changers and received an honorary doctorate while speaking at the university. He returned to IWU the following year when his friend, Tony Dungy, was also inducted into the society.[6] On June 19, 2008, Carson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the President George W. Bush.

Later career and illness
Carson has written three bestselling books published by Zondervan, an international Christian media and publishing company: Gifted Hands, The Big Picture, and Think Big. The first book is an autobiography, and the other two are about his personal philosophies of success that incorporate hard work and a faith in God. Carson is an evangelical Christian and a Seventh-day Adventist. In a debate with Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins, and Daniel Dennett, Carson stated he doesn't believe in evolution: "I don't believe in evolution...[it] says that because there are these similarities even though we can't specifically connect them it proves that this is what happened."

In 2002 Carson was forced to cut back on his public appearances a bit when he faced a medical problem of his own. In June he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but fortunately the cancer was caught in time. Because of his brush with death, however, Carson made a few life changes. He still operates on more than three hundred children a year but has been trying to shorten his days: prior to his cancer he used to work from 7:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night. Now, he tries to leave the hospital at 6:15 P.M. This gives him more time to spend with his wife and three children.

[BobL]

“So, would you have a problem if this minority doctor were operating on you or your spouse or one of your kids?”

Given his resume I’d be fine with him...but obviously I’d have to see his resume...something that I wouldn’t require if I knew the doctor didn’t get any “help” along the way.

[socialismisinsidious]

File this under ‘another stupid liberal idea’ sub-category ‘they will destroy health care one way or another’