Universities removing portraits of top doctors, scientists, Nobel Prize winners of the past. Not enough diversity. From @NPR: http://ow.ly/rv0F50vM5Y6
Madcow got them to really think about their message.
The qualifier for being up on the wall was winning the Nobel or Lasker. Just a bunch of white dudes with racist achievements.
Prolly just easier to get Nobel and Lasker to reissue the awards to someone more diverse retroactively.
A few years ago, TV celebrity Rachel Maddow was at Rockefeller University to hand out a prize that's given each year to a prominent female scientist. As Maddow entered the auditorium, someone overheard her say, "What is up with the dude wall?"
She was referring to a wall covered with portraits of scientists from the university who have won either a Nobel Prize or the Lasker Award, a major medical prize.
"One hundred percent of them are men. It's probably 30 headshots of 30 men. So it's imposing," says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist with the university and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Vosshall says Maddow's remark, and the word "dude wall," crystallized something that had been bothering her for years. As she travels around the country to give lectures and attend conferences at scientific institutions, she constantly encounters lobbies, conference rooms, passageways, and lecture halls that are decorated with portraits of white men.
"It just sends the message, every day when you walk by it, that science consists of old white men," says Vosshall. "I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, 'What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?'"
She's now on a committee that's redesigning that wall of portraits at Rockefeller University, to add more diversity. And this is hardly the only science or medical institution that's reckoning with its dude wall.
At Yale School of Medicine, for example, one main building's hallways feature 55 portraits: three women and 52 men. They're all white.
"I don't necessarily always have a reaction. But then there are times when you're having a really bad day — someone says something racist to you, or you're struggling with feeling like you belong in the space — and then you see all those photos and it kind of reinforces whatever you might have been feeling at the time," says Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a medical student at Yale.
Sorry Max, you're not the target audience. The Asian's days are more numbered than whitey at Yale.
Edit: When I'm wrong, I'll admit it.
Tiako sounded like a Japanese surname.
Tiako, who moved to the United States from Cameroon when he was 16 years old, attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. There he studied civil and environmental engineering, the field in which he originally thought to pursue a career. He took a master’s in science in bioengineering at Georgia Tech, with plans of earning a PhD, when he realized that what he really wanted to do was be a physician. He then worked in a mechanobiology lab at Vanderbilt.
“Bench research wasn’t quite for me,” says Tiako. “At Howard, I developed a passion for social justice. Being a physician pulls everything together: science, thinking of people’s medical and social issues, and helping them with those.”
He also host a SJW podcast. I like how npr just found a random Yale med student for their broadcast.
He is perfect for Yale.
Last edited:
