Unpacking the Experiences of Black Medical Students

Minority Applicants And Enrollment In First-Year Medical School Classes, 1968–1969 Through 1987–1988

Students of Medicine in the '60s

At the start of the 1960s, medical education institutions began to respond to a national consensus that there was a shortage of physicians. The Civil Rights Movement further affected the administration of medical education institutions. As depicted in an article in Health Affairs, a leading health policy journal, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) aimed for minority representation in medicine to align with the U.S. population. In 1970, the AAMC set a goal that "12 percent of entering medical school classes should comprise underrepresented minorities by 1975. Although enrollment of underrepresented minorities increased rapidly from 3.0 percent in 1968–1969 to 7.1 percent in 1970–1971, reaching 1,473 first-year students by 1974–1975, subsequent years saw fluctuations. A new high was achieved in 1979–1980, but it wasn't until the 1980s that the percentage of first-year positions occupied by underrepresented minorities began to rise consistently, reaching 10.2 percent in 1987–1988" (Jolly 1988).

As can be seen in the rightmost exhibit, the number of underrepresented minority applicants in medical schools has trended downward in tandem with the overall applicant numbers, but the decline among minorities has been more gradual. As a result, the minority percentage of all applicants has climbed to 10.6%. Despite affirmative-action initiatives, underrepresented minorities made up less than 3% of medical school faculties as of 1988 (Jolly 1988).

Columbia and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Bradley's "Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League" sheds light on the campus climate at Columbia following the Dartmouth chapter, highlighting the contrast between rural Hanover and urban New York. At issue in the latter was Columbia's institutional expansion plans. Bradley notes that the neighborhoods "around the medical school [Vagelos] in Washington Heights, parts of Manhattanville, and other enclaves have observed Columbia’s creep" (Bradley 2018). By 1967, when Dr. Buckner would have entered his first year at Vagelos, Columbia and other universities had jointly established a five-year prospectus on expansion in Morningside Heights and beyond (into Manhattanville West Area). Over a ten-year period, Columbia moved 10,000 people out of their homes (Bradley 2018).

Columbia Students Protesting.

As part of the famous 1968 student rebellion, Columbia University members of the Students’ Afro-American Society protest the institution’s expansion into Harlem and Morningside Heights in New York City

"[I chose Columbia] because that was where my family was from."
- Dr. John Buckner

In his concept of “UniverCities,” scholar Davarian Baldwin writes that “as colleges and universities are given the keys to ‘save the city,’ the Black and Latino communities that largely surround urban campuses are left especially vulnerable to the for-profit ambitions of higher education.” (Baldwin 2015). Columbia's campus is situated across poor and working class neighborhoods; class tensions alongside the omnipresent issues of race and residential segregation made strife inevitable. As a full-blown conflict in Vietnam entered public discourse, unrest came to a head: "employing the collective agitation methods of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement, neighbors of Ivy League universities—often in coalition with students—fought back against institutions that they viewed as space invaders" (Bradley 2018). Leadership of student groups, such as Columbia's Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS), was becoming more militant. Like students at other institutions, including Dartmouth, what originated in the mid-1960s as a peer support group evolved into an activist organization by the latter half of the decade.

The confrontations that would occur on Columbia's campus between student and community organizers put the power and influence of a private institution on full display. While the laws of capitalism encouraged Columbia’s aggressive approach to ownership, the passion of the protesters forced Columbia officials to re-envision what institutional growth should look like and what role the university played in its neighborhood (Bradley 2018).

Student and community activists were thus key drivers of change at Columbia, at Dartmouth, and in all corners of American life during the 1960s and '70s. The disenfranchised and the youth questioned not only the merit of their leaders, but the direction the country was headed. As more people from a breadth of backgrounds found their voice, the more they demanded a say in shaping the decades to come.

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