Minority Students and the Political Environment: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

I feel like a strange interloper in these proceedings. Most other conference participants are either educators with long practical experience in training minority students in the sciences and medicine or social scientists who have studied the attendant problems for years. By contrast, I am an historian, an historian of science and medicine more specifically, and I am very new to the business of medical education. Although I have been the assistant director of the Center for Biomedical Education (CBE) at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY) for a little over two and a half years and in that capacity have performed many functions, I serve primarily to represent the social sciences and humanities in the center’s unusual educational curriculum and to embody what might be called a societal or ethical perspective.