Missouri Medical School May Lose Accreditation For Being Too White

STAT, a national publication that covers health, medicine and science, came out Wednesday with a lengthy story on the medical school at the University of Missouri-Columbia and it isn’t pretty.

The publication says the med school is in danger of losing its accreditation next year because it has so few minority students and faculty.

STAT notes that the current first-year class has only five black students out of a total of 104. In 2015, there were two, it says, and in 2014 just one.

Dr. Patrice “Patrick” Delafontaine, dean of the med school, tells STAT it’s an issue the school has to deal with, but STAT says interviews it conducted with more than half a dozen current and former students “described a campus that has made it harder for them to succeed.”

“Some said that MU’s lack of diversity means they are more likely to be mistaken for a janitor, to be singled out for ID checks by campus security, or to hear physicians make off-handed remarks about patients of color,” STAT writes. “They said it was more difficult for them to thrive here than white students. They said they have dealt with subtle and overt displays of racism. And some have questioned whether they made a mistake deciding to attend the school.”

The med school has been cited twice before, in 2001 and 2008, by the national accreditation organization, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME). And as STAT points out, the LCME has cited nearly half of all medical schools in the United States for lacking diversity.