The "Gauze Curtain" at Harvard Medical School

...Gibbon seems utterly fascinated by this aspect of the work, to a degree which Mrs...

...Failing this spirit of realism, we may easily find ourselves in the predicament of having intensified invidious racial stereotypes as well as the health care deficiencies of minority communities precisely by means of our most energetic efforts to abate them...

...One would certainly hope so...

...In the absence of hard facts, anecdotes and rumors naturally abound...

...Foster, "Race and Truth at Harvard," the New Republic, July 17, 1976...

...We find at least a dozen notes to Algernon, requesting that he determine without delay the pre-Roman Belgian term for "chopped meat...

...Needless to say, Grynde received from the historian neither a mention nor an acknowledgement —nothing, we suspect, but the enduring gratitude of Mrs...

...Last year, for example, at least three minority applicants with excellent academic records but middle-class origins were initially denied admission while much more poorly prepared minority applicants from the "proper" social background—the ghetto—were being recommended...

...We have hisdetailed calculations of the changes in the rate of illegitimacy in suburban Rome as compared with the figures for the Midlands posited by David Hume...

...Seventeen seventy-six was a good year, seeing the publication of The Wealth of Nations, the Declaration of Independence, and Common Sense...

...And Derek Bok, President of Harvard, weightily intoned: "On the basis of evidence supplied to me by the Dean's Office and the Registrar, I find no basis for any implication that minority students are less than fully qualified for the M.D...

...Grynde received an introduction to Edward Gibbon, who had recently decided to investigate the causes for the collapse of the Roman empire...

...And a not insignificant cognate cost will be the loss of integrity of our most distinguished academic institutions...

...In as much as the fate of a decade of "affirmative action" hangs in the balance, both sides of the dispute agree that this will be the most important decision on race since the historic Brown ruling in 1954...

...We were told that a representative of the administration was "unable to distinguish between minority and majority students on the basis of their records" (remember that curious grading system that deliberately obscures all distinctions, and, also, that it is not the performance of a// minority students but only of some that is in question...

...degree leads to an unlimited license to make life-and-death judgments...

...Even the colonials in Boston and Philadelphia call them hamburgers, for God's sake...

...One would like to be assured, too, that the remedial programs were indeed successful at overcoming past educational deficits...

...a fuzzed grading system...

...Thus, what is so elevatingly called "an affirmation of social responsibility" boils down in practice to setting aside in many cases manifest academic talent in the ranking of minority students even against each other...

...prototypical bureaucratic dissembling and know-nothingism on the part of the Harvard administration...

...And it is not difficult to locate one source of the problem...

...degree in accordance with the normal standards of the Harvard Medical School" (once again, the quality of this "evidence," in light of the grading system, must be questioned...

...Apparently, it had something to do with beef...

...First of all, shortly after the start of affirmative action, the grading of students in the pre-clinical years (i.e., in the basic science courses) was abolished in favor of a William R. Havender is a free-lance writer living in Berkeley, California...

...One must take great care not to mistake these remarks as opposing all efforts to increase the representation of minorities...

...it is not a matter here of setting the clock back but rather of setting it right...

...I find this altogether vexing," Grynde confides, "for everyone knows that chopped meat was not known to the pre-Roman Belgian peoples, the dish having originated in the Germanies, for which we have the testimony of Tacitus Germanicus himself...

...Grynde, who had never had smallpox, was too unblemished for Johnson and his circle...

...Gibbon, who soon came to enjoy the delights of the Gauls which Algernon had unearthed...

...For instance, one would like to know whether the grades and MCAT scores of minority applicants were systematically undervaluing their true academic abilities...

...Gibbon finds trying...

...nor has anyone, after nearly ten years of special admissions, yet attempted anything as simple as a survey of attitudes among graduating seniors, members of the medical profession, or the public at large to see if any change in stereotypical and prejudicial thinking can be detected, and if so, whether it is in the direction one would wish...

...In view of the total lack of quantitative evaluation of both pedagogical effectiveness and student competence, it probably does not come as a further surprise that no one knows, either, whether the hypothesized social benefits are being realized or not...

...that by uncovering and developing previously overlooked talent, these changes have greatly strengthened the primacy of merit as the just and proper basis for advancement...

...What this cautious phrasing wholly evades is the little matter of the National Board scores, as well as the fact that it is precisely the standards for passing in the Harvard curriculum that were being questioned...

...But at Harvard one quickly runs into a swamp of obstacles in trying to answer such questions...

...Unfortunately, there is reason to think that quite the opposite may be true: for if we can say anything about the controversy over affirmative action, it is that passionate declarations of good intent have been allowed almost completely to displace attention to relevant facts...

...A special minority admissions subcommittee, composed in large part of minority students, was formed to evaluate these applicants, it being plausibly assumed that black students, for example, would be better able than whites to recruit and judge other blacks...

...There are, then, ample grounds for prudent and sympathetic persons to question certain aspects of special admissions as practiced at HMS...

...Indeed, it can be said that Grynde's role was such that only an excess of modesty prevented him from claiming coauthorship of the long book...

...Gibbon thinks there is a correlation between illegitimacy and Christianity, and he is trying to get to the bottom of it...

...As Grynde's notes make clear, Gibbon was in well over his head...

...Thus, an obscuring veil—a "gauze curtain"—has been drawn between the teaching faculty and the information necessary for evaluating students at HMS...

...Not even a faculty committee that might be charged with evaluating the success of the revised admissions policy or the faculty's pedagogical efficacy (with all students, not just minority students) could gain access to the records of individual students...

...degree without completing the requirements of the Harvard curriculum as designed by the Harvard faculty...

...Indeed, this whole matter of Gibbon's research assistants has been something of a lacuna...

...While there exists, to be sure, a general consensus among the faculty that the affirmative action program has brought in many worthy and capable minority students who would otherwise have been missed, at the same time tales are told privately of as many as one-third of the special admittees failing the National Boards (compared to a pre-special admissions failure rate of about one percent...

...Grynde, who had gone up to Oxford to read Roman history, had to drop out when funds ran short...

...In the process, we have come upon the first authenticated copy of a sex manual widely in use among the Gauls...

...At this point, Grynde's notes are written in Greek, and I can make neither head nor tail of them...

...One of the forgotten figures of that era, Grynde nonetheless had a hand in the publication of another great work of '76, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...

...Grynde was Edward Gibbon's research assistant and, as my own researches reveal, had much more to do with the great work than literary historians have hitherto supposed...

...William R. Havender The "Gauze Curtain" at Harvard Medical School Why no one knows whether affirmative action has worked at HMS...

...The Grynde notes are, in fact, a gold mine of social history, both late Roman and 18th-century British...

...And accounts are heard of a few such students to whom basic science seems unteachable by any pedagogic technique now known, but who nevertheless are passed along to graduation...

...Shortly after this uncharacteristic assertion of exasperation, Grynde left the employ of Mr...

...I have finally figured out why...

...Such a mixture—of gratifying successes and worrisome failures —would not be unexpected in the early phase of any new admissions policy...

...He agreed to hire Grynde for six months, at a wage of one pound per week...

...Consequently, it is by no means certain that those called upon to evaluate the practice of preferential admissions have been able to obtain reliable information...

...In 1968 the Harvard Medical School adopted an affirmative action policy whereby some 20 percent of admissions were reserved for members of "disadvantaged" minority groups, chiefly blacks and Hispanics...

...For it is widely felt among the Harvard faculty that carefully t A detailed account of this is given by J.W...

...But many members of the teaching faculty, confronted with the operational results of this policy, have been compelled to view this "evidence" with skepticism...

...He doesn't know any Latin...

...We find among these remembrances Gibbon's handwritten instructions to his researcher: 3 March 1774 Algernon—find out for me the following: (1) the Phrygian term for coitus interruptus (2) the Scythian tax lists for the third century, as rendered into contemporary units of account (3) the name of the inn where Julius Caesar entertained Vercengetorix (4) the editor at the Roman publishing house which first issued Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars (5) sales of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Roman Britain after the death of Hadrian (6) the name of Robert Graves' agent who negotiated his contract with Public Television for the production of I, Claudius (7) Who is Theodore Mommsen, and why does he hate me...

...No one, so far as I know, has looked into the question of how the Great Man organized, collated, indexed, cited, and otherwise played around with the data and documents of his magisterial work...

...What led to Grynde's resignation from Gibbon's service...

...Grynde's notes and jottings are remarkably instructive on this point...

...Leon Eisenberg, who was chairman of the Admissions Committee from 1971 to 1975, tells us: 22 The American Spectator March 1978 ...most of the minority students admitted...have had grade point averages and MCAT scores little different from those of the "majority" group...

...Alvin Poussaint, Associate Dean of Students at HMS, informed us of the useful fact that "not a single minority group student here has received an M.D...

...and once again, it is not all minority students that are of concern but only some...

...and a sulphurous hostility directed not at correctable defects in the program but at any beam of light that illuminates them...

...But this mix seems to have persisted wholly unaltered throughout the years—nearly a decade by now—of special admissions...

...We have in no case accepted a student without evidence that she or he had the ability to become good physicians [sic...

...This was especially important in grasping the significance of Roman tax collections...

...I have now come into possession of more than 6,000 three-by-five index cards, once the property of Algernon Grynde...

...traditionally included in the past...

...and the "evidence of ability to become a good physician" seems often to take more account of an applicant's "correct" social origin and political perspective than of his demonstrated scientific aptitude...

...Pass /Fail system with the odd feature that a Fail was not really a Fail at all but merely a provisional Incomplete: A student who failed a course could be examined as often as necessary to obtain a Pass, with consequent removal from the record of all previous attempts...

...This was instituted at the behest of students during a general wave of concern for "student rights," but it had the incidental effect of making it impossible to measure the relative performance of the specially admitted students...

...This is nowhere better illustrated than at another of the nation's medical schools—that at Harvard University...

...But in light of the seemingly irremediable academic difficulties that some minority students have had after enrolling, the wisdom of such reasoning, pushed as far as it clearly has been in some cases, is seriously open to question...

...24 The American Spectator March 1978...

...8) What day would it be today if we still used the old calendar...

...Davis are his own and do not reflect those of the Faculty or the administration"—this in a letter from Robert Ebert, Dean of the Medical Faculty at Harvard, to the Deans of 118 of the nation's medical schools'), and then secreted a Some of these students were subsequently admitted, but only after the outraged intercession of faculty members who had personal knowledge of their credentials and capabilities...

...Dean Ebert wrote: "I know of no evidence to support the view that the students at the Harvard Medical School have diminished in quality in recent years" (the matter of concern is, of course, not the average but the minimal quality of HMS graduates...

...So there seems to be an invincible disdain for facts at work at Harvard, a willful blindness, as though ordinary respect for evidence were reactionary...

...The faculty are being treated as if they were children...

...emphasis added] This can only be read as a guarded, cautious admission that some minority students with questionable academic credentials were deliberately admitted in preference to others with good records—though in the view of the admissions subcommittee there was evidence of "social" merit that justified these preferences...

...Given this significance one would like to hope, at the very least, that the testimony of various medical-school administrators and university presidents has provided the Supreme Court with an accurate picture of how preferential-admissions policies have worked over the past ten years...

...But he was a Whig, and Boswell didn't much care for him...

...Not every applicant, however, was so fortunate in having such forceful backing.steady stream of what Norman Mailer calls "factoids"-- evasive statements that merely simulate facts...

...lyl°:'- - - The American Spectator March 1978 23 targeting recruitment efforts, revising admissions procedures where bias seemed likely, and making remedial instruction available where the lack of previous educational opportunity was the cause of poor performance have succeeded in finding worthy minority candidates...

...There is not the slightest evidence of a resolute effort to reduce progressively the number of unsuccessful gambles by means of adjusting the admissions process in the light of experience...

...But when Bernard Davis, who holds the Adele Lehman Professorship in Bacterial Physiology at HMS, did venture to confess doubts (in a most judicious and courteous editorial in the May 1976 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine) about the criteria used in special admissions and about the standards used in passing these students along to graduation, the Harvard administration pronounced a curse of anathema ("The views expressed by Dr...

...These students were actively recruited from schools that did not usually send many graduates to HMS, and for them the usual admission requirements of high grades and MCAT scores were greatly relaxed...

...This makes it unusually difficult for an outside party to assess objectively what the affirmative action program has actually achieved...

...that their fine grades reflect not so much their potential as their social setting...

...Indeed, a sensibly balanced inclusion of such considerations should no more generate academic anomalies than have the other kinds of subjective judgments (of character, motivation, geographic representativeness, etc...

...Gibbon to take up a position at the publishing house then creating the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

...As one professor points out, "We have invested one-fifth of our considerable teaching resources in an experimental program with no reliable feedback on its efficacy...

...Not to insist on a reasonable level of demonstrated competence in basic science from all of those to whom this degree is awarded, and placidly to ignore such indications as we have of problems in this respect, is to put the public—and in this context, especially minority communities—dangerously at risk...

...To complete this cycle of frustration, even the scores of HMS students on the National Boards (a set of nationwide exams the results of which are independent of the grading eccentricities of any particular school), which in the past were routinely made available to the faculty, became occult: The administration quietly stopped giving this vital information to the faculty...

...This obscuring of realities is effected, as we have seen, through a combination of factors: the existence in the first place of a separate, politically tendentious subcommittee controlling minority admissions...

...Now, common sense would advise us of the necessity to monitor carefully the results of such changes to insure that they were in fact achieving their objectives...

...We do not know how Gibbon reacted to this decision by young Grynde...

...Algernon also spent a fair amount of time transposing Roman numerals into Arabic ones...

...Another outcome of this concern for student rights was that grades became privileged information sequestered even from the teaching faculty: A professor could no longer obtain the grades of students other than those in the specific courses he was teaching or his own advisees...

...John Nollson Gibbon's Silent Partner y investigations into America's Bicentennial continue to yield remarkable historical fruit, even as we now approach the second year after the great event...

...No more is needed than a spirit of realism that is willing to distinguish those practices included in "affirmative action" that are effective in discovering and nurturing previously neglected talent from those that regard technical proficiency as a lightly disposable detail in the gadarene rush to "social justice...

...Whatever stand should have been taken on this question, it is only a minority of the admitted minority group who fit the latter description...

...Sometime in the next few months the Supreme Court will decide whether the medical school at the University of California at Davis acted unconstitutionally when it denied admission to Allan i3akke, who is white, while accepting certain minority students on the basis of less stringent academic requirements...

...No evidence has yet been offered to show that the special admittees do return to the barrios and ghettos and improve the existing level of health care in these communities...

...The particular problems addressed here—the gross displacement of academic considerations in ranking minority applicants even among themselves, and the lack of any assessment of the program —seem, in principle at least, readily curable...

...Some faculty have argued that it was hardly an affirmation of social responsibility to accept only outstanding students rather than to search out those with the requisite ability but with limited educational backgrounds, towards whom the extensive teaching resources of the school might have been directed...

...He had hoped to sign on with Samuel Johnson and pick up some extra money working on the Dictionary...

...The machine, which survives, has of course no numbered keys, but just the keys M, D, C, L, X, V, and It took me a long time to figure out how it works...

...Young Grynde deserves credit for designing the first hand-held calculator with an Arabic conversion key (which could be pressed for just this purpose...

...Now even for this one can envision rationalizations: that minority candidates with splendid academic credentials who come from middle-class or professional rather than ghetto backgrounds do not really "need" to go to HMS since they can easily get in elsewhere...

...Yet such an assessment is gravely needed, since, as Bernard Davis soberly reminded us in his NEJM editorial, "the M.D...

...After all, it is difficult to see how rejecting minority applicants with strong technical abilities while accepting others who can barely do the work required to meet even today's eased standards will counteract negative stereotypes or assure minority communities of competent health care in the future...

...These apochrypha, such as they are, suggest that at least some of the specially admitted students should not have been matriculated...

...Finally, those specially admitted students who developed academic difficulties were given special tutoring, and allowed to repeat courses, or even take a more gradual program...

...Gibbon shows thorough mastery of the secondary materials," jots Grynde, "but his familiarity with the primary sources is woeful...

...and that they would not be as likely to serve in a ghetto if they did not come from one...

...And one would like to see that these students did acquire the technical knowledge and skills that would allow them safely and responsibly to satisfy the health needs of their communities...

...Indeed, this has been a subject of continuing debate...