Integrity, accountability, and collaboration
By being open to criticism and change, the institution strives to fulfill its commitments.
Tino Delamerced ’18 MD’22 and Stephen Bozier ’17 MD’23
Years before the Medical School opened its doors, it was fueled by a promise and a shared vision. In the mid-1960s, Brown President Ray Lorenzo Heffner endorsed the ambitious medical program plans and promised to involve students in decision making. While Heffner wasn’t at Brown long enough to see that plan come to fruition, it did become a reality in much the way he outlined.
That sense of integrity and accountability—making meaningful commitments aligned with Brown’s vision and following through on them—has been a throughline of the Medical School’s history.
For example, medical education in the 1970s and ’80s was moving toward increasingly compressed programs, some as short as six years. But when Brown launched its iconic Program in Liberal Medical Education, it bucked national trends and extended the educational timeline so that students could explore topics outside of science, from history to poetry to archeology. This approach broadened students’ horizons, making them more context-aware and empathetic. The PLME was unconventional for the time, but it was aligned with the School’s commitment to develop compassionate caregivers.
More recently, some have shone a spotlight on the difficulties faced by students underrepresented in medicine. When Tino Delamerced ’18 MD’22 and Stephen Bozier ’17 MD’23 turned their frustration into a podcast episode about these challenges in Delamerced’s podcast, Firsts, Brown faculty and administrators embraced it with enthusiasm, and committed to investigating disparities in repeating coursework, known as remediation, among students of color. In June 2021, the Medical School began waiving tuition for students who were required to repeat a semester due to academic issues.
That action was part of a broader effort to address systemic racism in medical education: the School created a dashboard to track its progress on a range of different efforts, and updates it with details on newly created positions, policies, trainings, focus groups, and other efforts. The dashboard is fueled by Brown’s commitment to back its words with action.
The aim, in many ways, is the same as the one that breathed life into the School some 50 years ago: make big, bold goals. And work together unstintingly, and with integrity, to make them a reality.
