Efforts to improve diversity among medical students are “doing pretty well,” says Hannah Valantine, professor of medicine. More than 50 percent of current students are women, and 22 percent are members of underrepresented minority groups.
But when she looks at the figures that tell the story of faculty diversity, Valantine is not pleased. “As you move through to residencies and faculty, the numbers diminish considerably,” the cardiac transplant specialist says. “The faculty is 25 percent women, and the senior faculty is 15 percent women; the percentage of African-Americans is 1, and of Hispanics is 3. Not good.”
As the newly appointed senior associate dean for diversity and leadership, a half-time post, Valantine aims to improve these figures over the next three years. She is launching a program that will train senior faculty to be mentors to junior faculty, and will coach women and underrepresented minorities on navigating administrative responsibilities and grant writing. “The issue is sufficiently important not to leave it to chance, but rather have it institutionalized in the fabric of the school,” she says.
Indeed, this initiative comes from the top. “This is the dean’s mandate,” Valantine says. “I’m just the commander in the field.” At the school’s strategic planning retreat in late January, actress and former drama professor Anna Deavere Smith presented a one-hour performance on diversity based on her interviews with several faculty members and students. “What I’m trying to do is take part of what these people have said and put it in a larger collage of the whole community,” Smith told Stanford Medicine.
