A Change is Gonna Come
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” -Barack Obama
Fall is the season for change and in this newsletter, change is our resonant theme. February 2025 will represent 10 years since we recalibrated the Office of Diversity & Inclusion and began a journey not only to change the face of medicine but to change the culture here at Feinberg School of Medicine. Culture change is no easy feat. In this past decade, we’ve experienced remarkable diversity: we’ve doubled our faculty diversity, increased our resident/fellow diversity, and now consistently hold a diversity metric in our incoming medical school matriculants of 20 to 25 percent. Similar progress is noted in our Physical Therapy & Human Movement Sciences, allied health and graduate programs. But metrics alone don’t fully qualify as success. Remember, as Albert Einstein said, not everything that is measurable counts, and not everything that counts is measurable.
Along the way, we’ve navigated critical external review by accrediting bodies, tensions in our Chicago communities, crises at our parent institution, Northwestern University, and a generation-changing pandemic. Now we are at the threshold of culture change, and it is palpable. Through it all, our course was undeterred and perhaps even emboldened. Ten years later, we are different. Though difficult to measure and decidedly more qualitative, it is perceptible as a feeling; a way of thinking; a change in behavior. This is the heavy lift. Yet, we are there.
Any meaningful culture change must begin with leadership. To that end, nearly 100 URM (Underrepresented in Medicine) faculty received promotions over this past decade and now nearly 40 leadership positions are held by women and URM faculty. We are two-thirds in on our NIH FIRST award, ($16M), known as NURTURE, with 10 out of 15 newly recruited research-intensive faculty from groups previously under-represented in science. These new scientists will be our future mentors, teachers, role models and leaders. Our newly refunded Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS, $55M) is anchored in the science of innovation, inclusion and implementation. Imagine inclusive science.
Advocacy and more simply put, voice, drives culture change but engagement is even more emblematic. The Fall Lyceum held earlier this month featured a riveting talk from visiting professor Thomas LaVeist, PhD, dean of the Tulane University Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Health Equity. It began with a brilliant, perhaps even tour de force, discussion of one leader’s journey from the projects in Brooklyn to a recognized leader in healthcare. If you were there, who could ignore the poignant lessons learned from the Titanic? The real difference between first class and coach?
And then there was our first ever health equity poster session. Of 80 entries, 65 posters brilliantly portrayed the depth and breadth of engagement on this campus. All tiers of professionals from college students to medical students, residents, graduate students, and faculty and all schools and hospitals- Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern Medicine, Lurie Children’s Hospital, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Driskill Graduate Program in Life Sciences and Physical Therapy & Human Movement Sciences were represented. In addition, the poster session included a full assortment of subject matter. A critical mass of professionals now hold space for scholarship in the science and sociology of health equity. Within this aggregate of intellectual energy there is an idea, once operationalized and scaled, capable of elevating the health and healthcare of the communities we serve. Is there a more effective tool with the potential to drive culture change than science?
Over the past 10 years, we initiated culture change by advocacy, education and awareness. We now endorse culture change with leadership, scholarship and science. Few other leading academic medical centers are as evolved on this journey, and according to Dr. LaVeist- “Northwestern may be ahead of almost every other academic medical center.”
We are not naïve. Not everyone subscribes to the value of our aggregate efforts, however, and we invite scrutiny. For those who detract, dismiss, and even denigrate our version of inclusive excellence, we stand as evidence that our enterprises, Feinberg and Northwestern Medicine, are better now, perhaps better than ever. Including “inclusive excellence” is our superpower. Remaining true to an arc of change, fueling growth via the talent of the next generation, and re-imagining diversity beyond race and ethnicity but inclusive of sex/gender, indigenous peoples, ability status, country of origin, LGBTQ+, and rurality- a quintessential all-comers American approach- guarantees our continued ascendancy to the uppermost tier of academic medical centers.
And my personal joy? Re-visit the last verse of Sam Cooke’s anthem “A Change is Gonna Come."
Finally, there are truly too many to thank. That’s a good thing. We have community, and to that community, I hold deep and heartfelt personal and professional gratitude.
See this newsletter endorsing our Lyceum Speaker Series, programs, events, awareness initiatives and unwavering investment in the next generation of scholars and leaders. After metrics comes culture and after culture comes legacy.
We welcome your feedback.
Vice Dean of Diversity & Inclusion