Summary of the Demands
1. We demand increased support for the wellbeing of underrepresented students in medicine.
This will require expanded funding and personnel for the DICE office to support a wide variety of initiatives, a more accessible advising system, and mental health professionals for students underrepresented in medicine (URiM).
2. We demand curricular reform that is anti-oppressive and anti-racist.
Implicit bias training is ineffective and inadequate; racism and oppression are drivers of disease and ubiquitous in healthcare, and nothing short of a comprehensive, anti-oppressive curriculum does justice to students or our patients.
3. We demand the creation and maintenance of a genuinely inclusive environment at YSM for students, faculty, and staff who are underrepresented in medicine.
A system for addressing unacceptable behavior—through replacement of punitive measures with restorative justice and education whenever possible—is essential if all identities are to be welcomed and included.
4. We demand increased diversity among the faculty and student body.
Beyond recruitment, Yale must develop and retain a diverse faculty; this includes compensating faculty and students for the vast, racialized equity labor that currently falls overwhelmingly to those who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. This burden is especially heavy on women of color.
5. We demand expanded financial support and recognition for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), health disparities research, and anti-oppression scholarship as well as implementation of anti-racist practices in research across the medical school.
Through a multidisciplinary research center, Yale will guide national policy and develop gold-standard institutional practices to invest in diversity, respond to sexual harassment and assault, promote anti-oppressive education, and exist without a police presence.
6. We demand that Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, and YNHHS end all ties with and practices involving police forces.
In the United States, police historically enforced the enslavement, segregation, and terrorism of Black and brown people. Decades of reform have resulted only in the increased incarceration of these folks and diversion of community and mental health resources to carceral spaces. The Yale Police Department must be abolished and YSM must commit to fighting police violence and mass incarceration as a public health crisis.
7. We demand Yale and YNHHS prioritize the protection of marginalized patients in clinical care.
YNHHS must expand services and protect the rights of marginalized patient populations including: patients who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color; patients without formal immigration status; patients who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ); patients who are intersex or with differences of sexual development (DSD); and patients who are uninsured and underinsured.
8. We demand Yale School of Medicine, YNHHS, and Yale University use their financial and political capital to directly benefit people from oppressed groups and make financial reparations to Black and Indigenous communities and the people of New Haven.
Yale must increase the amount of money it invests in the New Haven community, including increased voluntary payments to the city. It must divest from perpetrators of structural violence such as private prisons, and change its unethical investment policies that personally enrich the members of the board of trustees while robbing the people of this city of basic necessities. Yale must reckon with its historical and ongoing legacy of profiting from slavery and colonization and pay reparations to the communities that it has exploited and continues to exploit.
9. We demand full institutional accountability, transparency, and follow-through with these demands.
The administration must publish a strategic plan with quantitative goals, benchmarks, and a timeline for implementing these demands, including annual reporting and re-assessment of progress.