HMS Faculty Divided Over Removal of Diversity Language From Mission Statement

Harvard Medical School faculty offered diverging assessments of the school’s revised mission statement, with several professors welcoming a tighter focus on patient care and research while others said the rewrite stripped out language central to the practice of medicine.

HMS dean George Q. Daley ’82 unveiled the new statement on April 9, defending it as a “leaner” articulation of the school’s purpose. The previous version opened with a pledge to “nurture a diverse, inclusive community dedicated to alleviating suffering.”

The revised statement removes that language and centers the school’s work on improving “health and wellbeing,” with the diversity commitment relocated to a separate community values statement that affirms HMS as “a diverse and inclusive community.”

Several faculty members said the revision was an improvement.

Systems biology professor Johan M. Paulsson wrote that the new statement struck the right tone.

“I like the new statement,” Paulsson wrote. “It is less about ourselves and more about what we want to get done.”

HMS professors Hao Wu and Joseph P. Newhouse offered similar assessments. Wu wrote that the previous statement “sounded a bit sad,” while Newhouse called the revision “appropriate.”

David A. Shaywitz ’89, a lecturer in biomedical informatics, wrote that the removed diversity language was thematically redundant with the school’s broader scientific aims.

“I would anticipate that best science and care will necessarily involve and require a diverse community of researchers and clinicians, including diversity of perspectives as well as backgrounds,” Shaywitz wrote. “Monocultures of any kind are not conducive to the robust discussions thoughtful scientific inquiry requires.”

Other faculty were sharply critical, particularly of the decision to drop “alleviating suffering” from the statement.

David S. Jones, a professor of the culture of medicine at HMS, wrote that the phrase captured something fundamental about the discipline.

“A mission to ‘improve health and well-being’ sounds like a MAHA-activist or health influencer,” Jones wrote. “‘Alleviating suffering’ is a much more fundamental statement of the calling of physicians: people seek help from doctors because they are suffering and want relief — that’s why doctors have always existed.”

“Who would be opposed to having relief of suffering in a medical school’s mission statement?” Jones added.

Jones also questioned whether political pressure had driven the revision, noting that the change followed HMS’s renaming last year of its Office for Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership to the Office for Culture and Community Engagement, and the removal of a longstanding diversity statement – both of which came as the Trump administration ramped up its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programming in higher education.

An HMS spokesperson said the school stands by the revised statement, describing it as the product of multiple working groups and feedback from the HMS community.

Neal A. Baer, a senior lecturer on global health and social medicine, said he found the revision “dismaying” and tied it to a broader pattern at the school. He pointed to Daley’s state of the school address last fall, in which the dean said that “disease knows no politics.”

“Many of our patients are in the hospital because of the political environment, the cultural environment, because of racism, sexism, homophobia,” Baer said. “The medical school is next to Roxbury, and the life expectancy is 23 years less than that half a mile away in the Back Bay. Is that genetics, or is that politics?”

Christophe O. Benoist, a professor of immunohematology, said he understood the criticism but saw the changes as a strategic concession.

“Yes, taking out the diversity language is an unfortunate sign of the times, but probably a good idea not to hold up a lightning rod in the middle of a storm,” Benoist wrote. “And one could argue that ‘nurturing a diverse community’ was never really the mission of HMS, merely a desirable characteristic.”

Stephen Lory, a retired microbiology professor, said the revisions would not change the day-to-day work of the school’s labs.

“I have no opinion on these changes,” Lory wrote. “I have a feeling, what we do in our labs and how we do it is not affected much by the original or the modified version of the statement.”

—Staff writer Riya S. Shah can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at riyas.23. Follow her on X @RiyaShah233.

—Staff writer Juliana L. Yao can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at jly.87. Follow her on X @JulianaYao298.