Chapter 13: MD Anderson Leaders and Diversity
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Description
Dr. Jones evaluates MD Anderson and discusses the ability of key leaders to recognize race as an issue within the institution. He notes that Dr. Ronald DePinho, the fourth full-time president of MD Anderson, can empathize with, but not fully relate to the experience of African-Americans. He explains how important it is to make individuals aware of their biases without putting them on the defensive. He talks about Fred Levine, president of UT Medical Branch in Galveston, then compares Dr. Charles LeMaistre [Oral History Interview] and Dr. John Mendelsohn [Oral History Interview]. He talks about Dr. Emil J Freireich [Oral History Interview], Dr. Waun Ki Hong [Oral History Interview], Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, and Dr. Bernard Levin [Oral History Interview].
Identifier
JonesLA_03_20140130_C13
Publication Date
1-30-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Lovell A. Jones, PhD, Oral History Interview, January 30, 2014
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Overview; Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose; Experiences re: Gender, Race, Ethnicity; Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Religion; Diversity at MD Anderson; Leadership; Portraits; The Professional at Work; Professional Path
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
But it all goes back to the issue of value in terms of how you value certain things. And I think we talk about the issue of equity and addressing it, but I think that's probably as far as it goes. And you send strong messages where you value things. For instance, you take the Office of Institutional Diversity, which had a vice president for institutional diversity, and you now demote it to the chief diversity officer. That sends a strong message that that person's no longer a line officer that has direct access to the president. But now you declare victory and put it to the side and say, "Okay, it's now a part of Human Resources and it reports to the vice president for human resources." That tells people, well, you know-and it also says I'd better not raise my hand and say anything about it, because I see where it is on the chart with regards to the administration. At the meeting that I was at were a number of national figures: Howard Cole [phonetic], who was the Secretary for Health.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And the title of this meeting, just for the record?
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
It was the National Patient Navigation Consortium Summit. So as I said before, they kind of joked and said, "Okay-." For instance, Dr. Freeman, who had heard about my emeritus status here, came and says, "Is it really true you don't get anything?" I said, "Yeah, it is true." And he just walked away. That sends a message that says-hey. And we had drinks later that night, and he says, "You know what that says is that if you speak out like Lovell does, this is what you're going to get. No matter how much you've accomplished, no matter how much you've done, we still have a way of getting at you." And that is important on a national scene that you are present at these meetings and that, for instance, Howard Cole gets up and points you out as a national figure in making these things happen, so that the young people in the audience know that, yes, Anderson may do this to you, but you're still respected on a national level. So I think this all has, as I said earlier, has a bearing on where Anderson is today in terms of both its faculty diversity, both its patient population. Now, you know, if you walk the halls of Anderson and you see a lot of persons of color in nursing and you see it in allied professions that are here, but a lot has to do with the demographic change in terms of training and education and that sort of thing. So you're going to see a lot of secretaries, you're going to see a lot of radiation techs, you're going to see a lot of people in the Business Office, but, interesting enough, when you look in the Development Office, that Development Office is almost as reflective as the philanthropic group that's outside the institution. So in those areas that are-or you look at the senior-there isn't-if I think [unclear]. In the senior leadership here at Anderson, there's no person of color, no women, and you say, "In the twenty-first century, how is that [unclear]," that that also sends a message. (laughs) It almost says we're regressing to the extent, given that there were women for a good period of time in the senior leadership, there was a person of color in the senior leadership, and now there are not, I don't think people realize how that connects to the overall health of a city, overall health of a nation.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Tell me about that connection.
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
It goes back to what I said. Who are you determines the solutions to the problem, your experiences, and if that's not high on your list of things to address, then it's not addressed. If how your list is doing discovery, then it's like with Harold Varmus, who I've gotten to know well over the years, who was a former director of the National Institutes of Health, was faculty at UC San Francisco, and that's where I met him. My mentor was one of his mentors who then went to Memorial Sloan Kettering and then is now back at NIH as a director of National Cancer Institute. And people would say about Harold and how he viewed when the Office of Minority Health was created and he inherited it, and then it became a Center, he fought all those. He just fought them. And it wasn't because Harold was opposed. He just thought that, you know, he treated everyone the same and that there wasn't any need for this, and that if he deemed you of the same intellectual character that he was, he could care whether you were purple, green, polka dot. But that's not society. But he was bringing his experiences into how he approached things, and so those experiences have an implication on how you address certain issues.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Plus, I suspect that there are areas in which he saw differences and acted on differences but was completely unaware of that.
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Right. So that carries on at any level. It carries on here at Anderson. One of the things that Ken Shine, when he was executive vice chancellor for Health Affairs here at UT System-well, he's known me since I was a graduate student when he was in California, and I got to know him even better when I served on a number of Institute of Medicine committees. When Dr. DePinho was becoming president of MD Anderson and I had severe reservations about that, and I talked to Ken about those reservations, and his response to me was, "Well, he comes from a first-generation immigrant poor background." And my response to him was, "It's one thing to be poor white and it's another thing to be poor person of color. It has different ramification." So, yeah, his experiences with regards to poverty and that, I can sense his experiences in terms of being poor black child coming through the system, he may empathize, but I don't think he can relate, and I think that's my concern, is that he will take the same approach that, unfortunately, some minorities do in that "I was able to get to Point X without anyone's help or with my family's help, and that's our thing, and I think everyone else should be able to do the same thing," and that's-
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, that's very common.
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Yeah, and that's not going to happen.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you have other reservations about Dr. DePinho when he was being vetted?
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Yeah. I think that was my chief one. I think that my sense in having met individuals in leadership roles, if they could be made aware of their biases and without reacting in a negative manner or feeling that they're being attacked or being criticized in some manner, turned out to be excellent individuals in addressing the issue of health in a broad way. I give the example of Frank Levine, who was the president of University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for a period of time, at one time had three African American chairs in a medical school in the seventies.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. That's the punch line. (laughs)
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Who led to major change in the composition of the medical classes that came through UTMB, that's still having impact today, but he realized that the health of Galveston was directly related to his institution and the people who made up his institution, and that there was a need to make a change. And he made the comment, "If [unclear] to integrate the University of Texas football team, I should be able to integrate the medical school, because most people don't realize to run those plays, you have to be intelligent." (laughs) There's no such thing as a dumb jock. It may be in terms of his ability in society, but they have to have the intelligence to know where to be at one time and that sort of thing, and to calculate the flight of the ball, although they may not think they're doing that, so that they are at the appointed space when the ball lands so that they can catch it. But there have been very few individuals like that, but when they do have that sort of openness-and Ken kind of said, "Well, I think-." He says, "Ron has that." And, you know, that's just the way it is. And it's not that he's unique. It's people don't understand the relationships because they're so far up the food chain that it doesn't impact them in a way in everyday living.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Have there been some individuals at MD Anderson in position of leadership that have had that kind of awareness?
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Yes, and some have been after they've left. Mickey LeMaistre's one [Charles A. LeMaistre, MD [Oral History Interview]]. Dr. LeMaistre said to me about six months after Dr. Mendelsohn became president of MD Anderson, he came over to me at a dinner party, he put his arms around me and he says, "I bet you miss me now." And I said, "Yes, I do." I said, "Although your level of understanding was not where I wanted it to be, your level of understanding of the new leadership is far superior than where it is, in terms of understand what needs to be done and how it needs to be done." I would say J Freireich to some extent. If it wasn't for J, the first Biennial Symposium would not have taken place, because, for his reasons, he was a cheerleader in terms of getting the American Cancer Society to support the meeting. And his comment was, he says, "You know, Lovell, you talk about all this racial bias and this sort of thing. I want you to have a chance to fail with the resources that you need, so that when I say to you, "˜See,' you can't say, "˜I didn't have the money to make it happen, to do it.'" Then after I succeeded, he became a supporter in terms of moving things forward. And as I described him as someone who saw that he had made a miscalculation in his judgment and was willing to say, "Hey, I was wrong, and let's move forward and do something with it," although he didn't completely change in a whole lot of things, but he did in that area. Ki Hong, in a way. He, to an extent, hired one of the first African American medical oncologists here. And then I would say more than anyone-and I often wonder which way this place would have gone-Andy von Eschenbach and more Madelyn von Eschenbach. Most people don't realize that Madelyn, when Jesse Jackson ran for the presidency, she was his campaign manager here in Texas. (laughs) At one time, the three senior clinical fellows, [unclear] fellows in Andy's department were all African American, so that just set a tone, and then he actually hired Curtis Pettaway on to the faculty, and you can see the benefits of that support, because Curtis now is the only African American tenured full professor in the clinical sciences here, and that came from the nurturing and support that Andy gave. When Andy became provost, he called me in his office and he said, "Listen, you've been treated poorly, and let's see how we can fit you into the system." And he was the one that actually attempted to pull me into Cancer Prevention and Control initially, to Bernard Levin's dismay, because he, Bernard, knew the overall feeling of the power structure and was like, "Oh, I'm getting another bad [unclear] that I'm going to have to end up dealing with." So what Bernard did was, we had meetings on a biweekly basis for him to educate me about how I should appropriate interact with the administration. (laughs) In the end, when he was leaving-when I think about it, it's always when people are leaving-I took him with me on a trip to South Africa because I had been asked by the Lesotho government to help them develop a health plan to address the health needs, and I put together a group of individuals from across the country, congressional leaders, took Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee with me, I took several major economists with me, I took community leaders with me. It was about twenty [unclear] group of individuals, to really develop a plan of action. And I had the opportunity, Dr. Levin and I flew together. That was the first time he had been back home to South Africa, and we talked about our past lives and so forth. And I'll never forget, he came up to me in the hotel one morning at breakfast, and he says, "People really respect you." "Yeah." He says, "And you're able to get people to do things." And I said, "[unclear]." He says, "I'm going to make a request of you that's going to sound difficult for you." It wasn't in those words, but something along those lines. And he said, "I know there's a report that we're going to be putting together. You let me lead it, because if you come back to lead it, it's not going to get done. There's going to be a whole lot of obstacles thrown your way, so let me do it in my shop."
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And this is the report on this trip to South Africa?
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
Mm-hmm, for Lesotho, to be given to the Minister of Health in Washington. So we came back and he assigned his chief writer, and he put the budget up to do it, and it was done. It was given to the Millenium Foundation and several other groups to really look at what needed to be done with Lesotho. And he said to me, he says, "I really made several mistakes." Because, remember, he was the one earlier I mentioned that said I needed not to apply to be department chair, but be the person to serve on the committee to select my boss, and I think he realized that, that that was an impression that he had been given by others, and he never had a personal, direct interaction with me. So when he did, it just changed his thought pattern. So when he was leaving, at his reception he came to me and he says, "Listen, I said to Ernie Hawk that he really needs to take care of you when he comes, that he's going to get a lot of descriptions of you, but that he really needs to get to know you." Then he did, until I said-he realized that he was swimming against the tide, because one day after meeting with a group in Prevention, I went up to him and I said, "Dr. Hawk, when will I be able to get the line item?" And he said, "Line item?" I said, "MNO [phonetic] budget to support the Center that any of the other centers have here." He turned to me and he said, "They really hate you." (laughs)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Lovell A. Jones, PhD:
And he kind of said, "If I'm going to get my things through, then I have to drop your thing." And that was the change of support that kind of took place, and I realized that it was what it was, and that the only support I had was continuing to get the monetary stream from outside, and that once that stream ended, that that would be open season in terms of any kind of barriers from what would take place. So I think that, in turn, gives you a nutshell where I think the institution is. And I said at the strategic planning meeting, "You can do all the discoveries you want, but if you don't have a way to deliver it, it's not going to make a hill of difference." And that's what's occurring not only here, but, I think, to a large extent across the country. So it's going to be interesting over the next decade to see where this place and other places like it are going to be, if they're still going to be at the top, or if they're just going to be there.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Lovell A. PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 13: MD Anderson Leaders and Diversity" (2014). Interview Chapters. 609.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/609
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