[Dr. William Augustus Hinton. Photo via images.harvard.edu]
Harvard Medical School has approved renaming the Oliver Wendell Holmes Academic Society in honor of the late Dr. William Augustus Hinton, a former HMS clinical professor of bacteriology and immunology and 1912 HMS graduate.
The recommendation from a Faculty Council Subcommittee on Artwork and Cultural Representations task force is part of an ongoing effort to ensure that HMS buildings, symbols, academic societies and public spaces fully reflect the institution’s mission and values.
Holmes was one of the first American intellectuals to promote the racist doctrine of eugenics. In 1850, he revoked the acceptances of the Medical School’s first three Black students, writing that the “intermixing of the white and black races in their lecture rooms is distasteful to a large portion of the class and injurious to the interests of the school.”
Hinton — a 1905 graduate of the College and later HMS — specialized in the fields of bacteriology and immunology. He created a new diagnostic blood test for syphilis, one the U.S. Public Health Service later adopted.
Earlier this year, two medical students launched a petition to rename the former Holmes Society due to Holmes’s support of eugenics and racism towards Black and Indigenous people. The petition garnered over 1000 signatures from HMS and HSDM faculty, administrators, students, and alumni.
S. Allen Counter (photo via news.harvard.edu) by Rachael Dane via news.harvard.edu S. Allen Counter, the founding director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and a noted neurophysiologist, educator, and ethnographer, died on July 12. According to wikipedia.com, Counter was also known for his achievements as an explorer. In 1971, he located a group of people living in the rain forest in northern Brazil, Surinam and French Guiana; the group was descended from African slaves who had escaped from slave ships. In 1986, Counter located descendants of earlier U.S. explorers of the arctic, Matthew A. Henson and Robert E. Peary.Counter was elected to The Explorers Club in 1989. Counter also designed Arthur Ashe‘s memorial at Woodland Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, dedicated on what would have been Ashe’s 50th birthday on July 10, 1993.
“Harvard has lost a great champion of inclusion and belonging in Dr. Allen Counter,” said President Drew Faust. “Through his leadership of the Harvard Foundation, he advanced understanding among members of our community and challenged all of us to imagine and strive for a more welcoming University and a more peaceful world. We remember today a campus citizen whose deep love of Harvard, and especially our undergraduates, leaves a lasting legacy.”
“During my years as president of Harvard, no one did more than Allen to make minority students feel welcome and at home at Harvard, to promote fruitful interaction among all races, and to serve as understanding adults to whom many undergraduates could turn in order to register their concerns, answer their questions, and have their legitimate problems communicated to the Harvard administration so that they could be understood and acted upon in appropriate ways,” recalled Derek Bok, who led the University from 1971–91 and from 2006–07. “Much of what he accomplished was unrecognized, but his contributions were invaluable, and I will always feel a great debt of gratitude for his service to the University.”
Counter did his undergraduate work in biology and sensory physiology at Tennessee State University and his graduate studies in electrophysiology at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his Ph.D. He earned his M.D. at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He came to Harvard in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow and assistant neurophysiologist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Early in his University career, Counter lived in a student residence hall as dormitory director, resident tutor, and biological sciences tutor.
In the early 1970s, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) named him to the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1975, several proposals came before the council requesting funding for projects involving psychosurgery and electrode implants in human brains. At that time, the government’s rules protecting human subjects were still evolving, and Counter believed the projects were inherently racist. He insisted the council not approve them, and they were not acted upon.
In the same decade, Counter taught inmates at MCI Concord with the Massachusetts Correctional Concord Achievement Rehabilitation Volunteer Experience, where he said he gave inmates the same advice his grandmother had given him: “Read a book. Develop your mind.” A later study showed that participants in the program had a lower recidivism rate than prisoners who did not take part. After a sabbatical fellowship at UCLA with neuroscientist Alan D. Grinnell in the late 1970s, Counter returned to Cambridge, where his research at Harvard Medical School focused on clinical and basic studies on nerve and muscle physiology, auditory physiology, and neurophysiological diagnosis of brain-injured children and adults.
New Wellesley President Dr. Paula A. Johnson (photo via wellesley.edu) article by Jeremy Fox via bostonglobe.com Wellesley College announced Thursday it had appointed Dr. Paula A. Johnson, a Harvard Medical School professor and advocate for women’s health, as its president, making her the first African-American to lead the school.
Johnson will become the 14th president of the women’s liberal arts college in July. She replaces H. Kim Bottomly, who said in April she would step down after nine years.
Johnson, 56, said in an interview that she felt a special responsibility as the college’s first African-American leader and believes that student diversity is one of Wellesley’s strengths.
She said she would work “to not only strengthen and deepen that diversity, but also ensure that our residential experience is taking full advantage of that diversity, that our young women are really experiencing all the richness that that diversity brings on campus.”
Wellesley graduated its first African-American student in 1887. In 2014-2015, the most recent academic year for which data are available, the student population was 5 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic, 22 percent Asian, and 6 percent biracial or multiracial. Another 12 percent were international students.
On campus Thursday, the appointment resonated with sophomore Gabrielle Taylor.
“For someone who looks like me, a black woman, to become president of Wellesley College — it is so inspiring to me. She truly embodies black excellence,” said Taylor.
Johnson said that Wellesley has important work to do in preparing students for both the great expansion of leadership opportunities for women and the ongoing disparities in women’s employment and health care options.
“Wellesley could not be more relevant today in terms of its role in providing an outstanding liberal arts education, which we know is so critical to developing the next generation and to the future of our world,” she said.
A committee of students, alumnae, trustees, faculty, and staff unanimously recommended Johnson after an eight-month search.
“Even among a superb group of candidates, Dr. Johnson stood out through her record as a scholar and leader, together with her passion for women’s advancement, education, and well-being, the energy and insights she conveyed in our discussions, and her enthusiasm for Wellesley,” Debora de Hoyos, chairwoman of the search committee and a college trustee, said in a statement.
Johnson is the former chairwoman of the Boston Public Health Commission, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She attended Harvard and Radcliffe colleges and trained in internal and cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s. She is the daughter-in-law of a Wellesley alumna and lives with her husband and two children in Brookline.
She currently serves as the chief of the Division of Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s and is founder and executive director of the hospital’s Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health & Gender Biology.
Johnson’s work has focused in part on biological differences between women and men, seeking to correct a longstanding imbalance in medical research that looked only at men, she said.
“Dr. Johnson has devoted her life to improving the lives of women,” said Charlotte Harris, a Wellesley senior who served on the search committee, in a statement. “She truly understands the issues of equity, inclusion, and well-being that are so important to Wellesley students.”
The women’s college west of Boston has about 2,400 students and counts former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright among its graduates. Johnson said many Wellesley students support Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“There’s a tremendous excitement around the possibility of seeing a woman be next president,” she said. “It’s about leadership, and that leadership reflecting back at you and giving you a sense of pride and hope for what is possible.”
Wellesley made headlines last year when it announced it would begin accepting transgender women in the Class of 2020, following similar policy changes at women’s colleges such as Mount Holyoke in South Hadley and Simmons in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.
Johnson said it was a policy change that students, alumni, and the college leadership had embraced.
“The mission of Wellesley is to educate women, and women who will make a difference in the world,” she said, “and I think that embracing transgender women is part of our mission.” Dina Rudick of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Valerie Montgomery Rice was named the next president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She will take office upon the retirement of John E. Maupin Jr. on July 1, 2014. Since 2011, Dr. Montgomery Rice has served as executive vice president and dean at Morehouse. Previously, she was a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
Dr. Rice will continue to serve as dean, or chief academic officer, when she becomes president of the Morehouse School of Medicine. “I consider it an honor that our board is entrusting me with the responsibility of continuing to build on the legacy of this pre-eminent institution,” said Dr. Montgomery Rice. “The vision is crystal clear. My role is to continue to further the mission while also positioning the school to remain relevant and at the forefront of an ever-changing medical education environment.”
A graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Montgomery Rice received her medical training at Harvard Medical School.
