The Emory Wheel

Volume 104, Issue 2

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Founded in 1919, The Emory Wheel is the financially and editorially independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University in Atlanta. The Wheel is a member publication of Media Council, Emory’s organization of student publications. The Wheel reserves the rights to all content as it appears in these pages, and permission to reproduce material must be granted by the editor-in-chief.

The statements and opinions expressed in the Wheel are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Wheel Editorial Board or of Emory University, its faculty, staff or administration.

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“At the same time, we have considered the needs of our graduate program in our hiring plan for the next three years, and we do expect to grow our faculty as we continue to meet important benchmarks that indicate our commitment to excellence and eminence in our teaching, research, engaged scholarship and service to Emory and the wider society,” Stewart wrote in an email to the Wheel.

Located in Atlanta, the cradle of the modern civil rights movement, Emory’s program will provide doctoral students “access to institutions, organizations and local histories and cultures at the very heart of African American political and cultural developments in the South, the U.S. and the broader African diaspora,” according to the program description.

Stewart told the Wheel that the Ph.D. program will encourage more “cutting-edge” research in the field.

“It invigorates not just our research faculty in engaging with the people’s medical issues to escalate and ultimately requires more hospital resources.

The average salary in Georgia is $18.75 per hour, according to a survey of 1124 salaries. If someone works eight hours per day for $18.75 per hour, a day trip to the ER would prevent them from making $150. However, the average cost of an ER visit is $1,589 for uninsured Georgians. This cost equates to what a person would earn if worked eight hours per day at $18.759 per hour for over 10 working days.

Steele added that some areas, like Queens and the Bronx, have a skewed patient-to-doctor ratio, meaning people do not have access to primary care, even if they can afford it.

“Primary care and preventive medicine is the best way to go,” Steele said. “We literally need more doctors, more providers in these very underserved areas.”

She added that doctors also tend to congregate in highly populated urban settings.

“There are also a lot of physicians that prefer to highly specialize,” Steele said. “If that’s your passion, you do need to be in an urban setting because you’re not going to have a patient population that you can serve in these smaller areas.”

Steele attributed “inappropriately expensive” medical care prices to poor allocation of resources — such as nurses, beds, additional hospital wings and X-ray machines — not corruption.

According to Marshall-Smith, the big difference between Grady and the other hospitals she has worked at is the funding. She stated that while hospitals were not ”rolling in dough,” a greater number of the patients at these hospitals were insured compared to Grady.

If a patient is insured, their payment to the hospital is guaranteed. However, uninsured patients — which make up 18% of Georgia adults — “may or may not pay,” according to Marshall-Smith. Since the care has already been delivered, a lot of care provided by Grady is not being reimbursed.

“The emergency room isn’t a moneymaker,” Steele said. “It tends to be a place that is expected to and is required to catch and read all, and because of that, there’s a lot of patients who have no insurance, there’s failure to pay, and it probably usually operates in the red. So, of course that’s going to influence an administrator’s decision when they’re allocating funding.”

Marshall-Smith added that Medicare expansion would benefit patients.

“As frustrating as those deficits are to deal with, I think they’re doing a pretty good job with what they have to try to limit those deficits and try to give the best care and the best option that we have,” Marshall-Smith said.

— Contact Melina Ross at melina.ross@emory.edu doctoral students but also brings a lot of energy and vigor to our undergraduate curriculum,” Stewart said. “It was very important for us to truly live into the research and teaching mission of our department, the college and of the wider university.”

In the program, students will participate in theoretical conversations and debates, pondering questions such as what it means to train for a Ph.D. in African American studies and become a public scholar.

“We want students who are deeply engaged and invested in what it means to become a scholar, a producer of knowledge and who are not afraid to live deeply into the mission of African American studies as a discipline from its inception,” Stewart said.

Students will also attend professional development workshops to “have real engagement with alternative career pathways from the very beginning,” Professor of African American Studies and History Walter Rucker, who chairs the faculty committee behind the program’s implementation, noted in the press release.

The program will have three cognate fields for students to choose from: gender and sexuality, social justice and social movements and expressive arts and culture.

The gender and sexuality field will focus on the interrelation between gender, sexuality and race to “shape social understandings of personhood,” according to the program description.

The social justice and social movements field will emphasize African Americans’ individual and organizational efforts to combat structural racism, and the expressive arts and culture field will explore African Americans’ regional, national and global contributions to this field.

“What is so powerful about this Ph.D. program is that it not only trains scholars, but also trains people to work outside the academy so that they can bring that expertise to public policy positions, to cultural art positions, to [non-governmental organizations],” Anderson wrote in the press release.

The African American studies department expects Ph.D. candidates to complete the program in five to six years. All students will be fully funded for five years and will receive an annual stipend of at least $34,000, along with a tuition remission and health insurance. There will also be an option for a sixth year of funding if needed.

All admitted doctoral students will also be assigned an advising team who will serve as mentors.

“We want to make sure we pour as much mentoring and advising as we can into each student,” Rucker wrote.

Reflecting on why Emory is the first university in the Southeast and the first private university in the South to have an African American studied Ph.D. program, Stewart pointed to the “lack of vision from leadership and a lack of critical mass” at other universities.

“It is truly important to have a vision and a mission of a university that clearly emphasizes support for the mission of African American studies as an ‘intellectual study,’” Stewart said. “In many institutions, that struggle to be seen as a legitimate discipline with research problems that matter is still a question, is still a challenge, is still a fight.”

— Contact Jaden Song at jaden.song@emory.edu

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