Better Medicine through
Diversity
From Medical Students to Highest-Ranking Administrators NJMS Dean Robert L. Johnson, MD, and Vice Dean Maria Soto-Greene, MD, discuss the experiences that drive their commitment to diversity and inclusion. | By Genene W. Morris
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very August, scores of first-year students spill out onto the plaza of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School to take part in the institution’s annual White Coat Ceremony, a rite of passage welcoming new medical students to the healthcare field. There, trainees from different walks of life —African Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, Asians, and the many other dimensions of diversity— gather, knitted together by their aspirations to become physicians. Surveying the panoply of smiling, multi-complexioned faces, New Jersey Medical School Dean Robert L. Johnson, MD,’72, and Vice Dean Maria Soto-Greene, MD,’80, smile back, reveling in the scene that decades ago would have looked very different. In some ways it is a scene that speaks to NJMS’s standing as a school at the forefront of diversity and inclusion in medical education. It also hints at the story of the pair’s own journey from medical students who learned to practice at NJMS to their ascension as the academy’s two highest-ranking administrators, the first underrepresented minorities in the institution’s history to hold these prestigious positions. With their combined 92 years of service at NJMS, Johnson and Soto-Greene can remember a time when such gatherings at the school would have been predominantly male with very few underrepresented minorities to speak of. In fact, Johnson spent much of his educational experiences throughout the 1960s as an “only.” He was the only African-American in most of his classes at White Plains High School, a detail noted during a recent ceremony where he was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame. He was the only African-American in his undergraduate class at Alfred University. And, long before becoming the first AfricanAmerican dean at NJMS, he was the only African-American among his peers in the NJMS Class of 1972, and for a time, the only one in the entire school, Johnson adds. “When I first came here, I was the only minority in the school. I think the next year, the number of minority students doubled,” with the addition of one more underrepresented minority student, the professor of pediatrics and psychiatry says with a laugh. He points to 10
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his own graduation as an example of how far the school has come in terms of diversity and inclusion. “My wife, Maxine, talks about this. When she went to the graduation, she and I and my parents were the only black people in the whole place,” Johnson says.
Robert L. Johnson, MD
