A Look Back on a Sometimes Quirky Process
by Jane Myers and Danielle Turner
Retired New England pediatrician Ruth Appleton Bell (M.D. 1946)
still remembers clearly the Friday in June 1946 when she received
a telephone call from Dean Albert Furstenberg’s rather stern
secretary, Vera Cummings. “She told me the dean wanted to meet
with me the following Monday,” Bell relates. “I knew I was going
to graduate, but being told by Vera Cummings that you had to
meet with the dean was still a scary prospect. My friends and
I spent the weekend trying to figure out what it meant.”
As it turned out, the dean had a personal question to pose
to the new M.D., who was one of only four women in her class.
He wanted to know if his daughter Nancy’s desire to become a
physician should be encouraged or not. “I told him I’d had a
wonderful time in medical school as a woman, and that there
was no reason Nancy shouldn’t become a doctor,” Bell recalls.
“I did suggest that she go elsewhere so as not to have her father
as the dean.” (Nancy Furstenberg did become a doctor, and she
did go to another school, the University of Wisconsin, to earn
her medical degree.)
Furstenberg, now living in Ann Arbor, herself remembers her
father feeling uneasy about educating women to be physicians,
but having a dedication to diversity unusual for the era. “My
father was much in favor of admitting minorities,” she says,
“and he actively championed the admission of Jewish students.”
Such was not the case when Max Karl Newman applied to Michigan.
Newman (M.D. 1934), of Bloomfield Hills, who with his family
recently established the Newman Family Professorship in Radiation
Oncology, has vivid memories of his own admissions interview
in the late 1920s when then Dean Hugh Cabot told him that, despite
his shining academic record, he would not be admitted to Michigan
because “we don’t need any more of your kind.” Newman patiently
waited for the appointment of Frederick Novy to the deanship
in 1930, reapplied and was accepted.
In the absence of standards and written admissions policies,
human quirkiness did play a significant role in who was chosen
for admission and who was rejected. “Vera Cummings and my mother
both helped with admissions,” Nancy Furstenberg recalls. “My
mother’s compensation for her services was a mink coat my dad
bought for her.”
In the mid-1950s the School established its first admissions
committee, which attempted to judge applicants in a more objective
way. Robert Lovell (M.D. 1944, Residency 1950), then assistant
dean of admissions, was one of four members on that first committee.
“I think our prejudices neutralized each other’s,” he remembers.
“In the required personal interview, we looked to see if the
applicant was friendly and sincere.” Except for a student’s
previous academic record, though, there was little standardized
information to use in making decisions. “The Medical College
Admissions Test was still new enough that it could not yet serve
as a predictor of success in medical school,” Lovell says. “A
poor MCAT score did not cause us to disqualify a student for
admission on those grounds.”
At Michigan, as at other medical schools across the country,
social and cultural changes, always evolving, have, over the
years, strongly influenced both those seeking medical careers
and the admissions criteria used to judge their likely success
and satisfaction as medical professionals. The widely publicized
legal challenges now facing the larger University offer dramatic
proof of the intense emotions and complex judicial considerations
that even today are helping to define admissions practices across
America.
Also:
Medical School Admissions At Michigan
A Look Back on a Sometimes Quirky Process
Undergraduate Opportunities in
Research Help Prepare Students Interested in Medicine
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