An Appallingly Insulting Music Video
By
Leonard Zwelling
They arrived in my email almost simultaneously.
The first link was to one of the most appalling ideas I have ever seen, a music video featuring the administrative leadership of MD Anderson dancing and laughing, often without masks. (However one sequence featured masked dancers so this must have been produced fairly recent.) This video even included the president of MD Anderson. I assume this was supposed to be a light-hearted spirit lifter showing how human these people are. Instead, it just reminds everyone of the dire straits the institution is in compounded by the fact that the leaders have the time for this nonsense. That leadership is out of touch with reality. What could anyone of them have been thinking–that this would be a way to bring the MD Anderson community, much of it still sequestered at home, into a state of happy oblivion?
And by the way, other than the president, who says these are the real leaders of MD Anderson? The leaders are the faculty Division Heads and department chairs who are trying to see patients and perform research despite the administrative leadership and its arbitrary rules based on fear and arrogance. Well, at least now we know what that administrative leadership is up to. Dancing and making music videos.
The second link is to a description of the services that are now available at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center which sounds like it is anything but closed, both on the east side of Manhattan and throughout the metro New York area. MSKCC is open for business—all business.
It was hard for me to miss the juxtaposition of a serious cancer center in New York and its leadership and a frivolous cancer center in Houston and its leadership. The Cancer Letter of May 29 takes note of pay cuts taken by faculty at Mt. Sinai in New York and the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa to address corona-induced budget deficits. How exactly is the deficit at Anderson to be made up? It won’t be by dancing unless the leadership is crowd-sourcing the cost of the video.
If I were still a member of the faculty of MD Anderson, I would be incensed that those whose jobs purport to be setting an example are busy twerking for the cameras while many investigators languish at home unable to get back to work.
Personally, I believe that the Faculty Senate ought to take up this ridiculous waste of time, human resources, and money and question the competence of the leadership. They ought to send the video to the Board of Regents in Austin and question the continued fitness for duty of all who appear in it.
This is not leadership. This is nonsense. It is defiant of the hard working faculty and staff of MD Anderson that is itching to get back to work. It displays a complete lack of sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate at Anderson and beyond as highly paid administrators dance on roof tops and in luxury living rooms or near their swimming pools as many a graduate student languishes in his or her small apartment. It needs to end. I am afraid it is time for another change atop MD Anderson.
