Fear As A Management Tool
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/us/politics/trump-retribution.html
Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times wrote of the unusual difficulty he encountered getting sources to go on record commenting about whether or not it was credible that the Secret Service had put former FBI Director James Comey under surveillance putatively for posting a threatening message toward President Trump. Lawyers in large firms who usually were happy to venture opinions were unwilling to do so for fear of getting their firms on President Trump’s hit list. It seems that Mr. Trump’s threats and intimidation were working in allowing him to manage his political opposition through fear.
I have been intimidated by a president, too. This would be Ron DePinho when he was president of MD Anderson and I had just begun my blog. I thought he was a terrible choice as president given his lack of any credentials as a cancer doctor and was obvious megalomaniacal from day one claiming he was going to cure five cancers in five years—or at least that is what we heard.
What a bully! I believe Paul Goldberg wrote a piece in the Cancer Letter that DePinho didn’t like and DePinho accused me of leaking slides from the Faculty Senate to the press. I made no secret that Paul and I are friends. DePinho tried to intimidate me to my face in his office in the presence of the chair and in-coming chair of the Faculty Senate. He was trying to frighten me. It didn’t work. First, I had never seen the slides to which he referred and told him so. Second, I thought he was a vengeful man and very corrupt in his nepotism and I would not give in to the likes of him. Finally, Chancellor McRaven took care of the DePinho menace.
Flash forward to the present. The current president of MD Anderson is using the same strategy, but with far more effective tactics. Rather than yell at people, he fires them and accumulates more and more power to do so even getting help from the state legislature. He is proposing to lower salaries of established faculty. He has eliminated MD Anderson Pediatrics. He has removed some of the best clinicians among the faculty for bogus reasons (what the heck is unprofessionalism?) and to the detriment of patient care. And, much like President Trump (see Maureen Dowd’s piece in The NYT;
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/opinion/trump-cabinet-hegseth-bondi.html),
Pisters has surrounded himself with an inept and impotent leadership team, even removing from a chairmanship perhaps the most famous clinical investigator at the institution. If that doesn’t strike fear into the rest of the faculty, I don’t know what will.
No wonder no one at Anderson will risk his big salaries and oppose Pisters. No wonder the Pediatrics faculty says not a word as they become employees of Texas Children’s. No wonder, despite the best of efforts by the Faculty Senate to mobilize some consideration to tell Pisters that his plan is not theirs, no faculty members at-large say a word. And now, it seems, thanks to the state legislature, the Faculty Senate will cease its existence on September 1.
The sound of the loyal opposition in domestic and academic politics right now is crickets. No one will talk. No one will oppose. No one will raise the issue of higher principles.
I’ve already written about my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The self-guided tour starts on the third floor and works its way down. That top floor displays the seeds of the Holocaust in German compliance and Jewish victimhood. Hitler too came to power legally. In Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the new display also starts high and goes down low, before it rises to the rebirth of the Jewish people in Israel.
I thought there would be a rebirth of the Anderson faculty once DePinho was gone. I was wrong. It’s worse than ever. Now, no one talks. I fear for what is next. Is there a way out of the darkness?
