“Van az a penz” — “There’s always a price”
By
Leonard Zwellling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/hungary-viktor-orban.html
This blog’s title is from an op-ed in The New York Times by David Pressman (on-line, July 23), the former ambassador to Hungary in the Biden Administration. The piece describes his experience witnessing how freedom and democracy were eroded in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. His main point is that it was the acquiescence of the media, the judiciary, and the academics of Hungary to Orban’s induced fear that allowed a strongman to turn Hungary into the autocracy it is today. In thinking they could get along by going along, the major facets of society that would normally serve as protective guardrails for individual rights and democracy when a would-be autocrat takes power, cost Hungarians their freedom.
He then goes on to equate what happened in Hungary to what is happening in the United States today as universities, law firms, and large corporations bend their knees to the demands of the Trump Administration as the President and his acolytes take the country apart. Academic freedom, scientific inquiry, and truth are being sacrificed to the MAGA line of horse hockey about just about everything from vaccines to tariffs to Jeffrey Epstein (should I care about this one?).
As usual, I am going to extend this analogy to what happened and is happening at MD Anderson. When Ron DePinho tried to take over the institution and dictate its scientific direction and capture all its resources from lab space to furniture allowances, there was sufficient pushback both from the faculty (remember Fred Lange’s prescient statement at a large faculty forum that the leadership looked at the faculty as an “ATM”?) and, fortunately, from exceptional leadership in Austin (Chancellor McRaven). Ron was soon out.
Pisters is far more clever and his wiliness and stealth have been rewarded with undeserved longevity as president. (Pisters has been ably assisted by weak leadership in Austin.) Pisters has successfully cowed the faculty into passivity. His Executive Leadership Team is filled with pretend oncologists (with the exception of the recent addition of Jeff Lee as a breath of fresh air) and academics of little scientific accomplishment who cannot recognize their own mediocrity. They will not stand up to Pisters. Instead, they laud him and fawn over him so as to maintain their million- dollar salaries.
And as long as I am criticizing vice presidents, when I was one, I often clashed with major faculty figures (who really were world-class clinical investigators back then) and certainly with then-president John Mendelsohn. Dr. Mendelsohn was very old-school in his attitude about protocol-based research. He, like many faculty back then, thought the ultimate decision about how to manage a patient on a protocol was up to the physician even if the clinical decision violated the protocol. (My favorite of these was giving additional doses of experimental phase I drugs after the patient’s cancer grew because “it was good for the patient.”) Unfortunately, under the Code of Federal Regulation, those decisions must adhere to the terms of the protocol. Dr. Mendelsohn and I would fight about this frequently. So, I know about speaking truth to power and, indeed, suffering the consequences. (At the end of our time together, I believe that John and I did not like each other, but we respected each other.)
Today’s MD Anderson ELT members do whatever Peter tells them to do, no matter how it affects the faculty or even patient care let alone research. In their silence, the ELT will make sure the Anderson mission and the Anderson faculty pay the price.
I understand that I am just an old guy. I know the current young faculty would look at my ideas as dated. But those ideas are the ones that I learned from my mentors and from the distinguished faculty who built MD Anderson. These are the people I was privileged to work with when I was a vice president. The fact that the current president is a miserable leader of minor academic accomplishment who has surrounded himself with yes men and yes women is regrettable.
There’s always a price and there will be one at Anderson. The cancer center may remain number one in cancer care. This really reflects how poor cancer care is everywhere else. I fear Anderson too has regressed to the mean in cancer research excellence. And the mean is shifting to the left.
