Sever the Med School-Iranian Connection

THE MEDICAL SCHOOL faculty's vote last week to end its institutional involvement with Columbia and Cornell Medical Schools in planning a new medical center in Iran is the right decision made for the wrong reason. The faculty made clear at its meeting that it does not want to be responsible for a project whose policies it could not determine, but it failed to condemn Iran's outright police state.

The plans for the Imperial Medical Center of Iran (IMCI), to be funded by the Iranian government, reflect the Shah's political attitudes. Like most Third World nations, Iran needs to deliver primary health care to its entire population. Instead, the IMCI plans call for a referral center that would "provide sophisticated health care to the many Iranians who today can afford to seek care." Another major goal of the project is to encourage American-trained Iranian physicians to return to staff the new center and conduct their potentially important research at home. But the plans do not provide for any kind of redistribution of medical aid in Iran.

The expatriates should not be expected to return to, nor should American universities train physicians for a government that, since its inception in 1953 in the wake of a CIA-sponsored coup, has been run as a dictatorship. For the Med School to do so would mean ignoring Iran's 70,000 member secret police force, which keeps tight control on political action and education, spreading its web tight enough to include at least one agent in every university classroom. It would mean denying the 25,000 political prisoners now in Iran. It would mean justifying the use of torture.

The Medical School's new arrangement with the consortium allows the dean to make recommendations on the IMCI plans, as long as he submits his proposals to the Harvard faculty first. But the faculty must see that it is hypocritical for them as members of a medical school increasingly concerned with the equal distribution of health care to be connected--even unofficially--to a regime that patently ignores its citizens' well-being. Dean Ebert should resign as an ex-officio member of the medical school consortium, citing political reasons.