Black in Academic Medicine: Twice As Good Yet Never Enough

Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship on August 5, 2026, after weeks of headlines accusing him of plagiarizing his PhD thesis and embellishing his own life story. Nine days later he was found dead at 41.

Just 3 years earlier he had become the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history, a sociologist who said he didn’t speak until he was 11 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. His family said he had endured “a campaign of sustained abuse.” Meanwhile, Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday his doctorate and had previously investigated the plagiarism allegations, did not uphold the allegations and instead attributed the problems to “honest and reasonable error.“

Arday’s case isn’t unique for a Black person in academia. We believe our degrees protect us, that each accolade confers a little more protection in rooms where we are the only one. But no credential can protect you in a space that treats you as a guest it didn’t invite.

We were raised on one line: you have to be twice as good to get half as much. It’s meant to protect you. What nobody warns you is that being twice as good was never really the test.

Arday wasn’t just hired, he was displayed, held up as proof that talent can come from anywhere. He was used, and then pushed out. Academic medicine shares the same patterns.

Race in Academic Medicine

Black physicians are 5.7% of the active U.S. physician workforce. Black faculty are about 3.6% of full-time U.S. medical school faculty, and the share thins at every rung: Black women are 2.8% of women full professors, and Black men are 1.6% of men full professors. Meanwhile, Black Americans make up 14% of the population. When there are that few of you on a faculty, you don’t get to be just an academic. You are a case study, and everyone is waiting to see what you prove and if you are worthy.

I saw this early on in medicine. As a trainee, I was made to feel as if I didn’t have a voice. On one rotation, a patient had just come back from surgery, pale and tachycardic. She was unresponsive. The attending asked what could be wrong. I said she was probably hemorrhaging. I was told immediately to leave the room. I later found out she had been taken back to the OR; I had been right.

I learned quickly that simply being present was a privilege, and that bringing attention to myself was never the answer. So, I got quieter and focused on my work. I later learned that my quietness was also too loud. No matter how you contort yourself for a space that isn’t inviting, you will never be enough.

This trend shows up everywhere we bother to measure it. The odds of election to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society were nearly six times greater for white medical students than for Black students, even after adjusting for board scores, research, leadership, and professionalism. White students were more likely to be described as “exceptional” than Black students after controlling for Step 1 scores, while Black students were simply described as “competent.” And, as of 2011, Black applicants remained 10 percentage points less likely to win NIH research funding than white applicants after controlling for training, publications, and prior awards.

Why does that matter? Because research decides who gets promoted, and promotion decides who becomes a professor.

And then there is academic discipline, where the stakes are a person’s career. Unpublished 2015 data from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education found that while 5% of resident physicians were Black, they accounted for 20% of residency dismissals.

Scrutiny in our field exists because patients can be harmed. Research integrity, credentialing, peer review, and licensure are not optional. Medicine has a standard. However, what differs is the enforcement. Race decides what enforcement becomes a quiet correction and who becomes a public statement.

In August 2020, Aysha Khoury, MD, a founding faculty member at a new medical school built explicitly around health equity, led her eight students in a discussion of implicit bias and racism in medicine. She was suspended later that day and ultimately terminated, prompted by a complaint from that class. She sued, and the school settled in January 2023. Princess Dennar, MD, was the first Black woman to direct a residency program at Tulane, celebrated as a first, then removed from that role. Tulane’s settlement with her was announced in 2022. Two Black women, two institutions, two settlements; no one found the women had done anything wrong in either case.

This is what the “twice as good” doctrine never accounts for. Exceptionalism isn’t a shield, it’s a spotlight, and a spotlight doesn’t care whether it’s aimed to admire you or to find a flaw. We are paying for it, and so are our patients.

In a cohort study of medical school faculty, Black faculty stayed a median of 7.78 years compared to 9.91 for white faculty. Unfortunately, each departure gets read as a personal choice rather than as a pattern. And this loss doesn’t stay inside the institution. Counties with a higher proportion of Black primary care physicians had a higher life expectancy for Black residents; they were also able to decrease the Black-white mortality gap. Despite knowing this, we burn through the few Black physicians we recruit and our communities end up carrying the burden.

Time for a Shift

This shouldn’t happen. Changing it starts here.

Stop treating a handful of people as symbols and start treating them as colleagues. If a Black faculty member appears in your recruitment materials more often than in your promotion pipeline, that’s a finding worth noting.

Offer sponsorship, not just mentorship. Mentorship is advice. Sponsorship is spending your own capital to put someone’s name in a room they aren’t in.

Count invisible labor as work. The committee seats, the endless mentoring. Labor that should be considered when it is time for promotion.

Track who gets referred to remediation, who gets reported, and who gets a quiet conversation instead. Do it by demographic data, every year, and publish it.

Hold everyone to the same standard of misconduct, privately and fairly, and let the process finish before the public judgment begins. And when the story changes, as it did for Arday, stand by the person you celebrated instead of stepping back before anything has been decided.

To every Black medical student and resident being told they have to be twice as good: I won’t take the words back. They’re true. But here’s what our parents couldn’t bring themselves to add: Being twice as good won’t save you, because your worth was never really on trial, and it was never something you had to earn by being exceptional. You are already enough. The tragedy is a world that made so many of us believe we weren’t, and a system that keeps proving the point.