The Real Core Value At MD Anderson Is Power
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/opinion/donald-trump-pagan-king.html?searchResultPosition=1
In this guest editorial in The New York Times on February 13, documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse outlines how the Trump Administration is casting aside any pretense that morality and ethics guide its policies. He quotes Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s description of Trump World.
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
What Woodhouse believes has changed is the justification that strong nations use when they abuse Christian ethics in dominating the weak. He argues that, in the end, it was Christian ethics that did away with slavery, decreased segregation, was the basis for the Declaration of Independence, and put some limits on imperialism. None of these evils have ended, but at least in the recent past when policies and actions were driven by raw power, leaders felt the need to justify those actions as liberation for the betterment of the weak. It is clear from the Trump Administration’s actions from Venezuela to Minneapolis its only core value is power.
Here’s what Trump advisor Stephen Miller had to say about this to Jake Tapper:
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
MD Anderson too has become such a world.
Where once patient welfare, scientific discovery, and intellectual honesty were the coin of the realm at Anderson, it is now driven solely by the exercise of power by institutional leadership to maintain its dominance, its high salaries, and its claim on the history of what was once a great cancer center and has now regressed to the mean of quality and academic pursuits.
Unlike the Trump Administration’s abrupt willingness to ignore Christian sensitivity to the weak, MD Anderson’s decline in morals and ethics was a gradual one that began 25 years ago and has slipped ever lower with each passing year. This has largely been due to poor leadership, greed, and the lack of oversight from Austin.
The recent comments to my blog called “Beard” make it clear that this institutional regression from academic excellence to power-based mediocrity is recognized by the faculty who are the major victims in this unbalanced power struggle.
I have been asked frequently what can be done to restore the balance between leadership and rank-and-file faculty. Is there any possibility that even a modicum of shared governance can be restored? There are only two choices. Either the Board of Regents and Chancellor recognize the problem in Houston and make the needed changes with new leadership or the faculty needs to express itself in a fashion that is both unambiguous and that seizes back some of the power stolen from it when the Faculty Senate was killed.
Recently there has been a nursing strike in New York City. My sources tell me it was effective. The nurses got pay raises.
The faculty at MD Anderson doesn’t necessarily want pay raises as much as it wants equity in having a voice in the policies and processes governing the institution and new, visionary leadership that brings the cancer center into the 21st century.
Without a senate or something like it, it is going to be difficult for the faculty to express its displeasure with leadership in a coordinated fashion. Thus, I believe, that the first thing that must occur is the assembly of something like a faculty senate-like body which, as I understand it, is not outlawed by the recent legislation that killed the old senates.
Frankly, if I were still a faculty member with a lab trying to find 40% of my salary using grant dollars, I think I would be looking for a new job—outside of academic medicine. I fear many of the best faculty of MD Anderson may be doing just that.
