MONTREAL The top brass of McGill Universitys medical school had a very pointed message about its admissions procedure at a town-hall meeting Tuesday afternoon: This is the way it has to be.

Meeting mainly students and faculty at a full-house meeting, medicine faculty officials laid out the reasoning for their push for diversity, acknowledged there may be ramifications that not everyone is happy about, but strongly defended their process and the rationale behind it.

They were grilled about why McGill eliminated the MCAT as an admissions screening tool; why they dont have a language proficiency test for potential students; and what their responsibility is to provide accessibility for the English community.

As a medical school we have a responsibility to the people of Montreal and its environs, but we also have a responsibility to Gatineau and Abitibi, said Dr. David Eidelman, the dean of medicine. I feel very strongly that using language tests as a basis for accepting students is wrong. The fact that some of our sister schools have decided to do this is something I think people should take up with them.

But there was a hint at one possible concession that the title of Admissions, Equity and Diversity (it is the only medical school in North America to include equity and diversity in the title of its admissions office) may have been a mistake and may be changed.

We should have two offices one for admissions and one to promote the ideals of diversity, suggested Dr. Barry Slapcoff, a family physician who recently ended a long association with the admissions committee. Many refused candidates and their families may come to the conclusion they were rejected because they were not the right type of diverse.

Eidelman said the faculty, in fact, probably will move in that direction.

Although the external review said not to do that, its clear from a lot of feedback that it leads to confusion, Eidelman said. I think the decision to do that was made rather hastily a number of years ago. but certainly were very open to that suggestion.

Having taken a lot of heat for focusing on creating diversity in the faculty and courting francophone applicants sparking resentment this has been done at the expense of its traditional anglophone cohort medical school officials reiterated to a sometimes hostile crowd gathered in an amphitheatre of the McIntyre Medical Science Building that their strategy was both necessary and desirable.

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McGill med school defends process