Distinguished Black Emory Professor Explains How I Saved His Career From Michigan Psychoanalysts

“Without [Dr. Coyne’s] assistance, I certainly wouldn't have graduated. He saw an injustice and worked hard to resolve it.”

Kenneth Carter, PhD is Founding Director of the Emory Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Oxford College of Emory University.

This article continues the saga of racism and reprisals in the University of Michigan Clinical Psychology Program in the 1990s and its haunting presence in my life 30 years later. After providing more background, I will focus on a letter of support I solicited from Kenneth Carter, Ph.D., who held a minority supplement in 2011. The occasion for my request was that I discovered hateful material had been circulating on the Internet for two decades, including being shared with Penn a few years after I arrived there. The material was placed there by University of Michigan psychiatrist Elizabeth Young. It was retaliation for the oversized role attributed to me in the minority student unrest in the Clinical Psychology Program and its Captive Consortium.

Dr. Carter reports being allowed to accept a minority…