With a reputation as diploma mills, Caribbean medical schools are dedicated for-profit businesses that serve rejected applicants from the United States – but they still depend on American hospitals for the crucial clinical experience required during the second half of a medical education. Recently, however, an effort has begun in New York City to limit their access to local hospitals since there are only a certain number of spots available for such field work, and charges of elitism are flying. But how is it possible for foreign medical schools to threaten turf belonging to American ones?
Because Caribbean medical schools are first and foremost businesses, they charge a lot of money to provide something of a second chance for students rejected by American medical schools. At an elite institution like Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, donors from investment banker Sanford I. Weill to real estate developer Isaac Toussie provide a lot of money, reducing costs to around forty-five thousand dollars every year. In contrast, a Caribbean medical school can charge as much as sixty thousand dollars!
And with so much money available, it’s no wonder that Caribbean schools can easily pay New York hospitals to let in their students – and no wonder, what’s more, the movement to restrict such access to American schools, which otherwise lose out.
Thus the turf war.
You see, what hospitals do is mentor medical students in exchange for using the school’s prestige. Caribbean medicals schools have no brand name to offer, but they do have several tens of millions of dollars to pump into a hospital’s coffers, in effect paying for their students to be placed.
And what hospital administration could possibly refuse such funds, particularly with this economy?
Standard business cards are all the range in Japan. Did you know that? Carrying cards for purposes of introduction has long been a popular custom in that country, not just for salarymen but many other kinds of people as well. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that in Japan, folks use standard business cards as conversational ice-breakers!
The movie “Good Morning” parodies this cultural tendency to substitute meaningless signs and symbols for real conversation and real connections. The social milieu depicted in the film is that of postwar Japan in the 1950s, though relatively few signs of want are to be found and indeed no mention whatsoever of war. The film is notable for humorously noting such meaningless exchanges of social etiquette, a routine very much related to the practice of trading business cards.
Of course, all human societies revolve around signs and symbols; we are creatures whose first impulse seems to be to indulge in abstract thinking. But the Japanese are justly noted for having taken such instincts to a higher level of development, of formalizing them so much more elaborately than many, to the point that their very language reflects social status by offering alternating forms of address depending on the listener’s place in the greater hierarchy: words will take on different suffixes simply to recognize such social distinctions!
And so we come to the exchange of business cards. It’s the ultimate in getting to know one another in a way that’s really important: one’s relative ranking! This is Japan, after all, a country with a cultural heritage that doesn’t pretend to be egalitarian and so has no qualms about formally identifying people’s social standings.
A militaristic mindset, potentially. It isn’t limited to Japan, of course – at least not in kind, though few other places can match it to the degree of its intensity, the degree of its prevalence and common observation.
And it happens to be one that’s great for business!
Business cards. Indeed, much too much could be made of something so straight-forward. Still, there’s enough cause for a consideration: things don’t just happen for no reason at all.
Indeed, non-Japanese businessmen and women trade cards all the time as well. In fact, the custom started outside Japan. But there isn’t the same “moral authority,” for lack of a better phrase – there isn’t the same “cultural force” (for continuing want of a good way of putting things) – attached to the business card in the West as there is in Japan.
The reason modest swimsuits are becoming more popular now could be on account of the rise in religious fundamentalism around the globe — or, to be more specific, with the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (though political Hinduism has gotten out of hand with its nationalists, too). Maybe it’s something to do with the kind of mindset typically fostered under monotheism, that there is only one right way, one right belief, and that everything else is evil, of the Devil. Mass murder may not be the sole province of a monotheistic outlook, but it is to say that most of the worst examples have been inspired by monotheistic passions.