Mick Hartley

An alarming Tablet article by John Sailer looks at the spread of a highly ideological DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] program in US medical schools.

While this hyper-racialized approach has long been the norm in humanities departments, it now appears to have fully crossed over into the hard sciences as well, with medical schools leading the charge. Med schools across the country have aggressively embraced DEI programming, often instituting policies that promote a narrow vision of social justice. In 2021, the University of Michigan Medical School created its Anti-Racism Oversight Committee Action Plan, making a set of new policy recommendations that had won the endorsement of the medical school’s leadership. That action plan called for a new curriculum to help inculcate a “demonstrated increase in understandings of DEI, antiracism, and intersectionality concepts in medical students and residents.” For medical residents, the plan stipulated that the curriculum should be based on Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning.

Some of these initiatives create obvious issues of academic freedom. In 2020, the UNC School of Medicine created a “Task Force for Integrating Social Justice Into the Curriculum,” issuing a report with dozens of recommendations. One called for faculty to adhere to “core concepts of anti-racism,” listing several of these required “concepts,” including “race is not a set biological category” and “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders.”

Whoa! We can certainly argue about race not being a "set biological category"…but “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders”?? Are they really saying that, in a medical school, the idea that, say, a penis is a male organ should not be taught?…that, in effect, biological sex isn't real?

Unfortunately we hear no more about gender as the writer's concern here is with the ideological embrace of an extreme understanding of racism, but I'd like to have had more detail on the subject of organs and genders. 

Anyway yes, it's not good. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), for instance – an institution devoted exclusively to the medical sciences, and one of the top recipients of federal grants from the National Institutes of Health:

Because of the ideological project associated with DEI initiatives, critics often highlight their effect on curriculum and teaching. But the more potent effect, in the long run, could end up being on scientific research and scholarship.

For the UCSF Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research, the stated goal is to transform the university’s research enterprise. “To truly rectify the entrenched, structural harms from racism in research,” the task force report notes, “we must start from its foundations in the way that we privilege knowledge, methods, and people. The overarching changes required to mitigate racism in research is a philosophical shift in the mindset of those in power and those who produce research.”…

In other words, under the new ideological regime that has taken power both inside the federal bureaucracy and in institutions like UCSF, even medical research has become yet another front in a larger ideological battle. Tomorrow’s doctors and medical experts are being selected and trained on the basis of their willingness to “disrupt power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people.”…

More broadly, many of these measures could pose a threat to academic freedom. Organizations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have argued against mandatory diversity statements. After all, given that DEI is often associated with a narrow set of social and political views, it’s not hard to see how evaluating a professor’s commitment to DEI invites viewpoint discrimination. An “anti-racism” advisory board that reviews grants would only extend that policy further.

By the time it published the report, the UCSF task force was aware of all of these issues. Each had been brought up by UCSF employees during the comment period. The comments were published in the report’s appendixes, which make up perhaps the most telling part of the whole publication.

One commenter repeated the same line in every answer: “I fundamentally do not feel or have ever felt that UCSF is a racist place. These are grossly misdirected funds and efforts.” Several cautioned against embracing discriminatory policies in the name of anti-racism. “All of the above sounds to me like trying to fight racism with more racism,” one noted. Still others urge the task force not to distract from UCSF’s focus on scientific research. As one commenter put it, “UCSF is a medical and life science campus. Its strength lies in its objective data-driven experimental approach. Qualitative and sociological research has no place at UCSF and no place in scientific medical research and will undermine UCSF’s reputation.”

Yet rather than addressing the concerns of the school’s employees, the report attacks them while presenting its authors as the real victims.

It is important to note that while many of the comments received were constructive and helpful, task force members were traumatized by a striking number of comments that denied the existence of inequities and racism, and others that minimized the burden that racism has imposed, particularly on Black Americans at UCSF.

Traumatised? They, adult task force members, were traumatised by hearing people disagreeing with them? This isn't the language of respectful debate: this is the language of ideological coercion.

The forward to the report quotes one of the task force co-chairs, Sun Yu Cotter, who adds:

It is extremely important to acknowledge the magnitude of the emotional labor and trauma that many of the Task Force members endured in doing this work, particularly during the public comment period. Not only are many of the Task Force members, especially our Black colleagues, encountering and navigating racism on a daily basis at work and outside of work, we are also volunteering our very limited time to dive into grueling work (the minority tax is real!). Then to be gaslit by some members of our very own UCSF community was very painful.

Take note. This is the future of American medicine.