Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has no place in medicine - opinion

In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the world watched as leading universities, human rights organizations, and so-called progressive groups fell over themselves to excuse the rape and slaughter by Hamas. For many, it came as a shock. For myself, it was the logical escalation of the poisonous ideology that has captured leading American institutions – including in my own field, medicine, where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have overtaken schools, research programs, and professional associations.

Now, the corrosive consequences of medicine’s widespread embrace of identity politics are on full display, with top medical institutions going silent on the Hamas attacks despite their heartfelt statements on Black Lives Matter and Ukraine, and doctors carrying out blatant public displays of antisemitism, sometimes without disciplinary consequences.

A November 2022 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges offered an alarming window into the degree to which DEI has captured modern medical education. According to the report, 44% of medical schools boast tenure and promotion policies that “specifically reward” faculty scholarship on DEI. Seventy-nine percent have embedded DEI training and participation within the faculty hiring committee by putting “equity advisers” on all committees or asking all members to complete unconscious bias training. And 96% have undertaken efforts to integrate DEI “within the curriculum as a key learning outcome.”

This politicization of the American medical system does not stop with hiring and curricula. It has also swept through medical research, in the form of a methodology called “public health critical race praxis” which places a chief focus on race in public health through research objectives like “prioritizing perspectives of marginalized groups.” These racialized metrics have taken hold at America’s leading medical institutions, influencing their research objectives and diminishing their internal rigor.

In Tablet, John Sailer described the case study of the University of California, San Francisco, which responded to DEI pressure by creating a “Task Force on Equity and Anti-Racism in Research.” 

The stated goal of the task force was to “truly rectify the entrenched, structural harms from racism in research.” They prescribed dozens of changes to the university’s research system, from “adding scoring criteria on equity and anti-racism” to the university’s internal grant programs, to selecting university leaders through metrics like their record of hiring “members of historically extended populations.”

They also replaced the vice chancellor for DEI with (coincidentally) the task force co-chair, Tung Nguyen, who believes that “anti-racism is centered in all aspects of the way we work and function as a research enterprise.” UCSF is just one item in a long list of institutions that have been overtaken by the corrosive ideology of DEI, which shrouds itself in noble language while waging a power grab to undermine the value of merit and hard-earned excellence.

But while every instance of such institutional capture should concern us, we should be especially horrified by its intrusion into medicine, the field tasked with treating life-or-death situations and caring for the most vulnerable, of any race, among us. 

FOR ONE, the decline of objective evaluation and the diversion of university resources toward DEI programs raises serious concerns about competence within the next generation of American doctors. 

At least 40 medical schools no longer even require certain categories of students to take the MCAT – the most reliable evaluator of student preparedness and success – for admission.

Abandoning meritocracy in favor of politicized, qualitative standards will only endanger the patients who land in the care of the doctors shaped by this system. Every curriculum item, research grant, and faculty training meeting sacrificed at the altar of identity politics is a wasted opportunity for students to learn a real skill that might actually help them save a life. But the infiltration of DEI within medicine is not just dangerous for the threat it poses to the critical role of meritocracy. It is also dangerous because, as the events of the past two months have made glaringly clear, DEI is not concerned with a fair-minded application of the words it claims to champion.

In medicine, rather than creating a more equitable medical system, DEI reduces the world to a flawed hierarchy of victimhood, advancing a worldview so riddled with hypocrisy and antisemitism that it now leads its supposed champions of the marginalized to celebrate terrorism and justify the murder of Jews. 

How are Jewish patients meant to feel safe in the care of doctors who opened Twitter on October 7 to post, “What a Beautiful Morning, What a Beautiful Day,” or logged onto Instagram to comment that “Zionist settlers” got a “taste of their own medicine?”

Future medical professionals being trained on antisemitic strictures

The growing numbers of future medical professionals being trained within the antisemitic strictures of the DEI regime raise serious risks about their ability to regard all patients with equal care and respect. Fortunately, there is an opening for medical schools who wish to roll back some of these policies. 

Schools have generally resisted state efforts to combat their DEI bureaucracies, arguing that any changes would violate the policies of the national accrediting body, which specifies that all medical schools must have a diversity policy and engage in efforts to achieve “diversity outcomes.” However, as The Wall Street Journal reported in July, the national accrediting body for US medical schools recently testified in a letter to the House Committee on Education that there is no specific definition of diversity in their standards, nor are there any quantitative outcomes the schools must meet.

In other words, these accreditation rules do, in fact, contain ample flexibility for schools looking to scale back DEI – and do not provide a valid excuse for the schools refusing to change their policies. Any movement that discourages merit, stokes the flames of hatred, and replaces pressing priorities with boutique progressive concerns should have no place in American life – but the absolute last place it should be is the field of medicine. 

Sacrificing our evaluative standards for misguided hierarchies of oppression has real, vital risks for the millions of people who seek medical care each year.

With the schools’ excuses gone and the dangers of their identity politics laid sickeningly clear, it shouldn’t just be doctors like myself raising the alarm. Every American who cares about their right to equal, skillful medical treatment should join me in condemning medicine’s DEI-fueled politicization.

The writer is a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, and star of the Emmy-nominated Netflix original series, Skin Decision: Before and After.