Woke medical education isn’t going away. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I first began writing about woke medical education in 2022, hoping it was a passing trend that would eventually go away. But today there is evidence it is getting worse.
In my last post on this subject, called Woke Medical Education Update, I wrote about Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Perelman was the first to call attention to this situation as early as 2019 in an Op-Ed published in The Wall Street Journal called “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns.” He wrote, “Concerns about social justice have taken over undergraduate education.” He warned about the “focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness.”
Grace-Marie Turner, writing for The Galen Institute, says many students say they are admitted to medical schools only if they give the “right” answers to a litany of woke questions. Students are being indoctrinated to see skin color as the most important thing about a patient.
Dr. Marilyn Singleton wrote in a recent Washington Post Op-ed that she “graduated with a medical degree in 1973, a black woman in a class of mostly white men. Since I became a physician, I have seen exactly one instance of racism in health care – and it was from a patient, not a fellow physician. As for my colleagues, I have been consistently impressed with the conscientious, individualized care they have provided to patients of every race and culture. When we all took our oath to ‘first, do no harm,’ we meant it, and we live it.”
The latest evidence of this awful trend is a new editorial from The Wall Street Journal called The New Segregation on Campus. The editors tell us “If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare.”
They go on to explain: “The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts. This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”
Fortunately, there is an organization fighting back. Do No Harm is a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare.” They say this UCLA practice is illegal – that it violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first-year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.
Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.” In case students think they have a choice of which group to join, a letter from the school makes clear they should sort themselves by how they look to others.” Recognizing the imperfect and problematic nature of our socially constructed racial categories,” the school says, “we ask that you identify the group in which you feel you are most perceived as in clinical spaces.”
The day the civil-rights complaint was filed, UCLA abruptly informed students that the caucusing exercise was cancelled, which suggests that administrators know the practice is legally suspect. In accepting federal funds, schools must agree to abide by Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by race. It contains no exception for discriminating in pursuit of an antiracist agenda. As a public university, UCLA is also governed by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
When I went to medical school, we had more than enough to learn in the relatively short period of four years to complete our medical degrees. We didn’t have time for learning nonsense like this. Neither do the students in medical school today.
