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Wonderful.
Time to check on where my doctors graduated from.
'Brown Medical School Gives DEI More Weight Than ‘Clinical Skills’ in Promotion Criteria for Faculty'
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https://freebeacon.com/campus/brown-medical-school-gives-dei-more-weight-than-clinical-skills-in-promotion-criteria-for-faculty/>
'Brown University Medical School now gives "diversity, equity, and
inclusion" more weight than "excellent clinical skills" in its promotion criteria for faculty, raising questions about the quality of teaching
and patient care at the elite medical school and underscoring how deeply
DEI has penetrated medical education.
The criteria, which are posted on Brown’s website and have not been previously reported, list a "demonstrated commitment to diversity,
equity, and inclusion" as a "major criterion" for all positions within
the Department of Medicine, which oversees the bulk of the school’s
clinical units. Clinical skills, by contrast, only count as a "minor
criterion" for many roles.
Doctors who reviewed the criteria were alarmed, saying they reflect an unusually frank admission that merit is taking a back seat to DEI.
"This is as stark as it gets," said Bob Cirincione, an orthopedic
surgeon in Hagerstown, Maryland. The criteria "say what DEI in medical
schools is all about. And it’s not about clinical performance."
Hector Chapa, a clinical professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine,
said it was "difficult to comprehend" why clinical skills get less
weight than DEI. "That is heartbreaking," Chapa told the Washington Free Beacon. "Clinical skills are of paramount importance and should be
considered major criteria for any promotion."
The criteria, which were last updated in 2023, indicate that DEI gets
more weight than clinical skills for positions focused on research and classroom teaching. It gets the same weight as "patient care" for
doctors who train students in clinical settings.
A university spokesman, Brian Clark, declined to comment on the criteria
but noted that they apply only to the Department of Medicine—whose 11 divisions include cardiology, oncology, and primary care—not to the
medical school as a whole.
Other departments, though, have implemented similar practices. Brown’s psychiatry program says that faculty will not be promoted unless they "demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion," which
can be done by participating in "antiracism reading groups," while the Department of Molecular Biology has instituted its own DEI requirements
for promotions, according to a 2024 report by Brown’s diversity office.
The medical school also runs a fellowship that gives "underrepresented
(URM) students" the chance to participate in clinical electives, per a university webpage that was live as of Friday afternoon. Clark said the fellowship was open to all students and that any website stating
otherwise was "an error." By Monday morning, the language about underrepresented students had been removed, though the program’s title—"Diversity in Medicine Visiting Student Scholarship"—remained unchanged.
It is illegal for federally funded universities to discriminate based on
race. Brown received over $200 million in federal funds last year, much
of it for medical research. A spokeswoman for the Department of
Education, Madi Biedermann, declined to comment on the fellowship but
said that DEI programs like Brown's often shade into unlawful territory.
"Concluding that there is a violation of civil rights law requires
examination on a case-by-case basis," she told the Free Beacon.
"However, based on what we have seen, programs and activities labeled
'social justice' and 'DEI' often abandon the very concept of equal
opportunity and nondiscrimination that civil rights laws like Title VI
and Title IX were enacted to protect and promote."
The Trump administration, she added, "is committed to returning to the
promise of equal opportunity for all Americans."
News of the promotion criteria comes as President Donald Trump is
preparing an all-out assault on DEI, instructing each federal agency to identify up to nine potential targets—including universities—for civil rights probes. Even before that order, some public colleges had
shuttered their diversity offices under pressure from GOP lawmakers. The
most dramatic reversals took place in corporate America, with tech
titans like Meta and Microsoft axing scores of DEI programs in
anticipation of the new administration.
Medicine, though, has been a notable exception to that trend. Medical
schools and professional groups are doubling down on DEI even as other institutions retreat from it, raising concerns about the quality of
future doctors and the politicization of science.
At UCLA, for example, whistleblowers alleged last year that the medical
school was admitting unqualified applicants in order to boost the
diversity of its student body, which saw a steep drop in Asian
matriculants between 2019 and 2023. Over the same period, the number of students failing standardized tests exploded.
Some doctors drew a connection between those failure rates and the
alleged affirmative action. Others argued that the medical school’s curriculum—which includes an entire course on "structural racism"—wasn’t spending enough time on basics like anatomy.
DEI has also been woven into the training standards for many medical
fields. Since 2021, the American Board of Internal Medicine has asked
questions about "health equity" on its board exams. And in November, the
top neuropsychology groups in North America released a guide urging
clinicians to use "social justice frameworks" and pursue "just
scientific knowledge."
"Right now, almost every organization that you can possibly name is
abandoning DEI," said Richard Bosshardt, a plastic surgeon in Tavares,
Florida. "I don’t understand why medicine isn’t."'
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