DEI Is Contaminating Medical Schools With Leftist Ideologies

The Left claims that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is good. They insist it's meant to help students and that the Right "politicizing" it is wrong and manipulative.

But in reality, DEI efforts have infected multiple fields including education, aviation, the military, medicine, and more. It's one thing for identity politics to be a personal belief in a social context, but it's entirely different for it to be the prioritized system in some of America's most important institutions and environments. These industries play critical roles in the safety, success, and well-being of the American people, and DEI only jeopardizes their effectiveness.

The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro wrote this helpful summary of what DEI means:

This is the mindset that exults skin color, orientation, and radical ideologies over professional credentials and expertise. And what do we see as a result? Well, it's quite simple. The results are teachers preaching anti-white and anti-American lies to future generations, airplanes falling apart mid-flight with hundreds of passengers on board, and the lowest military recruitment rate we've seen, experts say, since the 1940s.

As the list of DEI victims grows, it's now a prominent plague within the medical field -- an industry that's supposed to heal and save human lives. As Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said on "Washington Watch" Thursday, "DEI initiatives have corrupted ... medical school instruction." Because instead of learning actual medicine, "classroom and clinical time is devoted to social issues that doctors can't change such as climate, homelessness, and the police" -- to name a few.

But it's not mere speculation that this is happening. Rather, several of America's top medical schools, including UCLA's, are practically parading their efforts to make the practice of DEI more important than medical practice. And on Thursday, a congressional hearing was held to address the concerns of the "real impact of DEI on college campuses." During this hearing, "an alarm sounded," Perkins said, when Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, one of the witness, said, "DEI is dangerous everywhere, but it's most dangerous in medical school. Americans need to know exactly what's happening."

Goldfarb continued, "Your future doctors are learning about divisive politics at the expense of life-saving care. They're being taught to discriminate by race, not treat patients equally. Ultimately, your future doctor is being trained to be an activist. But you don't need an activist when you're sick or suffering from a life-threatening disease. You need a doctor. And if we don't restore medical school to its real mission, Americans will inevitably suffer a diminished quality of health care." The DEI "idealogues ... don't want doctors, they want lobbyists in white coats."

The doctor, who has practiced medicine for over 50 years, shared that DEI initiatives require medical students to learn about "intersectionality, oppression, colonization, and white supremacy among other core DEI topics." And he noted that these curriculums are taught all through their final year of residency. "Yet every minute students spend on colonialism is one they don't spend on cancer," he pointed out. And Goldfarb highlighted that a medical student told his organization, "I've learned more about pronouns than I have about how the kidney functions." And yet, this only scratches the surface of what Goldfarb exposed in his testimony.

Representative Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) joined the discussion with Perkins on Thursday's episode. Responding to the information highlighted in the hearing, he said, "Even I was surprised by the degree to which these DEI people have taken over the medical schools."

He continued, "First of all, these schools have this fiction that people are happiest if they're treated by a doctor from their same" ethnicity or orientation. Grothman added, they "are putting people through medical school not based on who does best on ... a standardized test to get the smartest people to be doctors, but rather getting some racial groups in at the cost of quality and" people's well-being.

"I just want a good doctor," Perkins emphasized. "When I need a doctor, I want a good doctor that can help me. Whatever problem I might have, I want them to fix it so I can get going again." But unfortunately, this is becoming less common because, as Grothman highlighted, the quality of medicinal care has declined over the years as schools increasingly judge "who gets through medical school by an ethnic background," which he described as "ridiculous" and "horrible."

He shared that hiring based on race is something we see less surprisingly in liberal arts universities, as well. "But in your medical school," he added, doctors are "supposed to be the smartest ... in the class." But to make matters worse, Perkins noted that "a lot of focus" in the Thursday hearing was "on DEI and medical schools ... pushing transgender ideology."

The truly sad part about the push for transgenderism within the medical field is that it only feeds into the harmful delusion of gender confusion. Grothman explained that "the vast majority of people who would go into this transgender stuff will bounce back within a short time period. ... There are very few people who go this way their whole life." However, by pushing this agenda and reiterating the idea that transgenderism is something good, "you wind up [making] people who would have bounced out of it ... lifetime transgenders," he said.

He continued, "And I think just common sense will tell you in the vast majority of cases, there would be no problem here if you just let things be. But obviously you are taught if you are a doctor in today's science society, that this is a wonderful, normal thing, ... it's kind of guaranteeing that you're going to have muddle-headed liberals graduating from medical school."

Originally published at The Washington Stand