Politically Unstable: The dangers of medical DEI

OPINION:

Ian Kingsbury, director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, joins Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss findings from their new report, which shows nearly half of U.S. medical schools continue to operate diversity, equity and inclusion offices in defiance of Trump administration policies.

[KINGSBURY] The purpose of our rankings really is to give patients and prospective medical students information about which medical schools are centering excellence. And so there are rankings that already exist for medical schools, perhaps most famously U.S. News and World Report. But if someone wanted to know which school is taking in the brightest students and giving them what we imagine to be probably the best medical training, you wouldn’t really get any information about that from U.S. News and World Report or other rankings that exist. And so that’s the purpose of our rankings. Primarily we’re focused on academic metrics. What is the GPA of, or the undergrad GPA of students who are enrolled at the school? What is the MCAT score of the students who are enrolled at the school? Those two measures together form 60% of our rankings. 

The rest of it comes down to DEI, whether the school has a DEI office and the level of commitment to DEI observed within the school’s mission statement. We penalize schools that have an office, we penalize schools that have that in their mission statement because it means that they’re derelict in their mission of really centering excellence. And then the other part of it comes down to willingness to differentiate student performance. So there’s been this trend in medical education to make grading and standardized exams pass/fail. And that’s really a problem because historically that differentiation is really important when it comes to placement into residency. And so we wanna see that the schools are actually giving grades. We wanna see that the school has a National Honors medical society to really recognize their top students. 

And so those metrics together form our rankings. And I’m proud to say that University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine comes out number one within those rankings. So good on them. 

[SADLER] If there’s any place DEI is not warranted, it’s in the medical profession, I think that we all trust our doctors, we want to rely upon their opinions and their advice for what could potentially be life altering treatments. Can you describe to our audience how DEI and how past/fail rankings and college admissions have really blurred the lines and made our health system less reliable?

[KINGSBURY] Medical education is perhaps ground zero of DEI. We are talking about an obsession, really sort of discarding merit in favor of identity box checking. And much of this occurs under the pretense that patients need doctors who quote unquote look like them. There’s this idea in the medical literature they use the term racial concordance. We’ve actually reviewed the literature on that, and unsurprisingly, there’s nothing to that hypothesis. Jim Crow medicine is as abhorrent and ineffective as it sounds. So under that pretense, really, they’re engaging in some very radical activities in terms of what they teach, in terms of their admissions process, and we’ve reviewed the data on that. And what’s shocking is that even after the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious college admissions in 2023, many medical schools are still engaging in extreme racial preference, especially against Asian applicants and especially in favor of Black ones. And so we have essentially a two-tiered admissions system within medical schools when, as you said, of course, these are institutions that really need to be squarely focused on merit and taking the brightest applicants. 

[SADLER] I know that the Trump administration is looking to dismantle all DEI programs, across the board, both in corporations, in medicine, in schools. There was this Supreme Court decision as you said, and so I think a lot of people in 2023 are like, okay, the Supreme Court settled this for us. There is no more race-based admissions when applying to college. But from what you’re saying and the need for this index, this still is going on very much behind the scenes. 

Watch the video for the full conversation.

Read more: Half of U.S. medical schools flouting Trump DEI ban; rating report finds revolt of 67

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