DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors By Jeffrey Blehar
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/
In September of last year, I wrote about the University of California system’s truly radical embrace of DEI ideology in every aspect of its hiring, teaching, and administrative processes — an activist commitment so striking that even the New York Times wrote about it with genuine alarm. The issue back then was the barring of an academic from an expected position at UCLA because he had once evinced skepticism about the value of “diversity statements.” But what really worried me was what I saw coming over the horizon:
I am left wondering what our next generation of doctors and scientists will look like . . . where all present have been screened either for their desirable racial and sexual characteristics or their ability to demonstrate fulsome and abject fealty to this approach. Because that is the world these people are constructing.
I am not optimistic. I don’t take the occasionally alarmist gibes I hear about how “in a generation we’ll no longer even know how to build [X]” seriously, if for no other reason than projects involving engineering, mathematics, and the hard sciences tend to have pretty strict metrics for success. . . . But in other fields the decline will be disguised — reflected only indirectly over time in statistics like life expectancy, infant mortality, or suicide and addiction rates. There is no way that scientific (and particularly medical and psychological) fields permeated by these standards . . . will not be negatively and seriously affected in the long run.
My depressing vision of the future is arriving even faster than anticipated. Though I don’t often encourage people to go read someone else, I beg you to check out Aaron Sibarium’s nuclear-grade journalistic bombshell at the Washington Free Beacon about the scandalous state of the UCLA medical school. By the end of “A Failed Medical School,” you will agree with the title’s assessment, which the article copiously documents. Yet you might not even quite believe what you are reading.
The short version is this: Since 2020, the medical school’s radical embrace of DEI orthodoxy in admissions and teaching has led to a collapse in student quality and strength of curriculum. “Faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.” Admissions director Jennifer Lucero — who also sits as the vice chair of the medical school’s DEI program — is fingered as the primary villain. At her insistence, wildly underqualified students — students who shouldn’t be applying to any graduate program in any field, much less to medical school — are being admitted because they belong to certain minorities, crowding out “overrepresented” Asians. Predictably, the underqualified students are struggling miserably.
But the rot goes deeper than mere admissions; the curriculum has changed significantly since the George Floyd riots, adding in massive amounts of “DEI-related” coursework that has inevitably come at the cost of instruction in core medical areas. The failure rate of assessments (the so-called “shelf exams” taken at the end of every clinical rotation) has skyrocketed. “I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” one doctor on the admissions committee told Sibarium.
The accumulation of detail in the Free Beacon’s thoroughly reported piece makes it clear that the situation at UCLA medical school is spinning wildly out of control. (My favorite anecdote: Lucero angrily forced the other members of the admissions committee to listen to a two-hour lecture on First Nations history delivered by her sister after they rejected a Native American applicant.)
This is no petty scandal; this is an ongoing crisis with real-world consequences. As appalling — and revealing of hidden social hierarchies — as the hypocrisies of career plagiarists like Claudine Gay and other faux-scholars are, they are ultimately low-stakes in the grand scheme of things. Nobody ever died from a bad case of plagiarism. But people are going to die behind what UCLA has done to its medical school. A professor on the medical faculty is quoted as saying, “UCLA still produces some very good graduates. But a third to half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
A third to half? Think about what that statement means: You are nearing coin-flip chances that, of any two UCLA medical students you pick from this current crop, at least one will be “incredibly unqualified.” I do not like those odds! How is it going to make you feel when you walk into the doctor’s office for a cancer screening and you see a UCLA diploma on the wall? Because make no mistake — these people are going to be your doctors. They weren’t selected for their intellectual abilities or skills, but rather for their skin color or providential racial identity. They didn’t hunker down and focus on the basics of human anatomy while in school, but rather on important subjects like “Structural Racism and Health Equity.” They bear a credential from what is supposed to be one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country. They may or may not have truly earned it. Do you feel like rolling the dice? Do you feel lucky, punk? I wouldn’t. I’m not going to risk having an incompetent treating me.
And “trust” is the key word here: We are asked to trust doctors more than nearly any other profession. We rely on their being well qualified and rigorously educated — our health and well-being are (sometimes literally) in their hands. This story destroys the illusion that our medical professionals got to where they are through merit. It feels like an irrevocable breach of trust.
UCLA is about to graduate — and will continue to graduate, for several years at least — an entire ruined generation of medical professionals, releasing them into the world like a batch of dangerously defective products. Some, no doubt, are well qualified. A scandalously large number are not. When they are treating you and your family, may you be lucky enough to tell the difference before it’s too late.
Now imagine this replicated at schools across America, and you have constructed a vision of societal decline. This authentically feels like the mechanism by which our society actually turns into the future seen in Idiocracy, and at the rate things are going, don’t be surprised when UCLA-trained doctors start diagnosing you like this.
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