UPenn Med School Leaders Turn on Former Dean over ‘Racist’ Affirmative-Action Criticism By Jack Crowe
Senior administrators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine recently leveled a reputation-destroying accusation at a former colleague who was, up until a few years ago, a member in good standing of America’s elite medical community.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb had a long, distinguished career in medicine that culminated with his being appointed professor emeritus and associate dean of curriculum at Perelman. He retired from his role as associate dean in 2019 but retained his emeritus title. That honor and the career that made him worthy of it weren’t enough to earn him the presumption of good faith from his former colleagues.
Goldfarb’s offense? Publicly questioning whether racial discrimination is as pervasive in medicine as the conventional elite narrative suggests. Responding last week to a study which suggested that systemic racism explains why minority medical residents tend to receive worse performance evaluations than their white peers, Goldfarb asked: “Could it be they were just less good at being residents?”
Within hours of the tweet being sent, Medicine department chairman Dr. Michael Parmacek sent an email to Perelman students and faculty labeling Goldfarb’s question “racist” and offering mental-health counseling to those who may have been traumatized by reading it.
The email reads in full:
I am writing to address the racist statements made by former Associate Dean and Professor Emeritus Stanley Goldfarb. I want to acknowledge the deep pain and anger that his sentiments evoke in many of us, and wish to make my own position very clear. The greatest strength of our Department and of Penn Medicine is our diverse faculty, trainees, and staff. We as a Department place the highest emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion, and recommit ourselves every day to upholding those values. Moreover, providing the best care for our patients means acknowledging that structural racism contributes to inequities and disparities in health outcomes. Only by recognizing this truth, and addressing its root causes, which include the lack of a diverse workforce, will we achieve the aspirations of our noble profession. As physicians, educators, and investigators, we must teach and reinforce this message to our students, patients, mentees, and colleagues. My opinion represents that of our leadership team and, I believe, our colleagues across the Department. Together, we will continue to fight the biases and injustices that erode the health of our nation. Please know that our entire leadership team is here to support you. Don’t hesitate to contact me, any of the Vice Chairs, Division Chiefs, or Vice Chiefs for DEI, with any concerns, and please remember that
COBALT (https://www.penncobalt.com/sign-in) is a 24/7 resource which can provide support as well.
Goldfarb told National Review that he was left “sad and disappointed” when he learned that Parmacek, someone he long considered a friend, had responded to public debate on a contentious topic by smearing his motivations.
“How anyone can construe what I said as racist is beyond me,” he said.
While the brief tweet may have come off as glib or ill-considered to those unfamiliar with Goldfarb’s work, it was not a rushed pronouncement on a complicated topic that he had just parachuted into while scrolling on his phone. It was just one line out of the many thousands Goldfarb has written since retiring on what he sees as the dangerous takeover of the medical field by proponents of anti-racism.
Goldfarb first waded into the topic in 2019 with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns, arguing that medical education has suffered as activist administrators lacking any medical background rejected scientific rigor in favor of social-justice-infused curricula and admissions standards.
Drawing on his decades of experience in medicine, Goldfarb expanded on the op-ed’s thesis in a book of the same name published in March, in which he argues that the medical field’s commitment to anti-racism — the use of present racial discrimination to remedy past discrimination — has resulted in a loosening of objective standards of qualification. Instead of leveling the playing field for racial minorities, elite medical schools have upended the field of play altogether by reducing the importance of the MCAT and other standardized tests in favor of subjective race-conscious criteria that elevates unprepared applicants, he argues.
The book relies on Goldfarb’s analysis of some 2,700 studies purporting to show systemic racism embedded in the medical field. When Goldfarb reviewed the studies he found that they, like the study he commented on in his tweet, ignored a troubling possibility: that racial performance disparities are not the result of systemic racism but rather the consequence of efforts to combat it.
Goldfarb argues that affirmative-action programs have elevated unprepared minority students in the service of crude racial admissions quotas, inadvertently harming both the field of medicine as a whole and the minority applicants themselves, who may have thrived at less selective institutions or who may be legitimately qualified for the positions to which they were accepted, but who are now forced to work under a cloud of suspicion about their qualifications.
Critics of medical-school affirmative action have pointed out that in order to expand the pool of qualified minority applicants, the process must begin with encouraging their interest in science and mathematics as early as middle school, rather than simply accepting more minority applicants into elite medical schools.
In order to push back on the dangerous trends he describes in the book, Goldfarb recently founded Do No Harm, a nonprofit whose mission is to “Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”
The email from Parmacek was followed by another email stating that Goldfarb’s social-media pronouncements “run counter to the anti-racist stance that has been adopted by Penn Medicine and the Penn GME community.” That email was signed by four Perelman deans, Drs. Jeffrey Berns, Cary Aarons, Ilene Rosen, and David Aizenberg, sending a powerful message to residents and junior faculty whose careers rely on the approval and recommendations of their superiors.
Having finished his career in medicine, Goldfarb has no plans to quiet down now that he finds himself in the crosshairs of his former colleagues.
“That’s why I drive them crazy,” he said. “Because they know they can’t hurt me.”
Goldfarb is worried about the next generation of doctors and educators — the ones who still have something to lose. And his fears about ideological conformity at Perelman are well-founded, according to one source’s account of a meeting that took place after the emails were sent.
One day after the emails were sent, a regularly scheduled meeting of the graduate medical-education group was held in which senior administrators reiterated their condemnations of Goldfarb but declined to discuss any of his views in detail, instead labeling them out-of-bounds and explaining that the institution would avoid addressing them publicly to avoid a tit-for-tat escalation. During the meeting, no one asked for clarification as to the specifics of Goldfarb’s offense or took issue with the labeling of his views as “racist.”
The future of Goldfarb’s nominal relationship with Perelman is unclear. Project Diversify Medicine, a social-justice group that relies on the tents of antiracism to encourage racial diversity in medicine, started an online position to strip him of his emeritus professor title. It had received 1,551 signatures as of Wednesday morning.
The University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine did not respond to a request for comment.
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