DEI at public colleges, medical schools comes under congressional attack

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Dive Brief:

• Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce took aim at colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion practices during a two-hour hearing Thursday.
• Republicans focused much of their attention on diversity in medical education, antisemitism, and the budgets and staffing of DEI offices at colleges. 
• The hearing could give insight to Republicans’ legislative priorities. Republicans control the committee, which oversees federal higher education initiatives and influences legislation affecting colleges. 

Dive Insight:

Medical education was a popular topic among Republicans at the hearing. That’s likely due in part to the testimony of Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. 

Goldfarb — who founded Do No Harm, an organization which seeks to roll back DEI initiatives in medical education — has attracted criticism for his views. One op-ed in the medical news publication STAT accused him of trying to advance a “racist narrative.”

“Your future doctors are learning about divisive politics at the expense of lifesaving care,” he said in his opening remarks. “They’re being taught to discriminate by race and not treat patients equally.”

Goldfarb argued that spending classroom time on issues of policing, climate change and intersectionality is depriving future doctors of education on the fundamentals of medicine and care. 

He claimed medical schools are making faculty sign “DEI loyalty oaths,” advocating for segregated medical care and endangering patients by lowering admissions standards for underrepresented applicants. 

“There’s an ideology that says if I’m a Native American, I’d rather have a doctor that maybe got 30 or 40 points lower on the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] but who is a Native American, rather than an Asian doctor who did superior on the MCATs,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin. “You have to be really a sicko to think that’s what we should operate our medical system on.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges and other educational organizations have instead said that future doctors need to be aware of the public health issues affecting their patients, as well as be able to address disparate health outcomes for different groups. 

Research has suggested that sharing a racial identity with one’s doctor can lead to better communication. In one study, the prevalence of Black doctors in a health system was linked to an increase in life expectancy among Black medical patients. 

Republicans on the committee also focused on the funding and staffing of public colleges’ DEI initiatives. Rep. Burgess Owens, chair of the Higher Education and Workforce Subcommittee, used his opening remarks to call out several public universities for their multi-million dollar DEI budgets. 

“And what is the result?” he asked. “More hatred, more anger and more racism.”

Rep. Bob Good, a Republican from Virginia, blasted his own state’s public flagship for its spending on diversity, equity and inclusion. 

“The DEI jobs on college campuses are not low-paying jobs are they? In fact, at the University of Virginia in my district, the vice president of DEI and community partnerships makes $340,000,” Good said. “It’s double the average of a college professor. Is there any way you could justify that?”

A spokesperson for the University of Virginia said its commitment to DEI is meant to help its students learn from a wide range of people and perspectives.

“To achieve that, we welcome students, faculty, and staff who reflect the rich diversity of the Commonwealth we serve, we focus intently on teaching students to bridge differences in ideology, life experience, and other perspectives, and we strive to offer a wide range of points of view in the classroom and in programming around Grounds,” the spokesperson said via email.

Several members of the committee, including Democrats, used their time to talk about antisemitism, with multiple arguing that DEI offices and initiatives engender antisemitism on college campuses. 

 “If DEI is the right place to address antisemitism, then those DEI programs have been failing Jewish students,” said Rep. Kathy Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina. 

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, took that sentiment a step further. 

“The offices of DEI on these college campuses are inherently antisemitic,” she said.

After a previous committee hearing, Stefanik was influential in putting pressure on the presidents of three universities to resign over their handling of antisemitism allegations on their campuses. Two of them, Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, eventually resigned in the aftermath of the hearing. 

Democrats on the committee were generally more supportive of DEI efforts. Many suggested that diversity on college campuses leads to better learning environments. If there are institutions that have taken DEI in a negative or unreasonable direction, then those should be addressed individually, they said, rather than discarding DEI offices entirely. 

“We need to be careful of talking about DEI like it’s this monolithic structure,” James Murphy, director of career pathways and postsecondary policy at think tank Education Reform Now, testified Thursday. “It isn’t.”