NICOLE NEILY: America Needs Doctors, Not Activists

An epidemic of discrimination and indoctrination is infecting America’s medical schools.

From admissions protocols to classroom seminars to residency placement, progressives’ toxic diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda has metastasized into every aspect of our future physicians’ education.

A new report by campus free speech advocacy organization Speech First (which I founded in 2017) recently investigated 54 public medical schools’ curricula and administrative policies, discovering that the vast majority aggressively push extreme racial and gender theories onto students and faculty. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Medical Schools Press Ahead Answering ‘Clarion Call’ To Wokeness)

These schools have traded academics for activism, science for social justice, and patient care for political correctness.

At its core, the DEI agenda signifies a profound dehumanization and politicization of a field that should be rooted in human dignity, compassion, and a respect for the sanctity of all human life. Requiring doctors-in-training to conform to ideological litmus tests undermines the moral clarity and neutrality essential to ethical care.

This DEI-infused training is already eroding medical schools’ culture of scientific inquiry and collegiality, replacing their purpose as the training grounds for empathetic, ethical medical care with a culture of coercion and groupthink.

Faculty are forced to outline their “contributions to diversity” plans for incorporating DEI into their classrooms and clinicals as a basis for hiring, with colleges like the University of California-San Francisco and UC Davis making no effort to hide their blatant preference for more “diverse” scholars and faculty applicants. This top-down ideological mandate leaves students without a chance to challenge DEI initiatives and curricula lest they be smeared as biased or unfit to practice medicine by their professors and academic mentors.

Clearly, this programming needs to be removed from medical schools’ hiring standards and curricula before it destroys the quality of our physicians’ training and spawns a culture of systemic discrimination and intellectual conformity in the medical community.

Furthermore, these policies often force medical students and faculty to silence and violate their deeply held moral, religious, and political convictions. Students and faculty can’t choose to opt out of increasingly extreme DEI training, and are bullied into compliance because they fear jeopardizing their educations, careers, and medical reputations.

Students are at risk of unintentionally violating their school’s harassment policies that now include racial microaggressions and “misgendering” speech and facing disciplinary actions. And many face ineligibility from internships, clerkships, and residency placement if they fail to comply with “gender-affirming” objectives, like the University of North Dakota’s neurology clerkship. These policies not only silence free speech and threaten students’ moral and religious beliefs, but they do so through fear and ostracism.

At many schools, this coercive ideology appears on day one. At the University of Missouri, students are force-fed information about “gender affirming care” in their orientation materials that hint at patient self-harm if physicians fail to affirm gender identity. This emotionally charged, fear-based tactic that manipulates students into compliance demonstrates the lengths that universities will go to in securing commitment to their political dogma.

And because these policies and standards impose intellectual uniformity, they’re incompatible with the fundamentals of a medical education: engaging in scientific inquiry, challenging accepted methods and theories, and pioneering breakthrough treatments through analysis and experimentation. True education requires collaboration, intellectual diversity, and free discourse – because this produces capable, inquisitive, and knowledgeable physicians.

If political orthodoxy is allowed to go unchecked, it will have drastic effects on our physicians’ medical ethics and the quality of American healthcare – because brainwashing future physicians into an “acceptable” political narrative harms patients, rather than helping them.

DEI training goes so far as to inherently violate – and in some schools’ cases, actually infuses DEI-language into – the Hippocratic Oath, forcing physicians to break their vow to “first, do no harm” by training them to prioritize some patients over others and to discriminate based on race, gender, or privilege.

For example, the University of Connecticut School of Medicine recently updated its White Coat Ceremony oath to include a commitment to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism.”

Altering the fundamental principles of ethical medical practice, hiring faculty based on affirmative action, penalizing students’ scientific inquiry and free speech, and mandating practices that are anti-science but “inclusive” (such as the framing of obesity as a sign of cultural oppression rather than a medical condition) has created a network of social justice bootcamps masquerading as medical schools.

Such an identity-based world view erodes the physician-patient relationship, sacrificing patient wellness on the altar of political correctness (not to mention a shameful abuse of medical responsibility and authority). Medical schools need to get back to what they exist to do: training skilled, compassionate physicians – not social justice warriors who are prejudiced against their classmates, professional peers, and patients.

The politicization of medicine and radicalization of our future physicians must end. It is time to restore the integrity, excellence, ethics, and purpose of American medical education before future generations of physicians and patients become the collateral damage of the Left’s woke crusade.

America needs doctors without political agendas. Let’s train our medical students to be physicians – not politicians in white coats.

Nicole Neily is the acting Executive Director of Speech First.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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