By Zachary Faria | May 24, 2024 2:42 pm | The Washington Examiner
We have already seen how diversity, equity, and inclusion policies get people killed when it comes to criminal justice policies. Now, we may be investing in a future where we see how it gets people killed in the operating room.
Several faculty members at the University of California, Los Angeles, blew the whistle to journalist Aaron Sibarium that UCLA’s medical school has been admitting students who do not reach the expected academic requirements because the students instead reach DEI requirements. Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero blew up on one admissions official for questioning the subpar qualifications of a black student because “we need people like this” in medical school because “African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else.”
One professor told Sibarium that he or she was berated by a student for asking if the student could identify a major artery in the operating room, which she could not. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students,” that professor warned.
Lucero, of course, also happens to be the DEI vice chair for UCLA’s anesthesiology department, which tracks with her alleged remarks about how medical schools “need” underperforming black students because of their skin color and how it tracks with UCLA’s admissions concerns. Lucero may even be violating the law, given that California banned affirmative action in 1996 and reaffirmed that ban in 2020, and the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in university admissions in 2023.
Violating state and federal law would actually be a minor problem, though, compared to what this could mean for the future. If UCLA is admitting students who can’t cut it into medical school, and other university medical schools may or may not be doing the same, you face a future where there is a shortage of qualified medical professionals. That means that either jobs will go unfilled, which puts people’s lives in danger with longer waits, or that unqualified medical “professionals” pushed through med school by DEI ideologues put their patients’ lives in danger, perhaps by not being able to identify major arteries in the operation room.
All of this is in service of the racist idea that, for example, only black doctors can treat black patients effectively or, as one California physician warned about the message of the state’s implicit bias training, that white doctors would harm black patients just because of the difference in skin color. Therefore, DEI dictates that we must have quotas for doctors’ skin colors, even if the doctors filling those quotas aren’t qualified and will hurt their patients for the more logical explanation that they do not know what they are doing.
This is how DEI does real, physical damage to people beyond the mental damage of pushing people to become more racist and view all people only by their skin color. This pervasive ideology does not exist in isolation at UCLA, and a future built on it will be dangerous for everyone.