Commentary

Is The LCME Forcing Racial Quotas On Medical Schools?

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • January 12, 2023

Editor’s note: The LCME submitted statements to Congress addressing this issue. Our response to those statements is here.

America’s main medical school accreditation organization is forcing schools to adopt racial quotas.

That’s what we just discovered after getting FOIA responses from the University of Utah School of Medicine. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits every U.S. medical school, criticized Utah for not being diverse enough – and then forced the school to take remedial action. The LCME, which is sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association, is completely out of line.

Our FOIA request found a trove of documents highlighting this issue. To start, we obtained part of the LCME’s accreditation report for the Utah School of Medicine. It made clear that the school was not complying with the LCME’s diversity standards:

“[D]ata show that 38.5% of full-time faculty and 22.2% of senior administrative staff are women. No offers for faculty and senior administrative staff positions were made in several of the school’s diversity categories (American Indian/Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) for the 2018-19 academic year.”

Figure 1. LCME letter to UUSOM re: accreditation survey results.

The LCME also criticized Utah for not having sufficient “diversity/pipeline programs and partnerships,” a reference to the lack of diversity in its student body.

In other words, the LCME expects Utah – and every medical school – to offer jobs to candidates based on skin color and gender. When they fail to do so to a sufficient degree, the LCME pushes medical schools to do its bidding. Sure enough, the LCME told Utah exactly what to do:

“To compensate for unsatisfactory diversity: Provide an update on the activities of the Office of Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion since appointment of the new associate dean in AY 2019-20 and of the new assistant dean in 2020. In the update delineate any changes in programs and/or any new programmatic initiatives related to student, faculty, and senior administrative staff recruitment and retention for each of the school’s identified diversity groups.”

Figure 2. LCME survey results excerpt from March 8, 2021.

We’ll explore the school’s reaction in a subsequent blog. The bigger issue is this: The organization that accredits medical schools is responsible for putting ideology ahead of education at those some schools. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education should be investigated by state and federal policymakers – now.

Has your medical school been forced to go woke by an outside organization? Please let us know – securely and anonymously.