UVA Is On A DEI Hiring Spree

Forget teaching medicine. The University of Virginia’s medical education programs are too busy hiring woke ideologues. A source recently sent us the job posting for the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center’s new DEI Program Coordinator, and the School of Medicine is hiring a Program Manager and Events Coordinator. These are the sorts of things the UVA Board should investigate, and better yet, stop.

The job descriptions are everything you’d expect from positions grounded in divisive and discriminatory concepts like DEI. The cancer center job, for instance, will develop “DEI related trainings, programs, seminars, and presentations,” ensuring faculty and students receive woke indoctrination. They will also help implement a “5-year strategic plan,” with the goal of making the Cancer Center more woke every year.

The program coordinator will also “engage in the day-to-day advance of the Plan to Enhance Diversity,” which likely involves putting skin color ahead of merit. The same is surely true of the person’s responsibility to “assist with recruitment activities of trainees and faculty.” In the context of DEI, that typically means hiring educators and admitting students based on their race. In other words, racial discrimination.

Naturally, these jobs slot into a rapidly growing DEI bureaucracy, with the cancer center position “reporting to the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” As experience shows, DEI departments always grow and exert a bigger influence. With these new jobs, DEI will come to affect more and more of what faculty teach, students learn, and trainees practice – across the entire UVA School of Medicine.

What’s most concerning are the implications for medical care. When a patient asks a UVA cancer center physician about a lump she discovered, will she get woke extremism instead of medical expertise? When a patient needs lung cancer surgery, will the surgeon’s implicit bias training lead them to provide worse care to white patients? These DEI positions will influence clinical care, contributing nothing but potentially worsening the quality of medical treatment.

Do No Harm has already called attention to the UVA School of Medicine’s discriminatory scholarship, filing a federal civil rights complaint. We have separately spurred the federal government to open a civil rights investigation into the school’s participation in a discriminatory outreach program. Now it’s time for the UVA Board of Visitors to investigate, as well.

Perhaps Bert Ellis, who Gov. Youngkin placed on the board to help fight divisive and discriminatory ideology, would be interested in leading the charge. DEI should be driven from UVA’s medical education, to say nothing of the rest of campus.