Do No Harm Pens Letter Asking Lawmaker to Remember Taxpayer-Funded Medical Schools in DEI Investigation

On September 19, 2023, Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb sent the following letter to Sen. Dan Sullivan of Arkansas ahead of an investigation into the prevalence of DEI within Arkansas’s state-funded colleges and universities.

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Dear Senator Sullivan,

Thank you for your upcoming investigation of DEI in Arkansas’s higher-education system. As the chair of an organization focused on getting DEI out of health care, I urge you to include medical schools in your probe. This divisive and discriminatory ideology is especially dangerous in medical education, literally jeopardizing the health and well-being of every Arkansan.

Do No Harm – which represents physicians, patients, and medical students in Arkansas and nationwide – has already discovered that DEI has seeped into medical education in Arkansas. Earlier this year, we sued the state for offering racially discriminatory scholarships under the guise of DEI. The Attorney General settled the case and terminated the program’s race requirements. Yet this is just the tip of the DEI iceberg.

In Arkansas and nationwide, medical schools are engaging in many dangerous and destructive practices grounded in DEI:

• Lower standards: In the name of diversity, medical schools are ditching standardized tests and academic requirements. This ultimately leads to worse quality physicians who provide worse care to patients.

• Ideology and Lies: Virtually every medical school now teaches DEI, Critical Race Theory, “systemic racism,” and/or the so-called “social determinants of health.” An entire generation of medical students is being indoctrinated as political activists, not medical professionals.

• Discriminatory treatment: In the name of “equity,” medical schools are teaching that patients should be prioritized – and de-prioritized – based on race. Such blatant discrimination inevitably leads to worse health outcomes when people are pushed back in line for treatment.

• Political litmus tests: Medical schools are increasingly demanding “DEI Statements” for faculty and student applicants. By forcing individuals to hold specific politicized beliefs, medical schools are violating free speech and undermining the academic freedom that leads to medical progress.

This is only a partial list of DEI’s infection within medical education. We hope you will investigate DEI’s true extent at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the Arkansas College of Osteopathic Medicine. Arkansas’ future physicians and patients deserve medical education that improves lives, not ruins them in the name of divisive and discriminatory ideology.

We appreciate your leadership on this life-or-death issue. Please reach out if we can be of any assistance.

Respectfully,

Stanley Goldfarb, MD

Chairman, Do No Harm