University of Michigan Medical School Invoices Show Taxpayer Dollars Spent on Lectures That Indoctrinate, Not Educate

The University of Michigan Medical School (Michigan Med) has been heavily engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, spending taxpayer dollars on training that reinforces the claim that medicine is an inherently racist field and that “health equity” requires medical schools to turn out doctors of diverse races and ethnicities through race-based admissions practices.

Documents obtained by Do No Harm via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) contained invoices from January 1, 2021 through July 2023, in which the name of the company or the description of services provided included the keywords racial, equity, inclusion, diversity, DEI, diverse, bias, multicultural, human-centric, belonging, and antiracism.

The school engaged in numerous DEI-related training sessions during the period covered by the FOIA documents, paying various speakers for lectures on topics intended to advance an ideological narrative in the field of medicine.

In November 2021, for example, Beverly Griffea Ph.D., president of Mott Community College (MCC), gave a keynote titled, “The Most Important Investment You Will Make” during a symposium focused on “Building Capacity, Building Partnerships: Advancing Health Equity.” She was paid an honorarium of $1,000 by the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR) for this presentation. Dr. Griffea hosts a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion monthly event” at MCC titled Telling Our Stories, and has stated that MCC’s policies “recognized that diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to our mission.”

The documents show that, in October 2021 and later in February 2022, the school hired consultant Latisha Cunningham of Leadership and Diversity Consulting (LDC) for a virtual presentation of “Microaggressions: A Deep Dive,” Sessions #1 and #2, billed at $633.33 each. LDC offers this and other workshops, including “dialogues on topics such as race, power and privilege” and “political ideology and expression.”

Sierra Carter, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Georgia State University, was paid $500 for a lecture titled “Racial Trauma and Racial Health Disparities among Black American Populations: Examining Pathways to Healing, Collective Action, & Liberation.” Dr. Carter’s research focuses on “racial Health Disparities and the promotion of health equity.” Rosie Alegado of the University of Hawaii is a researcher in biological oceanography, but was paid $300 for services described as a “DEI seminar speaker.”

The documents also contained invoices totaling at least $660 paid to various individuals who provided “expert perspectives on gender-affirming care and gender diverse challenges.”

Medical schools such as Michigan Med are spending precious time and taxpayer funds on training future doctors in radical CRT ideology – when those resources should be used for turning out competent physicians who can identify and treat medical illnesses and disease.

“Can your doctor cure poverty? How about homelessness? Food insecurity?” asked Do No Harm Chairman Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., in a piece at City Journal in September.

Goldfarb answered his own questions:

No. Doctors are trained to treat medical conditions, helping patients lead healthier, happier, longer lives. Yet the medical elite think the answer is “yes.” For years, health disparities between white and minority communities have been attributed to the so-called social determinants of health (SDH), which include the effects of poverty on communities, the residue of historic discrimination, and purported ongoing discriminatory practices in health care.

The recommendation that physicians find solutions for their patients’ social problems is “absurd,” asserts Goldfarb, adding that such a goal “will only lead to further degradation of our health-care system.”

“Worst of all, it will not do anything to improve the well-being of patients or correct disparities in health outcomes,” he wrote. “In fact, it is far more likely to worsen patient suffering, since patients will increasingly deal with doctors trained to be political activists instead of true medical professionals.”

There is simply no evidence to support the claims that social factors are the cause of healthcare disparities. Michigan Med must explain why it is committed to spending money from the state’s taxpaying citizens on initiatives that clearly contribute nothing toward developing competent physicians, while perpetuating the DEI agenda.