Commentary

From New York to Arkansas to California, Woke Medicine Retreats Before the Feds Can Crack Down

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • March 14, 2024
  • New York University, University of Arkansas, University of California Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine

As DEI gains traction at colleges and universities across the country, so has pushback against this woke intrusion into academia and medicine.

In 2023 alone, Do No Harm filed 150 federal civil rights complaints with Offices for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, resulting in 40 federal civil rights investigations and multiple favorable decisions.

Already just a handful of months into 2024, Do No Harm is seeing positive outcomes in several key cases before OCR. Below is a sampling of success in just three such cases in New York, Arkansas, and California:

In 2022, Do No Harm Senior Fellow Mark Perry filed a complaint against the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, making two critical allegations. The first pertained to the school’s use of state grant funding in its Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP) to represent “historically underrepresented groups”—a thinly-veiled form of discrimination. The complaint was dismissed by OCR–but only because NYU is facing a parallel class action lawsuit against it for the same allegations of discrimination.

The second allegation pertains to the school’s sponsoring of the “Visiting Elective for Underrepresented in Medicine Program,” which offers a stipend of up to $2,000 for individuals from the following backgrounds: “Black or African American, Latinx, Native American, Native Pacific Islander, or Native Alaskan.”

Figure 1. Eligibility criteria for the NYU Grossman “Visiting Elective for Students Underrepresented in Medicine” as it appeared in 2022.

Again, in this instance, the OCR complaint was dismissed—but that is apparently only because NYU changed the name and eligibility requirements of the scholarship, almost certainly as a direct response to the OCR investigation prompted by Do No Harm. Indeed, the language on the application page has been broadened to merely encourage minority participation, while clarifying that “All interested individuals are welcome to apply.”

Figure 2. Eligibility criteria for NYU Grossman’s “Office of Diversity Affairs Visiting Elective Fund” as they currently appear.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) mirrored this approach, adjusting their eligibility criteria for a scholarship following the filing of an OCR complaint. Originally, applicants for UAMS’s “Gloria Richard-Davis, M.D., Scholarship for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” had to be from a “racial” or “ethnic” population that is “underrepresented in the medical profession relative to their numbers in the general population.”

Figure 3. Eligibility criteria for the University of Arkansas Gloria Richard-Davis, MD DEI scholarship as they appeared in 2023.

But today, the eligibility requirements for the scholarship are quite different—all mentions of race and ethnicity are removed, and instead the eligibility criteria are open to students who “come from impoverished backgrounds, who are first generation college graduates, or those who come from or intend to return to medical underserved areas of the state.”

Figure 4. Eligibility criteria for the University of Arkansas Gloria Richard-Davis, MD DEI scholarship as they currently appear.

Put simply, following the OCR complaint, UAMS changed its scholarship from one based on discriminatory criteria to one based on a broader range of factors with no mention of race.

Finally, the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine launched an “Underrepresented in Medicine – Center of Excellence” (UIM-COE) program offering two separate racially-based research and travel stipends to students who “identify as Black/African-American, Latina/o/x, Native, American/Alaskan Native, and/or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

Figure 5. Eligibility criteria for UCLA Geffen School of Medicine’s “Medical Student Conference Travel Stipend” as they appeared on January 15, 2024.
Figure 6. Current appearance of the Medical Student Conference Travel Stipend page.

In addition, the school offered a fellowship opportunity called the “Integrated Community Engaged, mHealth, and Data Science to Enhance Clinical Trial Diversity and Cardiometabolic Health (iDIVERSE) Fellow” available only to those who are “from a racial or ethnic group that is under-represented in science (Black/African-American; Hispanic/Latino; Native American or Alaska Native; and/or Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander) or an LGBTQ+ person or a woman.”

The victories here are straightforward: UCLA removed the racial criteria for the research and travel stipends in the UIM-COE program, and discontinued the iDIVERSE fellowship altogether. A win-win for getting woke out of medicine.

In each of these three cases, Do No Harm was instrumental in raising the issues, filing the complaints before OCR, and ultimately achieving multiple victories. These universities pulled back their discriminatory eligibility criteria as soon as the rubber met the road, caving under the prospect of facing federal scrutiny.

These outcomes demonstrate the powerful impact that Do No Harm and other like-minded individuals and entities can have on pushing back against woke-ism. And they are neither the first nor the last victories that Do No Harm will secure in fighting against blatantly discriminatory policies at academic and medical institutions across the country.