Commentary

VCU School of Medicine Highlights the Promise and Limitations of Affirmative Action Prohibition

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • June 21, 2024
  • Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine

Should medical school be reserved for the best and brightest or those who check arbitrary diversity checkmarks?

Last summer, the Supreme Court went a long way in clarifying the answer in ruling that race-conscious college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The explicit racial favoritism that occurred in medical schools through affirmative action is (or at least ought to be) relegated to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, the Court’s decision doesn’t mean that competence, excellence, and merit win outright. Admissions guidelines obtained by Do No Harm from the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Medicine reveal that the school continues to reward “diversity.” Specifically, applicants receive additional points if they “would add something unique to the class (e.g., cultural background, life experience, artistic talent).”

Figure 1. From “File Review Guidelines for the 2023 Admissions Cycle,” page 5 (Virginia Commonwealth University).

The VCU guidelines offer no justification as to why the school values things like cultural background, rural habitation, or artistic talent, none of which predict clinical success.

As a practical matter, there is simply no reason that these types of traits should factor into admissions decisions. As a legal matter, awarding points for “cultural background” is likely a smokescreen for an attempt to reward candidates from racial groups “underrepresented in medicine.” In a notable exchange in the Supreme Court, a lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions opined that it would be acceptable for colleges to reward students who write essays about dealing with cultural differences. In response, an incredulous Justice Kagan (who voted to uphold affirmative action) quipped: “The race is part of the culture and the culture is part of the race, isn’t it? I mean, that’s slicing the baloney awfully thin.”

Kagan isn’t necessarily correct to conflate race and culture. They are in fact distinct concepts, and it’s possible that VCU—for dubious reasons—aspires to reward applicants who, for example, were raised by cowboys in Texas or monks in the Himalayas.

However, it is clear that many across the healthcare establishment are searching for workarounds to the Court’s ruling against race conscious admissions, just as it is clear that VCU maintains a firm commitment to the DEI agenda. Against this backdrop, vigilance is needed to ensure that VCU sees matters differently from Justice Kagan and that race and culture are in fact treated as distinct concepts. Or, sensibly, the school could scrap the “diversity” component of their admissions process altogether in recognizing that it doesn’t predict physician quality but crowds out aptitude, work ethic and other traits that truly matter.