A Tennessee Medical Student’s View on How Their School Is Handling Anti-DEI Laws

In 2022, Tennessee enacted a law preventing public universities, including medical schools, from teaching “divisive concepts” such as racial stereotyping, the notion that some racial groups are inherently racist, and so on. The law was intended in part to crack down on universities teaching tenets of the DEI agenda that encourage racial discrimination in the name of “equity.”

The next year, the state enacted a law rolling back or banning a number of DEI initiatives at public universities, and preventing public universities from spending funds on DEI.

However, predictably, there appears to be some resistance to these changes.

One Tennessee medical student got in touch with us and shared details of the school’s newly-implemented 2023 course that contained ample references to concepts that fit snugly into the DEI panoply, such as implicit bias and “environmental racism.” 

We spoke with them again last month on how their medical school is grappling with the anti-DEI laws. Here’s what they had to say:

There have been some changes since the end of last year. The new course curriculum was discontinued. A rationale given for this decision was that test averages had fallen and there were multiple complaints regarding the time commitment required of the course meetings and activities. 

However, I think the administration could sense the disapproval of the topics being taught and perhaps foresaw the possibility of legal ramifications, given that the new course curriculum violated the state law enacted in 2023. (It’s also interesting to note that some offices have retracted words or language that signify “divisive concepts” from their titles).

While it’s encouraging that the school is rolling back its DEI curriculum, that’s not all.

As a trade off, there are now a small number of separate lectures that discuss the social and environmental factors affecting a person’s health and healthcare disparities. Fundamentally, these deal with understanding various lived realities a patient may experience that can lead to certain health outcomes, which is certainly beneficial for doctors to ask about and often medically relevant. There are aspects of these lectures that certainly everyone agrees with, such as finding ways to increase access to healthcare for people without it. However, politicized themes of racial, ethnic and class disparities in healthcare continue to come up. 

Most medical students in the United States pursue medicine because they want to be good doctors and care for patients the best they can. They are not politically motivated nor wish to implement activist agendas into their training. Nonetheless, there seems to be an increasing level of motivation on behalf of some (administrators, students, etc.) to increase the amount of medical student involvement in sociopolitical causes. Individuals, of course, have the right to participate freely in whatever causes they may choose. But certainly, most Americans would agree that any and all political ideology should be kept from assimilating into medical education and healthcare more broadly. 

The student’s account sheds light on the reality of attempts to crack down on DEI in universities. Often, the ideology is so institutionally ingrained that schools will look for ways to circumvent good-faith laws cracking down on these discriminatory concepts.

To combat this, more stringent enforcement is required.