UT Southwestern Residents Promote ‘DEI Committee’ Despite Texas Ban

On January 1, 2024, the Texas law preventing public universities from maintaining DEI offices and employing DEI officials went into effect. 

Among other things, the law ensures public institutions of higher education do not “hire or assign an employee of the institution or contract with a third party to perform the duties of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office,” and do not operate “a training, program, or activity designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” Universities also cannot have policies or programs “promoting differential treatment of or providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.”

Yet the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern), the largest medical school in the state of Texas, is rife with DEI activity.

According to an email obtained through a public records request, the hospital’s residents voted on leadership positions in February 2024 – after the Texas law restricting DEI had gone into effect – including for a DEI position.

The email, from fifth-year surgical resident Dr. Maisa Nimer, discusses the “DEI committee” leadership position and notes that eligible candidates must be research residents in their second to fifth years.

Here’s the kicker: the description of the DEI committee position states that the candidate will “work with faculty DEI team on new employee training, hiring/interview processes, assist with DEI outreach and recruitment efforts; heavy involvement in structural disadvantage curriculum and DEI lectures.”

This would, of course, indicate that the UT Southwestern faculty has a DEI team that is involved in hiring decisions, lectures, and curriculum content. In other words, DEI is very much a presence at UT Southwestern.

Moreover, per the email, the voting process will be overseen by Dr. John Mansour, a Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair of Quality in the Department of Surgery at UT Southwestern.

And that’s not all; UT Southwestern is also maintaining its “UTSW-Parkland Health Equity Scholars Program,” a 2-year initiative aimed at improving faculty members’ engagement with “minority communities.” The university accepted applications for the 2024 cohort.

The webpage advertising the program further notes that scholars will have access to “training in implicit bias mitigation.” Program description documents from 2021 obtained by Do No Harm further note that scholars “will become workshop moderators and leaders in Implicit Bias mitigation in their department/division/section.”

The premise of the program is itself problematic: the common conception of health equity is based on the belief that systemic racism is at least largely at fault for disparities in health outcomes between racial groups. And achieving “health equity” invariably involves preferential treatment of certain racial groups in order to close racial disparities in health outcomes or treatments. 

This is definitionally “differential treatment” on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.

In addition to these policies and programs, the school curriculum is replete with DEI ideology.

UT Southwestern’s Department of Surgery maintains a “structural disadvantage curriculum” (SDC) that was funded in 2022 by a grant from the American College of Surgeons to bankroll “innovative and impactful research projects and programs addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and anti-racism issues.”

Do No Harm obtained a series of lectures from the SDC that were dated as taking place in 2024, following the enactment of Texas’ DEI law. 

These lectures touch on topics ranging from systematic racism in policing to prison reform to the treatment of Native Americans, and are at best tangentially related to issues of medicine and clinical practice.

One July 2024 lecture from the SDC, titled “Structural Violence and Mass Incarceration,” included explicit calls for audience members to participate in left-wing politics and support policies like cash bail. 

“You can support some policies. The George Floyd Act is a measure that seeks to ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state, and local level,” the lecturer said.

The lecture also went on to criticize the concept of qualified immunity, which protects government officials (like police officers) from liability for actions that violate constitutional rights.

Keep in mind this is a medical school promoting this content. What these issues have to do with medicine is anyone’s guess. 

In fact, during the question and answer section of one March 2024 lecture on “Structural Disadvantages of Native Americans,” an audience member asked the speaker if there were any resources available that would allow them to put their surgical skills to use. The speaker did not have a resource at hand.

All in all, it’s clear that DEI is alive and well at UT Southwestern.

Texas’ medical schools would be best served fully jettisoning these regressive ideals and committing to providing a medical education that equips residents and future physicians with the skills necessary to save lives and prevent harm.