Commentary
Yale Medical School Pushes Students into DEI Activism
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Yale School of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country, is using its platform to encourage students to engage in radical activism.
The school offers a “Team-Based Learning Program” for a wide variety of subjects in the medical field. This program operates according to an alternative type of pedagogy in which instructors provide students with content before meetings, and students apply the material during class.
Included in the list of the Class of 2027’s academic programming is a lab titled “Social and Reproductive Justice,” which includes a learning module consisting of several DEI-related videos. In one video, students are urged to “take action” to “eradicate health inequities” through “collective action”.
What types of collective action should medical students take? According to Yale:
- “Advocate for changes to curriculum at your institution and promoting increased recruitment and retention from underrepresented minorities at every level of training;
- Implement justice-informed research or service projects that prioritize and center community perspectives;
- Use the strategies presented in this curriculum to call out biased behavior when you see and educate your peers;
- Join a medical-legal partnership to help address structural causes of health inequities;
- Advocate for policies that will advance health equity in your community;
- Patron stores and businesses in communities where your patients live;
- Attend a conference centered on health equity to build a community of support with other clinicians; and
- Engage with social and digital media featuring through leaders dedicated to equity and the dismantling of systems of oppressions.“
In other words, Yale is urging its medical students to become DEI activists.
And the background materials informing the program reveal the kind of divisive politics that students may be encouraged to push.
For example, one background reading document is entitled “Black Lives Matter: Claiming a Space for Evidence-Based Outrage in Obstetrics and Gynecology.”
The article opines on how modern medicine is a “broken, racist system” which requires “evidence-based outrage” as an “objective, logical conclusion,” and recommends overhauling medicine to prioritize health equity:
“Instead of sitting back on the reflexive defense that racial disparities are too complex for us to do anything about, what if we decided to try anyway? What if every obstetrics and gynecology department made racial equity in known areas of disparity the priority of all quality improvement projects? For researchers, how would your study designs change if the primary metric was whether they helped Black women? How would your interventions be modified if you could not claim success without racially equitable outcomes?”
Moreover, the program’s “Readiness Assessment Quiz” attributes disparities in health outcomes to “structural oppression.”
“The US legacy of structural oppression and US laws, policies and systems that treat certain groups of people differently have led to the creation of invisible barriers to the access of high-quality appropriate care, free of stigma and discrimination for certain groups resulting in inequities in sexual, reproductive and perinatal care,” the quiz states.
“Can you think of 2 examples of historical events, laws or policies that may have resulted or facilitated such outcomes?” the quiz asks.
Unfortunately, as Do No Harm has documented, Yale is no stranger to the world of DEI and identity politics.
This includes Yale abandoning a test to diagnose and manage kidney disease on the grounds that it is “racist,” a Yale mental health clinic inquiring about experiences with racism, and Yale’s partnership with the discriminatory Perry Initiative, leading to the filing of a federal civil rights complaint against the university.
Put simply, Yale has a long track record of bending over backwards to not only accommodate the DEI agenda, but to actively advance it at the expense of legitimate medical knowledge.