UCSF Commencement Speech Turns Into Ode to DEI, Gender Ideology

“Frankly, it’s impossible to be a decent person or a good doctor without advocating for equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging, justice and diversity.”

That statement formed the centerpiece of a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) speech by UCSF professor Lousie Aronson, MD, at the school’s May 19 commencement.

Rather than celebrating traditional values of excellence, merit, and fairness that have served as the foundation for the practice of medicine for centuries, Aronson’s speech instead became a diatribe against the current administration’s attempts to eliminate DEI from medicine and medical education.

In her speech, Aronson appeared to reference terms identified by The New York Times as language from which the Trump administration has moved away in official government documents and websites. These terms include common signifiers of identity politics like “diversity” and “gender-affirming care.”

Aronson argued the terms “represent concepts that should be integral to how you practice medicine,” addressing the graduating students, and proceeded to go alphabetically through many of the terms.

Aronson first extolled the virtues of DEI to the medical profession; next, Aronson discussed so-called “gender-affirming care.”

“By definition, affirming care validates truths such as patient experience and demonstrates public support of or dedication to something such as practicing medicine with compassion,” she said.

The irony, of course, is that “affirming care” is hostile to the truth, in the sense there is no strong scientific evidence showing the effectiveness of “affirming care” in treating children with gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, there is corresponding wealth of evidence demonstrating the “affirming” approach’s myriad harms.

Aronson then invoked the debunked notion that racial concordance – in which patients are treated by physicians of the same race  – produces better health outcomes.

“Latinos have lower rates of health utilization than other groups,” Aronson said. “They also are more likely to access care and adhere to medical advice when their healthcare provider shares their language preference, ethnicity, or race; and better yet all three.”

As Do No Harm demonstrated in our 2023 report, “Racial Concordance in Medicine: The Return of Segregation,” this theory is bunk. Our report examined the scholarship surrounding racial concordance, and found that four out of five existing systematic reviews of racial concordance in medicine found no improvement in health outcomes, while the fifth is fraught with methodological problems.

This speech is yet another installment in UCSF’s long infatuation with DEI. 

UCSF’s Fresno campus previously maintained a racially discriminatory scholarship for visiting obstetrics students, only changing the discriminatory criteria following a civil rights complaint from Do No Harm.

What’s more, UCSF operated a scholarship program forcing applicants to submit a personal statement expressing their “commitment to working with diverse communities” and their involvement in DEI initiatives to proceed to the next phase of the application process.

This speech is further evidence of how UCSF prioritizes DEI relative to foundational principles of clinical practice.

UCSF should be instilling virtues of merit and excellence in its students so that they can become the best physicians they can be, not inculcating them in regressive political ideology.