The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) did not sever in one blow the head of the DEI goliath. Indeed, as a look back at a 2024 University of Houston panel series makes clear, a number of medical-education leaders who all but promised to ignore the Court are still highly placed in the American medical establishment.
“Justice and Health for All: The Future of Affirmative Action in Legal and Medical Education” took place less than 10 months after the Court’s SFFA decision affirmed that racially biased university-admissions processes “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.”
Like many campus panel discussions held in the wake of that decision, this one contained some doozies.
- Leon McDougle, MD, at that time chief diversity officer at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, spoke unapologetically about the “holistic review” process employed by his medical school, in which candidates are evaluated on the basis of their “experiences, attributes, and metrics” (22:45). Dr. McDougle also criticized “this master narrative in the U.S. that’s trying to delegitimize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and its importance.”
- Asked whether race should be a factor in medical-school admissions, Charles P. Mouton, MD, in 2024 the executive vice president, provost, and executive dean of the University of Texas Medical Branch John Sealy School of Medicine, responded, dismissively, “How do you define merit?” and complained that “other people” are “trying to tell us what values we should inculcate into our profession in selecting individuals” (16:29). Dr. Mouton further praised medical schools’ emerging “holistic admissions process[es]” that “look at individuals in a broader context” than the traditional indicators of academic success.
- Geoffrey H. Young, PhD, senior director for Transforming the Health Care Workforce at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), stressed the need to develop medical-career “pathway programs” prioritizing diversity as early as the kindergarten level (10:55). Among Young’s claims was that “historically marginalized communities” would benefit from increased resources and education on healthcare because “their community may not necessarily understand it.”
- Speaking about the (largely debunked) benefits of so-called racially concordant care, Marc Robinson, MD, associate program director of internal medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, insisted that “we can do a lot of training for our workforce, but that is not a surrogate for having a workforce that looks like the community that they’re taking care of” (32:00).
These do not sound like the words of physicians and administrators who are eager to follow the Supreme Court’s guidance (and relevant law) on colorblind admissions. Rather, the language sounds like that of authorities who are determined to implement beloved DEI processes as long as they can reasonably expect to get away with it.
Now contrast these boasts and pledges with the formal statements made by the institutions in question.
- In May 2025, the Ohio State University College of Medicine announced that it would close its DEI office and “sunset” certain DEI roles to comply with Ohio law.
- The University of Texas System, of which the John Sealy School of Medicine is part, has similarly pledged to follow Texas law regulating DEI activities at public institutions.
- While the AAMC has stated that the Supreme Court did not “go so far as to say that no compelling interest exists to consider a person’s race” in medical-school admissions, its guidance nevertheless concedes that “[s]chools should be cautious in treating prospective applicants differently on the basis of racial status.”
- As for Baylor, President Linda Livingstone declared in 2025 that the private institution would “be sure that we’re in compliance with federal law and that we are respectful of and follow what’s in the Dear Colleague letters” — a reference to the Trump administration’s guidance on how universities must interpret federal law concerning DEI in the wake of SFFA.
Thus do the steps in the dance become evident. To begin with, institutions formally promise to follow federal and state law and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
But also: the actual men and women “on the ground” who insist on DEI practices remain, including possibly McDougle, whose active LinkedIn page still describes him as the Wexner Medical Center’s chief diversity officer despite Ohio State’s DEI rollbacks.
This is not an argument that particular professionals should lose their jobs. If DEI partisans agree to follow the law and abide by that promise, then there is no reason for institutions to dispense with their medical services.
Still, it is difficult to ignore the near-constant drip of stories indicating that medical schools continue to resist merit-based admissions despite legal developments that mandate as much. Something has got to change.
Eventually, a new conclusion may become necessary. If reformers are going to force medical schools to change their ways, we may need some new doctors in charge.
