In 2024, the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson (UACOM-T) was rebranded the Office of Access, Community & Belonging.
Since then, the administrative unit has been renamed the Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships.
We look forward to whatever it may be called next.
There is reason for our suspicion that UACOM-T is merely abandoning politically troublesome terminology. To begin with, and as Do No Harm has previously noted, the DEI office’s first name change was largely cosmetic.
While UACOM-T scrubbed several DEI resources from its website during the unit’s first evolution, the pages of the DEI office and the Access, Community & Belonging office contained numerous similarities.
Importantly, both offices were run by the same administrative official, Celina Valenzuela, MD.
Dr. Valenzuela remains the head of the new Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships and retains her title of “vice dean.” In a greeting posted on the office’s first two homepages, she professed that “Inclusive Excellence is fundamental to the advancement of science” and pledged support for “the active recruitment, training, and retention of a medical and research workforce that reflects the demographics of Arizona.”
These DEI-informed attitudes remain despite the office’s second name change. Indeed, they are all over the Office of Community Engagement & Partnership’s online home.
Among the first examples one notices is the new office’s “Land Acknowledgement,” unchanged since its days as the Office of Access, Community & Belonging.
The new office still offers a “Pathways to Success” program for high schoolers, composed, in part, of an event series in which “speakers highlight the importance of … representation and diversity in health care.”
The new office continues to brag that Pathways to Success “[p]rovides students from under-resourced backgrounds with a unique opportunity to explore careers in medicine,” “[e]ncourages [d]iversity in [m]edicine,” and “promote[s] long-term inclusivity.”
Tellingly, the Pathways to Success program is “particularly” for high-school juniors and seniors “[f]rom historically under-resourced communities,” a term of art that makes clear the office’s preference for applicants of certain races and ethnicities.
In its outreach to current medical students, the renamed Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships is similarly committed to the principles of DEI.
Among its sponsored organizations is a Student Council on Community Engagement, which “[p]romote[s] community-responsive care in the curriculum” and “[s]upport[s] [the] recruitment and retention of mission-aligned faculty/staff.”
“Community-responsive care,” while seemingly harmless, brings to mind the activist obsession with “social determinants of health” and the prioritization of “systemic” rather than behavioral threats to patient well-being. “Mission-aligned” thinking in hiring and admissions, meanwhile, is, in many cases, a workaround for decisionmaking based on race.
Also, why is a student-led group so intimately involved with curricular design and faculty recruitment practices? Wouldn’t those be the domain of the institution’s academic leadership and faculty — those entrusted with maintaining professional standards and stewarding the long‑term integrity of the program?
Perhaps most troublingly, through the new Office of Community Engagement & Partnerships, student groups may apply for funding for “student-led workshops or trainings on … advocacy [or] health equity.” While there is obviously nothing wrong with students forming campus groups, should a taxpayer-funded public medical school help pay for advocacy training?
This is the same DEI music sung to the same DEI tune. Only the name of the song has changed.
Yes, UACOM-T has once again renamed its diversity office. But the work goes on.
