What happens when a DEI committee co-opts the language of the right while otherwise maintaining a standard-issue leftist perspective? The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine seems to be running that experiment.
Pritzker’s Identity and Inclusion (i2i) Committee is not to be confused with its Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office, a separate administrative unit straightforwardly dedicated to the principles of DEI.
Rather, i2i is a steering committee comprising faculty and staff members, student “affinity group” representatives, and members of the “student governance, wellness, and curriculum committee[s].” The body is “responsible for providing ongoing direction for programs and/or curricula at Pritzker that support an inclusive learning environment and promote respectful and effective communication with diverse patients and colleagues.”
One sees right away the tension baked into i2i’s mission. “Respectful and effective communication” is an obvious good in the realm of medical education. An “inclusive learning environment,” conversely, is too often a stalking horse for unscientific and discriminatory DEI initiatives.
Closer examination of i2i’s activities produces further confusion. The committee develops “civil discourse” resources, in which “diversity of thought … [is] valued.”
It arranges “civil discourse events,” a move that calls to mind much-lauded initiatives by education reformers to break the progressive stranglehold on campus speech.
Yet this encouraging language is surrounded on i2i’s website with ideas that wouldn’t be out of place in the farthest-left DEI bodies in America.
The committee “[e]nhanc[es] cultural competency training during Free Clinic Orientation.”
It provides “[t]raining in bias and identity issues that affect patients during the Clinical Skills course sequence.”
It “[i]dentif[ies] speakers to give foundational lectures on the nature of self and identity.”
It conducts an “annual student-led climate survey” and hosts an “all-school town hall to review the survey results.”
These are poor initiatives, proceeding directly from the same DEI mindset that produces racially discriminatory hiring and recruiting policies and identity politics in the classroom.
Trainings in “cultural competency,” for example, risk reducing patients to demographic labels, treating identity as a clinical shorthand instead of engaging with the complexity of patients’ individual histories, preferences, and beliefs.
Similarly, training in “bias” often presumes that clinician prejudice — implicit or otherwise — is the primary cause of any noted disparity, downplaying or even ignoring factors such as patient behavior, cultural practices, genetic variation, etc.
“Lectures on the nature of self and identity” belong in the philosophy classroom, not the medical school.
So-called climate surveys seem harmless enough until one recalls Texas A&M’s infamous (and disastrous) attempt to “fix” its own climate “problems.” To the extent that the disease existed in the first place, it was far less unpleasant than the cure.
Pritzker should go out of its way to avoid similar trouble. Indeed, its i2i committee’s pronouncements on civil discourse suggest that at least some reasonable notions have support on campus.
A word to the wise, however: DEI ideologies and civil discourse cannot coexist forever. An institutional commitment to the former soon makes the latter impossible.
