For any number of reasons, medical schools should tear down the DEI industrial complex that has made inroads on so many campuses. Yet one largely unmentioned motive might be simple self-preservation.
As the case of Anita Fernander, the “Decolonizing Doc,” illustrates, DEI hires may not always have their institutions’ best interests at heart.
Fernander was the subject, in 2024, of a blockbuster Daily Caller exclusive detailing her work “implement[ing] left-wing policies on race and healthcare across three different medical schools.”
At the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, for example, Fernander founded Black Boys and Men in Medicine, a “mentorship pipeline program” that eventually became the subject of a Do No Harm civil-rights complaint due to its alleged “illegal race-based and sex-based discrimination in violation of Title VI and Title IX.” (The institution has since taken down the program’s website.)
At Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Fernander’s work purported to help “students, researchers and health care professionals understand that race plays and [sic] important role in health care” and to “inform[] the public regarding the political and social determinants of health.”
At the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Medicine, Fernander was paid $243,915 a year, according to a document obtained by Do No Harm, for tasks that included leading
DEI strategic, innovative initiatives to address ongoing and emerging issues (e.g. Native American/Indigenous, Anti-Racism/-Ethnoracism, LGBTQ+, Women’s, Latina/o/x, Hispanic or of Spanish Origin+ (LHS+), Disability, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black/African-American, DACA) throughout the SOM’s operations.
These divisive and unscientific activities should not be taking place at, or paid for by, taxpayer-funded American medical schools.
Nor, for that matter, should the faculty and staff “training” that Fernander presented at FAU’s Schmidt College of Medicine, an ideological tutorial previously covered by Do No Harm. (Sample line: “The application of [Critical Race Theory] to academic medicine provides a contextual medium for understanding racial disparities.”)
Yet Fernander’s activities since the publication of the Daily Caller story provide their own illustration of the DEI road’s serious dangers.
In addition to condemning her previous employers on social media, Fernander has since filed suit against both a then-director of language equity initiatives in the UNM School of Medicine’s Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the UNM Board of Regents, alleging, respectively, “intentional infliction of emotional distress” and “violations of the New Mexico Human Rights Act.”
While the rights and wrongs of these cases are not yet known, Fernander’s social-media allegations are damaging merely on the basis of having been made.
A LinkedIn video filmed on the one-year anniversary of Fernander’s departure from UNM, for instance, accuses her former employers of “causing [her] more harm than benefit” (1:29) and creating an “expectation that [she] would educate people about racism while simultaneously enduring it” (1:36).
Fernander goes on: “I was sacrificing my mental and physical health in service to white supremacist systems in academic medicine that were not committed to my purpose, nor me, as an academician” (3:08).
These are painful ironies. Medical schools that have explicitly embraced DEI now stand accused of forcing an employee of color to “endur[e]” racism. The same institutions that enriched Fernander for years are now exemplars of “white supremacist systems in academic medicine.”
Unpleasant as it is, however, this turnabout reveals what can happen when medical schools embrace a poisonous racialist ideology at the expense of simply training future physicians.
To put it another way, is your medical school employing a “Decolonizing Doc”? And what might he or she one day say about you?
