Harvard Medical School Rebrands Diversity Office After Years of DEI Activism

Harvard Medical School (HMS) is doing some reputation damage control.

HMS has rebranded its DEI office as the Office for Culture and Community Engagement (OCCE), Dean George Q. Daley announced earlier this week.

“First, our HMS Office for Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership has adopted a new name — the Office for Culture and Community Engagement (OCCE) — to better reflect its work going forward,” Daley announced. “Under the continued visionary leadership of Dr. Joan Reede, OCCE will continue with two main focus areas: 1) providing opportunity and access to help individuals thrive and 2) collaboration and community-building.”

Daley’s statement suggests this is more of a cosmetic change than a real shift in HMS’s ideological commitment to DEI.

Conspicuously absent from Daley’s statement is any mention of significant policy or personnel changes related to DEI.

HMS should make it clear that it will end all divisive and discriminatory practices in which it engages, and that its DEI efforts will be discontinued rather than simply rebranded.

In addition to this rebrand, the school has taken steps to deemphasize language stressing the importance of diversity in its public statements.

According to The Harvard Crimson, HMS removed its diversity statement which included commitments to health equity and DEI, as well as pledges to “challenge discrimination,” “address disparities and inequities,” and “actively promote social justice.”

Additionally, the website for HMS’s DEI office now directs to the OCCE website, as do many DEI resource pages.

But HMS can’t rewrite history.

The school has long been a proponent of DEI and has promoted divisive and discriminatory practices and policies.

For instance, HMS maintained a racially-segregated affinity group that was the subject of a Do No Harm civil rights complaint in 2023. 

And in 2022, Do No Harm launched an advertising campaign highlighting HMS’s“Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion Report,” released in 2020, which laid out a comprehensive plan to make DEI ideology central to the school’s work. That plan now links back to the OCCE website.

We’re not content with a facelift. If HMS truly wishes to change its way and ditch its DEI practices, then it should make that clear.