Professor says students learn ‘from Indigenous ways in terms of health promotion and being at one with nature’
A required nursing class at the University of Alberta teaches students about “systemic racism” and “Indigenous ways” of understanding “health … and being one with nature,” a dean of the nursing school told The College Fix.
However, the course has prompted concerns about a growing emphasis on “identity politics” in healthcare.
Read more in The College Fix.
(The Center Square) – Washington Attorney General Nick Brown has filed a multi-state lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order banning gender reassignment procedures, such as mastectomies and puberty blockers, on children.
Trump’s EO states that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Brown argued at a Feb. 7 news conference that the EO was not only “disgusting,” but it was illegal for violating the Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Read more in The Center Square.
City Comptroller Brad Lander lamented an underage kid’s access to puberty blockers in a tirade against President Trump’s executive order banning federal funding for sex-change surgeries and other treatments.
“I literally this morning was talking to a mom whose kid has puberty blockers prescribed by a doc at NYU Langone,” Lander, a candidate for mayor, said during an interview with LGBT activist Marti Cummings. “She had to explain to him why his doctor is not going to continue to see him any more.”
Lander said he backed a legal opinion from state Attorney General Letitia James’ that said denying “gender affirming care” violates the state’s human rights law.
Read ore in the New York Post.
The Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced investigations into four medical schools over alleged antisemitic incidents during their 2024 commencement ceremonies.
While HHS did not identify the schools subjected to these investigations, the Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard, Columbia, Brown and Johns Hopkins medical schools were the targets. The investigations will come after a school year riddled with what critics have described as antisemitic incidents after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
“After October 7, we saw Jew-hatred explode not just on college campuses and city streets, but in the medical profession. This has caused a lot of concern that anti-Jewish bias in medicine endangers the lives of Jewish patients – and these concerns have not been conclusively addressed to date,” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at The Lawfare Project, which provides pro bono legal services to protect the civil rights of the Jewish community. “The investigations announced by HHS are a crucial first step towards addressing these concerns.”
Read more in Fox News.
What’s more important: Playing politics or protecting kids?
New York Attorney General Letitia James just gave her answer — and it’s the wrong one. She’s perfectly fine endangering kids for the sake of her own political gain.
That’s the grim reality now that AG James has demanded that NYU Langone — one of New York’s most important hospitals — restart transgender treatments for minors.
Read more in the New York Post.
Rhode Island College got a break a year ago when the Supreme Court declined to review whether its taxpayer-funded officials could be held personally liable for failing a social work studentwho refused to lobby for legislation he opposed, a vehicle for possibly overturning the SCOTUS-created doctrine of “qualified immunity.”
Public universities are still testing the legal limits of what they can force students to say, even if it’s not clear what they expect students to do, prompting confrontations with free-speech groups and likely the second Trump administration, which has wasted no time invoking executive power against all forms of diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent a legal warning letter Friday to the University of Connecticut School of Medicine for apparently requiring freshmen to recite what FIRE called an “ideologically-charged version of the Hippocratic Oath” at their “white coat ceremony” last summer, which kicks off their medical education. (Starting at 43:30, an official calls the oath “slightly modified and updated.”)
Read more in Just The News.
Pfizer has resolved a lawsuit by a conservative group that alleged that a fellowship program that the drugmaker established to boost the pipeline of Black, Latino and Native American people in leadership positions at the company unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian-American applicants.
According to papers filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court, Pfizer will stop accepting new fellows and has already opened its program to applicants regardless of their race after being sued in 2022 by Do No Harm, an advocacy group opposed to diversity initiatives in medicine.
The settlement came after the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 10 reversed a judge’s decision to dismiss the case and gave Do No Harm a new shot at establishing that it had the necessary legal standing to pursue the litigation.
Read more in Reuters.
Pfizer Inc. and a conservative group agreed to end litigation challenging the legality of the company’s multi-year Breakthrough Fellowship Program designed to build a diverse pipeline of scientific talent.
Attorneys for the pharmaceutical giant and plaintiff conservative advocacy group Do No Harm made the announcement in a joint stipulation of dismissal filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday.
Read more in Bloomberg Law.
Pfizer has agreed to end its fellowship designed exclusively for black, Latino, and Native American applicants as part of its resolution of an anti-DEI lawsuit, in which the plaintiff argued the program illegally discriminated against whites and Asians.
The pharmaceutical giant said it will stop accepting new fellows to the program, according to court documents approved on Friday. The case is now dismissed following the agreement.
Do No Harm, a policy advocacy group that opposes diversity, equity, and inclusion in medicine, sued Pfizer in September 2022 for illegally barring whites and Asians from applying for its Breakthrough Fellowship Program. Created in 2021, the program sought to boost the pipeline of black, Latino, and Native American leaders within the drug company. By 2025, Pfizer hoped to train 100 diverse fellows.
Read more in the National Review.
Pfizer publicly dropped race-based selection criteria from an internship program that discriminated against white and Asian applicants, settling a lawsuit with Do No Harm, an organization committed to safeguarding the medical industry from leftwing ideology.
The pharmaceutical giant settled with Do No Harm after the organization launched a lawsuit challenging Pfizer’s Breakthrough Fellowship program, which originally excluded white and Asian would-be applicants on the basis of their race.
Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb touted the victory, noting that the settlement amounts to an admission from the company that they were previously engaged in unlawful racial discrimination.
Read more in The Daily Wire.
Authors argue it is racial minorities and women who need help
White male doctors are less likely to get hired for entry-level positions, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
However, the authors argue the “culture and practices surrounding faculty appointments and promotions” needs to be “transform[ed]” – to support women and racial minorities.
Read more in The College Fix.
Is President Trump pushing gender-confused kids to commit suicide?
This shocking claim hit mainstream and social media within minutes of the president’s Jan. 28 executive order banning federal funding for child sex-change treatments, among other strong policies that will make those treatments less likely.
The way the argument goes, if kids can’t get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, their mental health will deteriorate to the point of no return.
Read more in the New York Post.
‘Pervasiveness of DEI’ means ending it will take work at state, federal, and accreditor levels, Rep. Henry Stone says
A retired member of the United States Air Force and former college football coach, Iowa state Rep. Henry Stone never saw his path leading to politics.
But after being prompted to run for office, Stone (pictured) now is championing efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education institutions – both in Iowa and nation-wide.
Read more in The College Fix.
Three days short of 45 years before the Supreme Court largely invalidated race-based affirmative action in college admissions as a violation of equal protection under the 14th Amendment, it struck down even more blatant racial quotas in medical school admissions.
Yet activists keep finding racial quotas in even government organizations, where they seem hardest to defend, raising the question of how many taxpayer-funded bureaucracies continue flouting a precedent settled since the Carter administration.
Medical advocacy group Do No Harm sued the Minnesota Department of Health on Friday, arguing its Minnesota Health Equity Advisory and Leadership Council‘s racial quotas violate the 14th Amendment and are “demeaning, patronizing, and unconstitutional.”
Read more on Just the News.
President Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive order meant to broadly restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender children and teenagers younger than 19, inching closer to fulfilling a key campaign promise to ban treatments that he and his administration have cast as experimental and dangerous, in conflict with major medical associations and transgender health experts.
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” Tuesday’s order states. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”
Read more on The Hill.
Many institutions continue to discriminate on the basis of race. Here’s what the president can do to stop the practice once and for all.
The death of affirmative action has been greatly exaggerated. Donald Trump knows it — and he’s already moving to end this racial discrimination once and for all.
This is the reality of the executive order that Trump signed on January 21. He ordered the attorney general and secretary of education to ensure compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action, which is both unconstitutional and illegal. Trump is targeting colleges and universities that receive federal funding, which is essentially all of them.
Read more on the National Review.
President Trump is waging war on the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) philosophy entrenched in various U.S. entities, signing an executive order scaling back the practice as he encourages companies in the public and private sectors to prioritize merit in the workplace.
“It’s just enormous, and I think the president is really, really going to make healthcare great again,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the “Do No Harm” nonprofit, told Fox News while addressing the potential changes to the medical industry.
“I think it’s going to do three things. It’s going to have a huge impact on medical school admissions. First of all, it’s going to demand that medical schools now comply with… the Students for Fair Admission, the famous case in the Supreme Court against Harvard and [the University of] North Carolina,” he added, referencing the landmark 2023 ruling that barred race-based “affirmative action” admissions practices for most institutions of higher education.
Read more on Fox News.
Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden couldn’t be further apart on values that once were considered foundational American ideals — but no longer are.
While the country never fully embraced or implemented diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), those stood as vital principles and goals to guide the nation.
Not now, thanks to Trump and his aggressive, methodical, fiercely implemented attack on diversity.
Read more on The Washington Post.