Why Do DEI Medical School Programs Bother You? Asking for a Friend
Representative Greg Murphy, himself a urologist, has introduced an 8-page bill to ban, what he calls “race-based mandates at medical schools and accrediting institutions”. The bill, titled the EDUCATE Act (Embracing anti-Discrimination, Unbiased Curricula, and Advancing Truth in Education), has 40 co-sponsors. It might surprise some people that the co-sponsors of this bill are all Republicans from the party that claims to care more about life than everyone else.
While introducing the bill, Murphy said, “Medicine is about serving others and doing the best job possible in every circumstance. We cannot afford to sacrifice the excellence and quality of medical education at the hands of prejudice and divisive ideology.”
The bill did not cite any research to support Murphy’s conclusion, suggesting that the sole aim of this bill is to stake his own claim in the culture wars.
Instead, supporters of the bill share anecdotal evidence, "I have witnessed firsthand the alarming rate at which DEI ideology has spread through medical schools across the country. If we fail to stop it, we risk a generation of physicians ill-equipped to meet the needs of their patients.” Why does DEI equate to being ill-equipped?
Some of us take that personally because for almost 200 years, (before the concept of DEI was popularized enough to reach the likes of Congressman Murphy), colleges and universities designated today as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, have been producing medical professionals that support America’s healthcare systems through a variety of career roles. Before DEI was a codified concept, HBCUs have been equity-aware institutions while successfully building excellent medical professionals.
Research confirms that the top American institutions where Black doctors graduate are all designated as HBCUs. They are Meharry Medical College, Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. If we view the data another way, the school whose undergraduate program has produced the most Black medical school graduates is Xavier University, another HBCU.
HBCUs generally do not have DEI programs because – for almost two hundred years – they have been addressing the social issues that sparked the DEI movement in the first place. Nevertheless, their innovation, against all odds, serves as an example for the impact that can take place when schools pour into qualified Black students.
According to a Georgetown Review study, despite the successes of HBCUs, Black doctors still only make up 5-6% of the total number of doctors in the US. Given that Blacks are 13-14% of the US population, it is clear that Black doctors are significantly underrepresented. By contrast, American physicians are predominantly White and Asian. According to 2021 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 63.9% of practicing physicians were white, 20.6% were Asian and 6.9% were Hispanic.
Given that a 2020 study, for example, found that Black infant mortality in the first year of life is halved when treated by a Black physician, why wouldn’t we want to improve representation through dedicated efforts? In a statement alongside the bill, Murphy tries to offset the intentions of the bill by acknowledging that “Diversity strengthens medicine,” – but do his actions show that he actually believes that? If he really believed that, perhaps he’d put more effort into improving the effectiveness of existing DEI programs through an additive, research based, strategic approach, rather than try to completely disarm one of the only intentional organizational methods of remedying America’s inequities. What will Murphy try to build after this? Probably, nothing.
If we can agree that a better mortality rate for Black babies is a priority, then why not encourage and foster greater representation of ethnically and racially diverse doctors joining the profession? I mean, if you care about the lives of babies, why not care about those who, data show, can improve outcomes for babies? Instead, the EDUCATE Act shows us that politicians like Murphy are either ignorant of the relationship between race of physicians and life-outcomes and did no research before proposing life-altering mandates, or they simply don’t care and are happy to hold pro-life ideologies without thinking broadly about the various ways babies are cared for. Both conclusions would be equally concerning.
One would think that the outcomes connected to race disparities in doctors would be a bigger issue for medical schools, educators and congressional representatives to address. It’s an issue that actually impacts life and death. It appears that some in congress have other ideas about what kinds of problems we should be solving.
Murphy’s take on the issue of DEI in medical school made me wonder how much research was actually done before he threw his bill together.
Let me remind Congressman Murphy that even though he claims that physicians have been “doing the best job possible,” Blacks have not experienced the best outcomes in the healthcare system in the US. DEI efforts in medical programs are meant to address this problem.
Here are just three, easy to find resources, that tell the story of an uncomfortable and less than adequate relationship between Black Americans and medical care in the US:
Pew Report (2023) Black American Views About Health Disparities, Experiences with Healthcare
With a History of Abuse in American Medicine, Black Patients Struggle for Equal Access
Supporting Black Voices in Urology (Congressman Murphy’s specialty)
The Association of American Medical Colleges, an authority on the accreditation of medical schools, opposes Murphy’s bill and advocates that Americans who care about the healthcare and education of our citizens should oppose the bill too. We should be thinking about how to attract, engage and retain qualified talent from every pipeline through the medical school experience and beyond. In a statement, the AAMC say that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at colleges are “intended to train the next generation of physicians to respond most appropriately to the rapidly diversifying populations that they will have to serve.” What is wrong with that?
As a urologist himself, Dr. Murphy should have first hand knowledge that one size doesn’t fit all. African American men have the highest incidences of prostate cancer in the world. What would be wrong with putting in effort into intentionally recruiting more qualified, Black people from medical schools into that specialization? Among other things, it is programming in diversity, equity and inclusion that will make that extra effort to build that diversity.
The American Medical Association show their commitment to DEI initiatives by stating that research “convincingly demonstrates that outcomes improve for patients - especially those from historically marginalized populations who receive treatments from racially diverse health care teams.” The fact is, DEI awareness prepares all doctors to serve the changing American population.
Murphy’s bill does nothing to address the root causes or cures for the challenges presented by under-representation of Black people in medical fields. His bill is not designed to do that. It instead regurgitates tropes about the fear of “quality candidates” being displaced by unqualified Black candidates, hoping to plant seeds of “otherisms” into fertile minds, who will then spread and widen the cultural divide. Murphy and his cadre of supporters don’t want to address the issue of under-representation, nor do they want to increase the number of physicians to expand the access of all Americans to good health care delivered by qualified professionals. If this was his goal, he would be seeking to support schools like HBCUs in educating more doctors. His work, via this bill, is short sighted and only succeeds at producing under-researched talking points about DEI programs.
My question remains - Why is he afraid of diversity, equity and inclusion training? Why are they opposed to eliminating under-representation?
HBCUs that produce medical doctors will continue to do what they have done for almost 200 years and that is, educate the under-represented.
This new attack on DEI has been seen and has been defeated before. This mindset to roll back medical programs to the days when only a privileged few were included, is on life support.
The #HBCULegacy will continue.