Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on July 03, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Top medical schools are enforcing beliefs such as “weight inclusivity,” racial justice, and gender ideology on their staff and students through “policies, forced statements, and curricular mandates,” a recent Speech First report found.
The report’s author told the College Fix this has created “a crisis of clinical judgment.”
However, one school denied requiring students or employees to ascribe to beliefs outside of “evidence-based medicine.”
The report, “Critical Condition,” evaluated “public records from FOIA requests filed in Fall 2024 and open source information from 54 medical schools, encompassing every top medical school in each state that has a public medical school.”
“The findings reveal the pervasive nature of DEI mandates in medical education and its detrimental effects,” it states.
To illustrate these effects, the report highlights several major institutions. For example, the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School offers a “Developing Outstanding Clinical Skills” program that teaches students to embrace “weight inclusivity, arguing that weight-loss strategies foster a ‘culture of shame.’”
Students are also instructed to avoid terms such as “overweight” or “obese.”
Similarly, the University of California, Los Angeles medical school offers a “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course that teaches students about ‘fatphobia,’ which frames concerns about weight and body size as a form of discrimination or oppression,” according to the report.
In addition, the report states that the University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s task force has urged the school to teach students political activism and embed social justice into the curriculum.
However, UNC School of Medicine spokesperson Alan Wolf told the College Fix via email that the “task force was disbanded years ago, and its recommendations were never operationalized.”
He also said the school “follows the broader university policy, which prohibits requiring an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment from having to ‘affirmatively ascribe to or opine about beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement.’”
The school is dedicated to “evidence-based medicine and the latest advancements in healthcare,” Wolf said.
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Commenting on the broader findings, Jared Gould, managing editor of Minding the Campus and author of the report, told the Fix via email that the situation should “alarm anyone who values free speech, scientific integrity, and quality care.”
Instead of training future physicians to treat illness, today’s medical schools are coercing students into adopting a rigid DEI ideology that redefines healthcare through the lens of identity politics, namely through the framework of oppressor versus oppressed, the author said.
According to Gould, schools are “compelling students into being social justice fanatics who judge care by race, force kids into fake gender identities, and swear obesity’s healthy, all for their woke DEI dogma.”
“I’m horrified we’ll get doctors who’ll shove kids into gender chaos, favor race over health, and lie to obese patients, endangering us all for a deranged fringe,” Gould said.
Operating under the guise of DEI, medical schools instruct students to factor race into clinical decisions, affirm gender identity over biological reality, and dismiss connections between obesity and health. These concepts are embedded throughout the curriculum, from orientation materials and mandatory courses to graduation oaths, he said.
Moreover, he found that “dissent is simply not tolerated” due to mandatory DEI statements and “vague harassment policies used to police speech.”
Gould also offered more examples of schools that are peddling this ideology.
“At the University of Connecticut, students are taught that white privilege—not behavior or environment—is the driving force behind health disparities,” he said.
“At the University of Arizona, transgender medicine training instructs students to treat pediatric transitions as standard care,” Gould told the Fix.
When physicians are pressured to prioritize “historically marginalized” groups, it invites unequal care for everyone else—especially when race, gender ideology, or political pressure overrides patient well-being, he said.
He also warned that students and faculty who question DEI orthodoxy often face consequences.
For example, University of Pittsburgh Professor Norman Wang was barred from teaching after writing a peer-reviewed article criticizing affirmative action. Dr. Allan Josephson, a child psychiatrist at the University of Louisville, was removed from his leadership role for voicing concerns about medical gender transitions for children, Gould said.
In addition, University of Louisville student Austin Clark was expelled shortly before graduation after sharing pro-life views.
“This is not how a free society trains its doctors. Medicine should be grounded in science, ethics, and individual care—not activist dogma,” Gould told the Fix.
“We are watching the slow collapse of professional medicine under the weight of ideological conformity. If we don’t correct course soon, the next generation of doctors will be less free, less trained, and less trustworthy. And that should terrify everyone—regardless of political persuasion,” he said.
Image: “Dell Seton Medical Center East Elevation 2020” by Larry D. Moore on Wikimedia Commons
The right anti-wokesters want to enforce fat shaming.
The left wokesters want to forbid fat shaming.
Which is better for patients? I don’t know.
Both approaches seem oppressive under the wrong conditions.
Go ahead and fat shame people, and see how it works. Write up papers and prove the medical schools wrong.