Do No Harm, founded by former Penn Medical School dean Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, has launched the Center for Accountability in Medicine (CAM). “Through data-driven research and public rankings, the Center empowers policy solutions grounded in evidence and equal opportunity – not ideology,” the website reads. Its newest initiative, the Medical School Excellence Index, ranks medical schools based on three main criteria: academic excellence, transparency, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
The Index lays bare what many in higher education have labored to hide—that a large number of medical schools have traded merit and excellence for the shallow currency of identity politics. Under the banner of DEI, some now administer ideological loyalty tests to their students; others cloak their decline behind secrecy, scrapping grades or concealing their curricula from public scrutiny.
By ranking institutions according to rigor, transparency, and their resistance to DEI orthodoxy, the Index identifies those still devoted to the older—and better—ideal of training competent, impartial physicians. For aspiring doctors, such knowledge is indispensable. With some 50,000 applicants vying for only 23,000 first-year seats, both students and future patients deserve to know which schools honor the principle of merit and which have yielded it to ideology.
[RELATED: A Retrospective on DEI and the Decline of Medical Schools]
This effort is both timely and necessary, and singling out the worst offenders (see page 10 of the Index) is a smart and strategic way to cut through the Sargasso Sea of obfuscation that the medical school establishment uses to shield itself from enforcement of federal law. At present, we have no direct knowledge of what actions the Trump administration is taking against these institutions, but one trusts it will act—especially now, with such a powerful instrument at its disposal.
The obstacles to the administration’s reform efforts are well known. The medical establishment fights back with predictable tactics, chiefly by threatening to cast the administration as indifferent to patient care or hostile to scientific progress. The new Center for Accountability in Medicine is thus built on sound principles, as it provides a clear, data-driven picture of how far many medical schools have strayed from merit-based instruction and objective evaluation. And the results are telling.
For example, the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine receives an “F” from CAM, and rightly so. The school maintains one of the nation’s most stringent DEI statements, a DEI office to enforce compliance, and an all–pass/fail grading system during the preclinical years. Its average GPA of 3.7 is inflated, while its average MCAT score of 510 is relatively low. The decisive factors, however, are the DEI statement and the office itself, which institutionalize ideological tests in clear violation of academic neutrality and, potentially, of civil rights law.
Whether these schools are indeed violating federal civil rights statutes is for law enforcement to determine. But CAM’s grading system makes that determination far easier for investigators, journalists, and policymakers, laying bare a medical education establishment more interested in DEI compliance than professional competence.
And DEI corrupts medical education in a multitude of ways.
[RELATED: My Surgeon Might Be a Diversity Hire!]
For one, DEI lowers admissions standards. The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, for example, waived MCAT requirements for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The index also notes that DEI warps curricula, replacing dispassionate truth-seeking with politicized orthodoxy. At UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, a “health equity” lecturer celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre and dismissed modern medicine as “white science.” At Duke University School of Medicine, a 2021 “anti-racist workforce” plan claimed that expecting punctuality from “people of color” reflected “white supremacy culture.” A vice dean at Perelman even lamented that the curriculum contained “too much science.” The list goes on—and Minding the Campus has documented much of it too.
Our contributors have tracked the decline in surgical competency, the Trump administration’s efforts to require medical schools to introduce nutrition courses—medical schools do not currently have nutrition courses!—and, not least, programs training physicians in the dubious doctrine of “weight inclusivity.”
Recently, a former Harvard Medical School dean dismissed Do No Harm as irresponsible. We take that as evidence that Do No Harm is doing good work and is seen, at least by some, as threatening the status quo.
The medical profession depends on objectivity, evidence, and trust. DEI ideology erodes all three. If the Do No Harm initiative and its Center for Accountability in Medicine can help restore integrity to medical education, then their efforts deserve not only our applause but also our active support.
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Image: UC Davis Medical Center (Wikimedia Commons). UC Davis School of Medicine ranks among the lowest in the Do No Harm Medical School Excellence Index.
