Virginia Commonwealth University requires personal ‘diversity statements’ for faculty, documents show
Jeremiah Poff
EXCLUSIVE — The faculty hiring process at Virginia Commonwealth University and its medical school requires applicants to provide a statement of commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion that is factored into their application, new documents show.
In a series of survey questions by the Association of American Medical Colleges that sought to discern the commitment by various medical schools to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, the VCU School of Medicine said it required faculty applicants to submit a “diversity statement.” The school’s responses to the AAMC survey were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm and shared with the Washington Examiner.
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The diversity statement is an institutional requirement for all faculty applications, but the guidelines for the statement say that “evaluation of a candidate’s Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will be viewpoint-neutral” and that its commitment to DEI includes “those with minority, dissenting or unpopular views.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Max Eden, an education research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that a 2021 study by the right-leaning think tank found that a fifth of institutions of higher education required diversity statements from faculty job applicants.
“Two years ago, AEI published a report demonstrating that these DEI ideology litmus tests were present in 20% of faculty hiring,” he said. “They have surely only proliferated further since then, and will continue to proliferate until state lawmakers take action to outlaw them.”
The answers to the AAMC survey contributed to the association’s Diversity, Inclusion, Culture, and Equity Inventory report published last year. The report detailed the extent to which medical schools had committed to enacting DEI principles in their respective institutions. The report said that 100% of medical schools had adopted admissions policies “that support a diverse class of students,” and 63% of medical schools had a faculty diversity recruitment plan.
Other diversity programs include a urology center internship it calls the “Diversity Scholars Program” that is exclusively open to applicants who are fourth year medical students and “identify as underrepresented minorities.”
Of VCU Medical School’s responses to the survey, 94% aligned with the AAMC’s DEI goals, which the survey said “indicates substantial diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity efforts.” The medical school’s diversity statement says the institution “reaffirm[s] the core values of human dignity and of mutual, unconditional respect, and we acknowledge our responsibility to condemn racism and all forms of discrimination.”
The statement provides commitments to DEI for various groups within the medical school, including one for researchers that says clinical trials research projects must be adapted to include previously excluded groups.
“As researchers, we work to close the gaps that racism and other forms of discrimination have created by broadening our research scope, diversifying participation in our clinical trials and improving the justice of dissemination and implementation of evidence-based medicine,” the diversity statement for VCU researchers says.
VCU did not respond to a request for comment. The school recently asked for a $51 million funding influx from the state government, which it said was necessary to maintain the quality of the institution.
The medical school, which is ranked nationally by U.S. News and World Report as the 48th best school for primary care and 62nd for research, has nearly 750 enrolled students and almost 2,000 faculty members. Tuition to attend the medical school for Virginia residents is over $33,000.
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Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, the board chairman of Do No Harm, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that the group sought the school’s responses to the AAMC survey because the organization felt that the public should be aware of how public universities such as VCU are spending taxpayer funds.
“We felt like the taxpayers in each state, the citizens of the state, should be aware of what their hard-earned tax dollars are supporting and whether they agree that a major focus of medical education, medical school activities, and health system activities should be devoted to these issues, as opposed to focusing their entire efforts on training the best physicians possible,” Goldfarb said.