By: Richard Bosshardt
Elite universities aren’t the only institutions that need to fire or force out their woke leaders.
The resignations of Claudine Gay and Liz Magill from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, came after they demonstrated their commitment to DEI, which has enabled the rise of racial discrimination and hatred on their campuses. Yet something similar is happening at America’s most prestigious medical institutions. And as I’ve seen firsthand, medical leaders won’t ditch DEI of their own accord — they need to be ditched like these university presidents.
Consider the American College of Surgeons (ACS), of which I am a longtime member. Founded to promote the highest standards of surgery, the ACS has instead stooped to launching endless DEI initiatives, programs, and departments dedicated to them. Tellingly, voices that question this have been routinely silenced by its leadership. For instance, after I pointed out the lack of evidence justifying DEI in surgery, the ACS banned me from its online forums and blocked my access to its nationwide directory of surgeons. They don’t want me telling my fellow surgeons the truth about DEI.
The ACS’s leadership knows exactly what it’s doing. Founded in 1913 to advance the art and science of surgery, the ACS proclaimed its mission was to “Heal all with skill and fidelity.” That requires excellence in surgical care. yet DEI threatens excellence and patient health. The ACS leaders have turned their back on the reason for the organization’s existence, much as Harvard and other elite universities have abandoned excellence in education in favor of radical indoctrination.
The justification for this radicalism is the same across the board. The ACS, like elite universities, accuses society of structural racism and claims that any disparities in outcomes are proof of it. In surgery, for instance, that means the lack of black surgeons and the generally worse health outcomes of black patients supposedly point to systemic racism within the healthcare system. But that claim obviously ignores real explanations, such as the lack of black applicants to surgery programs and a host of cultural, economic, and other factors affecting black communities.
Regardless, the accusation of systemic racism has been used to lower standards for admission — a threat to patient care — and led to calls for racially preferential care, which is outright racial discrimination.
The ACS has even paid racist opportunist Ibram X. Kendi, whose appearance fee ranges from $20,000-$30,000, to talk about racism and medicine and the need for so-called “antiracist” discrimination, which is just reverse discrimination. And it recently published a DEI “toolkit” to help surgeons such as me get over our “whiteness” and get on with implementing and spreading radical antiracist ideology. The toolkit shows that the ACS is more interested in indoctrinating surgeons than improving surgical care. In such an environment, surgery will inevitably decline as radical politics becomes more important than real patients.
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Will anyone hold the ACS leadership accountable? Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania show what needs to happen. The ACS membership needs to clean house, getting rid of leaders who have been instrumental in, or complicit with, the rise of DEI in the organization.
If Claudine Gay and Liz Magill aren’t fit to lead those universities, then the leadership of the American College of Surgeons isn’t fit to speak for our country’s surgeons. But so long as those leaders maintain their grip on power, act without accountability, and silence dissent, the divisive, discriminatory, and destructive ideology of DEI will continue to threaten the medical community, ultimately endangering American patients.
Dr. Richard Bosshardt is a fellow for the American College of Surgeons, a senior fellow for Do No Harm, and a founding fellow of FAIR in Medicine.