More than two decades ago, I co-authored a Pacific Research Institute report entitled “Facing the Classroom Challenge,” which analyzed the teacher-training curricula at schools of education in the California State University system. Many of these schools openly stated their left-wing bias.
At California State University Dominguez Hills in the Los Angeles area, the teacher-training program said unabashedly that the “effect of oppression and power upon children is represented through critical theory,” and cited Marxist education theorist Paulo Freire, whose goal was to create revolutionary teachers and students.
In a very worrisome trend, the leftist march through our educational institutions has reached America’s heretofore highly regarded medical schools.
In a study for the organization Do No Harm, Jay Greene, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a former professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, analyzed the mission statements of 158 U.S. medical schools.
For the study, Greene combined “five measures of woke concepts—diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, and the summative score for wokeness.” Points were assigned to these concepts and the mission statements were then considered “’woke’ if they received over 50 percent of the possible points for the five measures of woke concepts.”
Not only did a shockingly high percentage of medical schools include woke concepts, that proportion has risen markedly in just a few years.
In 2024, Green’s study noted, “77 percent of medical school mission statements could be characterized as ‘woke,’ up from 68 percent only three years earlier.”
According to the study: “These results indicate that between 2021 and 2024, dozens of medical schools scrambled to rewrite their mission statements to signal how committed to woke values they were. They were not scrambling to signal how focused they were on science.”
For example, Columbia University’s mission statement was changed to say: “To prepare our graduates for their future careers, the college recently updated its medical program objectives to focus on the domains of . . . Anti-Racism, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity.”
The result of such woke changes, noted Green, “is inevitably pushing out the focus on scientific rigor in medical education.”
Nowhere has the consequences of the woke revolution in medical schools been more evident than at UCLA.
Last year, the Washington Free Beacon published an in-depth expose of the woke practices at UCLA’s medical school, complete with exasperated criticism of those practices from some of its own officials and faculty.
Despite the fact that California outlawed race-based preferences in 1996, an admissions official said, “All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,” while for other groups, “those criteria are completely disregarded.”
A member of the admission committee said that the bar for underrepresented minorities is “as low as you could possibly imagine” and it “completely disregards grades and achievement.”
As usual in cases involving college admissions, Asian students are hurt most, with the proportion of Asian admissions to UCLA medical school dropping by a third between 2019 and 2022.
Once in medical school, UCLA imposed a ramped-up social justice curriculum that included courses such as “Structural Racism and Health Equity.”
According to professors, the woke curriculum eats up time that could be spent on physiology or anatomy, which “leave struggling students with fewer hours to learn the basics.”
One professor warned, “The new curriculum is not working and the students are grossly unprepared for clinical rotations.”
Another professor said, “a third to half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
Unfortunately, the ideological degradation of medical school curricula is not limited to UCLA.
At the University of Pennsylvania one vice dean declared, “There’s way too much science in the curriculum.”
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, retired associate dean at Penn’s medical school and a critic of the woke revolution in medicine, has written that the ultimate aim is turn doctors into “advocates for social and political issues.”
He emphasized, “Medical education is built on a foundation of science—the key to eradicating disease and improving human wellness” and replacing that foundation “is harmful to America’s health.”
In his study, Jay Greene concluded, “Promoting a social and political agenda among medical students comes at the expense of excellence.”
“At some point,” he noted, “patients, hospitals, and insurers will become alarmed if doctors have a stronger command of ideological doctrine than medical science and will demand a rebalancing of priorities.”
There has been a lot of talk lately about so-called 80-20 issues, but if you want to find a nearly 100-to-0 issue, ask Americans if they personally want the best doctor based on knowledge and ability or a doctor who is only an expert on DEI.
If President Trump wants to make America healthy again, as he said during his campaign, he and his administration should push hard to de-politicize America’s medical schools.
Lance Izumi is senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. He is a former president of the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges and the author of the 2024 PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse.
