The U.S. is no stranger to political polarization. Polarization has grown over the last several decades and shows no signs of stopping. Though much of this polarization is fueled by divided opinions on recent presidents, I believe there is another major culprit: diversity, equity and inclusion. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the job market, corporate DEI positions increased by 123% between May and September 2020, seemingly in response to the tragic death of George Floyd. Since then, DEI has been injected into many facets of life, from medicine to artificial intelligence.
A notable course correction away from DEI has occurred within higher education. The Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action will have a great impact on college admissions in the years to come. Will other elements of society phase out DEI in a post-affirmative action world? I believe they should.
Several recent stories indicate that DEI has gone too far, undermining decades of activism in the name of equality. A National Institutes of Health grant program, Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation, funds universities with the expectation that they will hire diverse cohorts. Some universities have hyperemphasized DEI in their evaluation of candidates, requiring them to write “diversity statements” with their applications. Furthermore, University of California, Berkeley’s hiring rubric for the grant’s funds, which has been adopted by many other universities including Northwestern University and the University of Southern California, “penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to ‘treat everyone the same,’” according to John Sailer’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Other cases have shown that speaking out against DEI can have grave consequences. According to Brad McDowell, a nurse in Hagerstown, Md., he was fired from Meritus Medical Center after “questioning DEI on [his] personal social-media account.” Meritus fired him days later. McDowell wasn’t even discussing DEI at his job, yet he was axed regardless. Before McDowell’s termination, Meritus sent him content for a DEI course for hospital leaders which claimed, among other things, that “the U.S. is built on ‘an ideology of White supremacy that justified policies, practices and structures which result in social arrangements of subordination for groups of color through power and White privilege.’” The notion of “white supremacy” goes hand in hand with the idea that people are either “oppressors” or “oppressed” and can “push medical students to treat patients differently based on race, sex or ‘gender identity.’” Furthermore, arguments for the existence of white supremacy assume that the Constitution is applied in a racist manner, even though the last remnants of direct constitutional racism were arguably eradicated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Medicine should be about helping patients, not singling them out based on race. Last I checked, the Hippocratic Oath reads “first, do no harm,” not “first, administer DEI training.”
McDowell’s story is a perfect example of how DEI is toxic. In commenting on DEI, McDowell “waded into ‘a touchy subject,’” as put by a Meritus representative. Institutions should not implement “touchy” material like DEI, since it is divisive and unequal. The moment you slightly question DEI policies, you are thrown to the wolves.
The tech sector has also shown it’s not immune to DEI’s insanity. Google landed in hot water several weeks ago after its AI chatbot Gemini generated baffling images of historical events. For example, Gemini “depicted a Black woman as a U.S. founding father.” This output, among others, sparked outrage on social media, with “some users claiming the tool had an anti-white bias.” In response, Google apologized for Gemini’s output, acknowledging that the AI would sometimes “‘overcompensate’ in seeking a diverse range of people even when such a range didn’t make sense.” Fictionalizing history is much more than “overcompensating” for programming biases.
DEI initiatives have not been a hot topic solely in the U.S. Just recently, the Inclusion at Work Panel, an independent U.K. organization, published a report that found little evidence “DEI efforts such as mandatory antibias training and corporate policy overhauls have any positive effect on corporate culture.” Furthermore, U.K. taxpayers contribute £557 million a year to DEI. At least the Brits are starting to rethink DEI.
Medical research, nursing and AI have all incorporated harmful DEI initiatives. What now? House Republicans, backed by the medical organization Do No Harm, are currently sponsoring a bill that would end federal funding for medical schools with DEI practices. I hope this legislation passes and prevents our tax dollars from further financing toxic DEI initiatives. The ‘best’ doctors are not the ones who satisfy various DEI criteria. Rather, they are the medical professionals who excelled in their training, honed their skills in practice and have garnered ample respect from the medical community. It’s time to put an end to divisive agendas like DEI.
