A Medical School Treatment for DEI

Several states have been working to roll back the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on university campuses, and good for them. But medical schools have resisted, claiming changes might put them at risk with the national accrediting body. That may be changing.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits U.S. medical schools. Its charter specifies that every medical school must have a diversity policy and engage “in ongoing, systematic, and focused recruitment and retention activities, to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes” for students, faculty and staff.

But LCME is now signalling its diversity requirement is not as inflexible as schools have assumed. In a letter responding to a questionnaire from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, LCME says that “nothing” in the text “mandates which categories of diversity a medical school must use to satisfy this element.”

The accreditation standards do not “establish or define any quantitative outcomes” that a medical school needs to meet. The LCME goes on to say that each medical program “has the discretion to define for itself the diversity programs it chooses to prioritize.” Schools can count on the accreditor using “flexibility” in the context of their own “missions, environments and geographic regions.”

That’s an opening for Missouri, Tennessee, Utah and other states looking for ways to get the DEI bureaucracy out of medical schools. The Missouri Legislature considered a bill that would have banned schools from “conducting DEI audits” or hiring DEI consultants, but it later backed off for fear the schools wouldn’t be able to comply with both state law and the rules of the national accreditor.

The letter from House Education Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx also put LCME on the record on the relationship between DEI and laws that prohibit discrimination by race. Asked if it would “require or encourage” medical schools to “treat applicants differently” or award scholarships based on race, the accreditor replied “No” to both questions.

Politicized diversity has loomed large over medical schools in recent years, and many schools have adjusted their admissions requirements to address them. This raises concerns about merit and competence among the next generation of doctors.

According to Do No Harm, a group of professionals who oppose politicized medicine, at least 40 medical schools no longer require certain students to take the MCAT for admission. But that test has long been considered the best gauge of student readiness and outcomes. Harvard recently dropped out of the U.S. News ranking of medical schools, noting that participating create incentives to “set policies to boost rankings rather than nobler objectives.”

As we’ve seen in North Carolina and Florida, accreditors can be capricious in pursuing a progressive political agenda, with or without written diversity standards. But medical schools can take the accreditor’s recent answers as a signal to worry less about protecting DEI at the expense of a top-flight medical education.