House Republicans introduced a bill Tuesday to ban funding to medical schools that use diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology.
Reps. Greg Murphy (R-NC) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) introduced the Embracing anti-Discrimination, Unbiased Curricula, and Advancing Truth in Education, or EDUCATE, Act aiming to eliminate federal funding, including student loans, for medical schools that advance or use DEI.
Flanked by other physician House members and medical advocates at a press conference in front of the Capitol Tuesday afternoon, Murphy and Wenstrup, both of whom are doctors, decried the harm DEI has done to the medical field.
“Physicians have always been held in a position of the highest trust — patients trust their doctors with their lives,” Murphy said, recalling his nearly 35 years as a surgeon. “Medical schools are then charged with educating and training their doctors to be the most competent and excellent in their fields.”
“In the past, students were admitted based upon merit, excellence, and aptitude. Sadly enough, those days are changing,” he continued, saying DEI “theology is sowing mistrust in the field where trust is so reliant.”
Murphy also said that DEI, which promotes race and gender considerations in hiring, admissions, and teaching, would likely have diminished his odds of getting into medical school because of “my race, my gender, and maybe even my religion.”
According to a press release, the EDUCATE Act would stop federal funding to medical schools that “force students or faculty to adopt specific beliefs, discriminate based on race or ethnicity, or have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices or any functional equivalent” and would require accrediting organizations to review their own standards to make sure they do not include the ideology.
The bill would alter the Higher Education Act of 1965 to block federal dollars from schools that “direct, compel, or incentivize students, faculty, or staff personally state, pledge, recite, affirm, or otherwise adopt” DEI practices, including through coursework mandates.
Schools would be barred from federal funding if they push the idea that “America is systemically, structurally, or institutionally racist, or that racism is weaved into the ‘ordinary business of society,’ or that America is an oppressive nation,” along with many other common tenets of the DEI ideology.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, also spoke at the conference, saying, “My message today is simple: DEI is dangerous everywhere, but it’s most dangerous in medical school.”
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“The ideologues behind this trend don’t want a doctor — they want lobbyists in white coats,” said Goldfarb, a board-certified nephrologist. “The Association of American Medical Colleges, which effectively controls medical education, now forces medical schools to teach intersectionality, oppression, colonization, and white supremacy, among other core DEI topics.”
Noting that a medical student told Do No Harm that he or she had “learned more about pronouns than I have about kidney disease,” Goldfarb warned, “Patients should be terrified about this kind of miseducation.”