OPINION 

EDITORIAL

US medical schools have gone DEI-crazy — with deadly results

Racism plagues American health care — reverse racism.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just brought another case against a top medical school for blatant discrimination against white and Asian applicants: Blacks applying to the University of California at San Francisco’s med school get admitted at almost 13 times the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. 

Black and Hispanic students the school admitted from 2023 to ’25 averaged lower test scores and undergraduate grades than the average white and Asian applicant the school rejected.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s letter blasting UCSF follows similar ones to UCLA, UCSD and Yale; virtually every other US med school is likely as bad, but she’s building the evidence before she strikes.

The University of Pennsylvania offers a path for students at eight other colleges to enter medical school without taking the MCAT at all — and five of the eight are historically black colleges.

At the University of Texas-Southwestern, per data from medical-accountability watchdog Do No Harm, “black applicants had 21 times the odds of acceptance compared to white applicants with similar academic credentials,” to choose another.  

Sadly, this racism isn’t remotely new: These admission disparities started back in the late 1960s.

What’s gotten markedly worse is how the schools have eviscerated their standards for graduation, as well as their curricula.

Richard Bosshardt, a surgeon and Do No Harm senior fellow, notes that “many candidates for certification” now take “seven hours to complete an operation that should take at most four” and cites “a rise in patients’ post-operative complications” driven significantly by schools that fear “to correct, hold back, or drop underperforming minority trainees.”

Med schools have been reducing required classes in actual medicine and adding ones in “social justice.”

The rot is so deep that school leaders are defying the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, banning race discrimination in admission.

UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood re-upped the school’s devotion to “anti-racism” the day the decision came down, while George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said, “We will never cease in our quest to level the playing field” and Dennis Charney, dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, blathered about the school’s “unwavering commitment to the core principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.” 

Advocates sometimes justify their racism by claiming black patients do better with black doctors, but that’s a myth based on a debunked study.

In fact, the discrimination is literally deadly: Less-qualified students make for less-good doctors; in the end, patients pay for the progressives’ “principled” racism.

And medical schools focused on teaching not about anatomy or pharmacology, but structural racism and decolonization, turn out graduates less qualified than they could be.

Not all med schools went down this path: NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine comes out near the top in Do No Harm’s un-woke rankings of the best programs.

But medical academia overall has a long, long way to go: Pray that Harmeet Dhillon remains relentless in bringing the hammer down.

Pray, too, that more of the folks who run American higher education wake up and realize how horribly they’ve betrayed their duty, and get to work healing the harms they’ve done.

https://nypost.com/2026/09/26/opinion/us-medical-schools-have-gone-dei-crazy-with-deadly-results/

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Post Editorial Board

Published Sep. 26, 2026, 8:20 a.m. PT