A worrying new study suggests that young doctors with known conservative inclinations would fare worse in residency placement.
A worrying new study suggests that young doctors with known conservative inclinations would fare worse in residency placement.
I t’s not only affirmative action. Just over a year after the Supreme Court ended that racist practice, radical activists are pushing new ways to discriminate in higher education, and far beyond race. To see where the woke set is going, look no further than a disturbing article published last month by a major medical journal. It shows a frightening new level of discrimination by political ideology, in which those who deviate from liberal orthodoxy are punished for their views.
Discrimination by political ideology isn’t new, and at many colleges and universities, candidates’ commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” often determines whether they’re admitted as students or hired as faculty or staff members. Yet the Journal of the American College of Radiology, the flagship publication of a prominent medical specialty, has now demonstrated that the commitment to ideology is becoming even more explicit.
The journal’s recent article looked at radiology residency selection, with a specific focus on applicants’ extracurricular activities. The authors provided hypothetical applications to faculty members in charge of resident selection at 30 radiology programs. The applications listed a range of extracurricular activities, many of which were explicitly political or partisan. Applicants who engaged in activities such as “LGBTQ Pride Alliance” were rewarded with a higher likelihood of acceptance, while those who participated in groups like “Young Republicans” were penalized.
Religious bias reared its ugly head. The reviewers generally gave lower ranks to applicants who listed “Bible Study” and “Christians on Campus” while rewarding applicants who volunteered for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. On the whole, the reviewers preferred liberal and secular activists — the kind who would perpetuate an ideological monoculture instead of those who would provide intellectual, political, and cultural diversity.
In one sense, these findings aren’t surprising. It’s already well established that far-left activists run medical education, to say nothing of higher education overall. But it is alarming to see this blatant political and religious discrimination applied even to the context of a highly competitive medical specialty. Focus on one aspect of a candidate’s profile necessarily comes at the expense of focus on another aspect. When physicians in training are rewarded for their political beliefs, there’s less emphasis on their medical expertise and qualifications. People are selected for their ability to toe the party line, not just diagnose or treat someone’s medical condition.
But woke activists don’t seem to care. Their main concern isn’t improving patient health. They simply want to expand an ideological army in one of America’s most influential institutions — medicine. Students who are members of the LGBTQ Pride Alliance profile as likely supporters of the moral and medical failings of transgender interventions for children—failures made clear by the Cass Report in the United Kingdom earlier this year. Similarly, students who preach DEI are more likely to support radical public policies such as reparations or racially segregated medical care — something woke activists explicitly support under the name of “racial concordance.”
When radical leftist policies are the goal, of course you don’t want Young Republicans. You want someone to the left of Bernie Sanders. Higher education has long been heading in that direction, and in recent years, the trend toward ideological conformity has only accelerated. The Journal of the American College of Radiology has done society a service by demonstrating how explicit this discrimination truly is. Now it’s time for policy-makers and the broader public to remove all kinds of discrimination from higher education, whether racial or ideological.