Advocates of Woke Medicine Play Victim While Still Pushing Their Agenda

T he forces driving the politicization of medicine have a complaint: People are starting to notice what they’re doing.

Their effort to view health care through a DEI lens, which has proceeded almost unabated for years, has only recently begun to have genuine opposition. And this is supposedly threatening their cause’s very existence. “It’s very taxing,” Chandra L. Ford, a professor at Emory University and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health, recently lamented to the Washington Post. “This anti-DEI movement creates a climate of fear.”

Sheldon Rubenfeld would be surprised to learn that Ford and those like her are on the defensive. Rubenfeld had been clinical professor of general medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. But this past summer, the medical school officially ended its relationship with him. It’s just the latest chapter in a story that demonstrates both the extent of the problem and the need to confront it.

Rubenfeld’s service at Baylor went back decades. It encountered a major stumbling block last year, however. The medical school abruptly canceled Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, an elective course he had been teaching for 20 years. Rubenfeld, also the author of Medicine after the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond, believes the course was an effective way to warn aspiring doctors against letting their prejudices influence how they treat their patients. Doing so ultimately “leads to all sorts of nastiness,” he says, “and Jews are always the first ones to experience it.”

One student, however, thought the course itself was a source of nastiness and filed an “anonymous grievance” after a lecture in which Rubenfeld pressed his students about their own potential biases. As he wrote in National Review earlier this year, all he learned about the nature of the complaint is that the student objected to his use of the word “Palestinian” — somehow now a charged term after the campus convulsions surrounding Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. Despite the filing of no further anonymous grievances, Baylor canceled the course.

This was not the end of Rubenfeld’s bureaucratic manhandling at Baylor, however. Over the past year, he attempted to conduct a one-off lecture on antisemitism in medicine with Peter Hotez, a Nobel Prize–winning doctor also at Baylor’s College of Medicine, but was stonewalled by Baylor administrators. On July 29, he was informed that the lecture would not take place until June 2025. And on July 31, he learned that his time at Baylor had ended — on the supposed rationale that he had not been doing enough. But Baylor’s actions (or lack thereof) had created that very situation. “They were preventing me from contributing,” he says.

Which is why Rubenfeld senses a broader, behind-the-scenes effort to force him out and cannot help but to see an ideological motivation. He has made clear that he disputes the intrusion of the DEI ethos into medicine, something others at Baylor either support or don’t rouse themselves to oppose. He views it as “sort of a Marxist idea that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressors, and oppressors are white people.” And nowadays, especially given the campus climate after October 7, Jews have come to occupy the oppressor role in this framework.

And this mind-set continues to infect medicine, whatever its proponents may claim. At the Baylor College of Medicine commencement this past spring, one student speaker devoted a portion of her remarks to accusing Israel of “genocide.” And in medical education more broadly, politicized trainings are taking up more of the curriculum, leaving less space for the actual practice of medicine. Rubenfeld worries that medical students increasingly “don’t care for the patients as much as they seem to care about their grievances.” (Hence, perhaps, the readiness of a former student of his to file one such grievance.)

It’s a trend that, if continued, could do grave harm to the medical field. As it may have already done. The aftermath of October 7 inspired — or perhaps merely uncovered — an epidemic of antisemitism in the medical field, as Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harm, a medical-advocacy group opposed to DEI in medicine, detailed in Tablet last year. It was both indirect (nearly 75 percent of professional medical associations remained silent about Hamas’s attack on Israel while roughly the same percentage condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and direct: Some doctors outright celebrated Hamas’s actions. How would a doctor like that treat a Jewish patient?

So those interested in the health of the medical field must continue their efforts. Rubenfeld is doing his part. He is currently fighting to restore the canceled course, with the support of the American Jewish Medical Association, an advocacy organization started after October 7. But bigger-picture action is needed as well. Organizations such as Do No Harm do important work. Institutional reform and even political action are also necessary.

The would-be politicizers of medicine are pretending that they’re on the back foot. In reality, they’re still marching their agenda forward. They are probably used to claiming victim status, though, as that is the essence of the DEI mind-set. That is the very mind-set which threatens the future of medicine and is creating a “climate of fear” for others. Defeating it means pointing out what its advocates are doing, and pushing back. If they’re afraid of medicine rightly understood and properly practiced, then they might be in the wrong line of work.