The University of Virginia’s vice president for diversity, equity & inclusion told the New York Times that UVa has only 40 DEI employees — half the number counted by the Virginia Association of Scholars. We wonder if his count includes the positions cited in the article below, which is reposted with permission from the Do No Harm blog. –JAB
Forget teaching medicine. The University of Virginia’s medical education programs are too busy hiring woke ideologues. A source recently sent us the job posting for the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center’s new DEI Program Coordinator, and the School of Medicine is hiring a Program Manager and Events Coordinator. These are the sorts of things the UVA Board should investigate, and better yet, stop.
The job descriptions are everything you’d expect from positions grounded in divisive and discriminatory concepts like DEI. The cancer center job, for instance, will develop “DEI related trainings, programs, seminars, and presentations,” ensuring faculty and students receive woke indoctrination. They will also help implement a “5-year strategic plan,” with the goal of making the Cancer Center more woke every year.
The program coordinator will also “engage in the day-to-day advance of the Plan to Enhance Diversity,” which likely involves putting skin color ahead of merit. The same is surely true of the person’s responsibility to “assist with recruitment activities of trainees and faculty.” In the context of DEI, that typically means hiring educators and admitting students based on their race. In other words, racial discrimination.
Naturally, these jobs slot into a rapidly growing DEI bureaucracy, with the cancer center position “reporting to the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” As experience shows, DEI departments always grow and exert a bigger influence. With these new jobs, DEI will come to affect more and more of what faculty teach, students learn, and trainees practice – across the entire UVA School of Medicine.
What’s most concerning are the implications for medical care. When a patient asks a UVA cancer center physician about a lump she discovered, will she get woke extremism instead of medical expertise? When a patient needs lung cancer surgery, will the surgeon’s implicit bias training lead them to provide worse care to white patients? These DEI positions will influence clinical care, contributing nothing but potentially worsening the quality of medical treatment.
Do No Harm has already called attention to the UVA School of Medicine’s discriminatory scholarship, filing a federal civil rights complaint. We have separately spurred the federal government to open a civil rights investigation into the school’s participation in a discriminatory outreach program. Now it’s time for the UVA Board of Visitors to investigate, as well.
Perhaps Bert Ellis, who Gov. Youngkin placed on the board to help fight divisive and discriminatory ideology, would be interested in leading the charge. DEI should be driven from UVA’s medical education, to say nothing of the rest of campus.
Do No Harm is an organization of physicians, medical students and healthcare professionals united to protect healthcare from “radical, divisive, discriminatory ideology.”
A key question that we at the Jefferson Council ask is, what do DEI staff do? Do they accomplish anything tangibly worthwhile, or do they just increase the bureaucratic workload for themselves and everyone around them? Here follows the list of duties for the DEI Program Coordinator referenced above. — JAB
Duties:
The DEI Program Coordinator supports the Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in duties that include but are not limited to:
• Develop and facilitating DEI related trainings, programs, seminars, and presentations
• Co-develop and manage a database to document the impact of DEI initiatives and activities
• Assist with quarterly reviews of activities and compiling of progress reports
• Assist with tracking progress and return on investment of DEI-related pilot and developmental funding awarded to program members
• Assist with managing the Cancer Center’s 5-year strategic plan to ensure the program remains aligned with the strategies and tactics mapped out in the plan
• Develop presentations, documents, and reports as requested by the AD for DEI
• Assist with the preparations of DEI-specific materials required for grant applications and materials, external and internal meetings, and other materials as requested by the AD for DEI
• Perform data analysis and evaluation
• Foster and maintain effective partnerships with DEI offices across the heath system and university
• Assist and engage in the day-to-day advance of the Plan to Enhance Diversity
• Assist with recruitment activities of trainees and faculty
• Perform other duties as assigned
Reporting to the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the DEI Program Coordinator indirectly reports to the Director of Research Administration and Strategic Planning.
My father, Virginia M.S. 38′ and M.D.41′, Captain U.S. Army Air Corps WWII, would be shocked to his core. “Quackery” was a term he used for malpractice. These DEI overlords are practicing collective malpractice w/o credentials. “First do no harm.” What gives them the right? Malpractice lawsuits against U.Va. to follow bad medical outcomes.
Your father was right in every sense.
My deepest desire has always been to be operated on by a surgeon whose main qualifications is that he is “woke.” USA medical and many of the others who’d have enough sense to actually place an emphasis on medicine and no satisfying the demands of a “woke” general mandate.
All driven by the DEI architect Jim Ryan. Good ol’ Jimbo. The guy who said students who did not want the vax did not need to go to Uva. The tyranny that TJ warned us about at the helm of UVA!
For lack of a better a description, this is all horse manure. DEI is just another public works program designed to create jobs for people otherwise unemployable. As is typical, it is a roadmap for creating another. costly, unnecessary bureaucracy. As was accurately expressed both by the author and in the letters, the Medical School and its professors/practitioners should not be burdened by anything other than the best possible patient care and research to help treat and hopefully cure many potentially life threatening diseases. Conflating medical care with political correctness is a recipe for mediocrity or worse. Shame on the University’s leadership.
“DEI” Lacks two letters, “DE”, for the discrimination and exclusion that are an inescapable part of any such identity based selection process. I would propose that in the future DEI be instead referred to “DEI(DE)” as a reminder of the cold, dark, and ugly underbelly of any DEI program!