‘DEI’ Is an Enemy of Free Speech, Not a Friend

H ow do you know when the good guys are winning? When the bad guys start denying what they’re really doing.

Such is the case with the most ardent defenders of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in higher education. More states are trying to drive this divisive and discriminatory ideology off the college campus. Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law to that effect in May, while Wisconsin’s Republican state legislature is pushing for a similar policy. The 2024 state legislative season may see at least a dozen states enact reforms.

In response, DEI’s collegiate backers are claiming to be champions of “free speech,” even going so far as to claim that the concepts of free speech and DEI are “deeply interdependent.” Yet abundant evidence demonstrates the opposite: DEI enforces far-left narratives while punishing those who deviate from them, undermining the purpose of higher education in the process.

A good example of this Orwellian sleight of hand is the Association of American Medical Colleges, which essentially controls every medical school in the United States and Canada. At its annual meeting earlier this month, the AAMC loudly emphasized its commitment to free speech, while its president lamented attempts to “shut down opposing views on sensitive cultural and political issues.” In fact, the AAMC is the one shutting down debate by forcing DEI on medical-school faculty and students alike, with harmful consequences for the patient care that medical school is supposed to teach.

Last year, the AAMC published new “competencies” that require medical schools to teach DEI canon as fact. They must ensure that students understand “intersectionality,” including “how one’s personal identities, biases, and lived experience” influence clinical practice. Medical students must also be able to “identify and address social risk factors” such as “food security, housing, utilities, transportation.” There is no debate or intellectual curiosity about these issues, just blind acceptance of the DEI worldview.

It gets worse. Medical schools must ensure that their students are well versed in a “patient’s multiple identities and how each may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression.” Specifically, students must identify “systems of power, privilege and oppression,” including “white privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression.” And if the radicalism wasn’t already clear, medical students must know how to “describe . . . the impact of various systems of oppression,” including “colonialism.” That’s the language pro-Hamas apologists are now using to justify the terrorists’ murder of more than 1,200 Jews on October 7.

This isn’t free speech. It’s indoctrination in political activism that has nothing to do with patient care. The same goes for the many other ways in which the AAMC stifles speech.

Notably, it ranks medical schools based on their adherence to 89 specific DEI metrics, with the goal of ensuring that every institution is as radicalized as possible. The AAMC wants medical schools to create “a dedicated office, staff, and resources” for DEI. A stunning 97 percent of the medical schools that it surveyed already have such a permanent bureaucracy. As my colleague Jay Greene has shown, DEI departments are designed to “articulate and enforce a university-approved orthodoxy.” There’s no escape, much less the “free speech” that the AAMC now claims to support.

The AAMC simultaneously wants medical schools to create a system for reporting “bias,” which paves the way for self-censorship from faculty and students alike, jeopardizing the inquiry that sparks medical progress. The AAMC also judges whether medical schools offer tenure and promotions to faculty members who conduct DEI scholarship, replacing free speech with an explicit party line on a nonmedical topic. Finally, the AAMC wants campus leaders to participate in local, state, or national DEI forums, while “advocat[ing] for policies and/or legislation” that align with DEI. This has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with forcing a specific set of divisive views on not just students and faculty, but society itself.

The true priority of medical education should be to train the best physicians who provide the best care to patients. DEI undermines that mission, sacrificing merit-based admissions and educational standards in favor of racial preferences and radical indoctrination. That helps explain why states like Florida are removing this harmful ideology from higher education and why other states are planning to take similar measures. While the danger of DEI is especially acute in medical schools, this ideology damages educational standards and jeopardizes free speech on every campus where it holds sway, which is to say, almost every college and university in America.

At the AAMC’s recent meeting, its president opposed state reforms on free-speech grounds, saying “we are healers, and yet today’s environment can feel anything but healing.” The real threat to healing — to say nothing of learning — is the divisive and discriminatory worldview that his organization and others are forcing on higher education. They’re now trying to hide it, but more states should see through this smoke screen and get DEI out of higher education, as soon as possible.