by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
How Phony “Civil Rights” Put Your Life in Danger
A recent story revealed that one-third to one-half of the students at the prestigious UCLA School of Medicine are unqualified. These students belong to racial and ethnic minorities; most are blacks and Latinos. One student couldn’t identify a major artery when questioned by a surgeon during an operation.
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Would you want a “doctor” like that to treat you? Isn’t the purpose of a medical school to train competent physicians? Why, then, were these unqualified people admitted? The answer is that the medical school was following the DEI guidelines. “DEI” stands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and supports preferences for racial minorities. The school wants certain kinds of “diversity” and not others. It certainly isn’t looking for students who oppose racial set-asides, even though they would be “diverse” from the lockstep leftwing majority that dominates academic life.
What can we do about this? The person who first posted about the situation on X, aka Twitter, thinks people should sue the school. Affirmative action is illegal in California, but preferential admissions are clearly “affirmative action,” whatever the school chooses to call them. He thinks that DEI standards, correctly applied, lead to true “equality of opportunity.”
As the great legal scholar Dr. Wanjiru Njoya has pointed out, this “solution” is worse than useless. Universities have a lot of experience in defending against claims that their admissions programs are unfair, so it’s unlikely the people who sue would prevail. More fundamentally, the lawsuits don’t get to the heart of the problem.
The real issue concerns the so-called “civil rights” laws, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This bans discrimination against people on grounds of race, sex, or religion. Under this legislation, no wonder medical schools admit unqualified minorities. If they didn’t, there would be a good case against them that they are violating a federal law.
The only true solution is to get rid of all “civil rights” laws. As the great Murray Rothbard has explained, in a libertarian society all exchanges with people are voluntary. People do not have the “right” to be free from discrimination. Medical schools in a free society could admit whomever they wanted, but schools that admitted unqualified candidates wouldn’t get money from donors. Who would want to go to such a school? In what follows, I’m going to look at these points in more detail.
According to a story in the Washington Free Beacon, the UCLA Medical School admits incompetent students: ”Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it. . . . “I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. “People get in and they struggle.”
When a student was asked by his professor to identify a major artery, the student berated him. This was harassment and “micro-aggression”. Why was he being asked about something anybody could easily look up? But of course the student was just making himself look bad. He didn’t know the answer, and in an operating room, you can’t take timeout to look something up—if you can read at all. Again, we ask; would you want this person to be your doctor?
Aaron Sibariurm, who fist posted about this story on Twitter, thinks that this is an abuse of the DEI guidelines. He thinks that we can ban “affirmative action” and make do with a reformed DEI. We can admit competent blacks and Latinos because we want “diversity” without admitting any really bad apples.
You might think this was a problem confined to California. If UCLA Medical School is bad, is that really a major problem? After all, it’s just one school. But the DEI ideology is everywhere. You can be sure all the other major medical schools are doing exactly the same thing.
But is Sibarium’s solution enough? Would you want a doctor who wasn’t clearly incompetent or would you want a doctor who was the best the school had available? The question answers itself. Some people might object, “But what if only a handful of blacks or Latinos gained admission, if the same standards applied to everybody?” The answer is clear: so what? Medical schools aren’t social readjustment programs. Also, if members of the so-called “protected” groups knew that they had to meet the same standards as everybody else, they would study harder rather than coast in on their race, as they now can do. Even more important, people who didn’t have the qualifications to get into medical school would be likely to choose to pursue other careers in which their chances of success would be better. As Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have said, isn’t it better to be a great teacher than a failed “doctor” who winds up on welfare?
