The timing was perfect. On November 11, an old Donald Trump video went viral, in which he promised to pursue federal civil rights cases against universities that “continue to engage in racial discrimination” and to pass legislation to get “anti-American insanity” out of higher education. That same day, I sat in an exhibit hall listening to a cavalcade of medical school leaders declare their intention to continue discriminating against applicants and indoctrinating students.
I was attending the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the national organization that effectively controls the direction of America’s 157 M.D.-granting schools. Over four interminable days, speaker after speaker defended racially discriminatory admissions practices, reaffirmed their commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and generally supported the politicization of medicine.
While the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision clearly states that race-conscious admissions are illegal, nobody at the event suggested that schools should simply abide by the spirit or letter of that decision. In a session called “Strategies for Continuing the Commitment to DEI Values and Achieving Health Equity,” legal counsels for the University of Michigan and University of California advised attendees to “work closely” with attorneys to maintain racially conscious admissions—in other words, to continue discriminating.
Several administrators described how their schools had redefined their mission to include diversity, supposedly allowing them to skirt the affirmative action ban by making racial discrimination necessary to fulfill institutional goals. An official at the University of Michigan Medical School also noted that his institution has a pipeline program to get students with the “right” skin color to apply. “Hopefully our pipeline program is legal,” he said, hinting at its goal of getting around the Court’s decision. Numerous administrators also praised the UC–Davis School of Medicine, which pursues race-based recruiting by deprioritizing the medical school entrance exam.
The conference betrayed the same commitment to maintaining divisive indoctrination in the classroom. The event started with a typical woke “land acknowledgement” of the Native American tribe that once lived in the area. Next, the plenary speaker, CBS News reporter Scott Pelley, consoled a fearful audience and absolved them of blame for the election outcome with a dubious claim that inflation was the “single factor” that determined Trump’s victory. In reality, the gender ideology that the AAMC pushes—attendees were invited to wear badges that list their pronouns—was a highly salient issue.
In the sessions that followed the plenary, multiple speakers talked about the ongoing need to fight “systemic racism” and “white supremacy,” the Supreme Court’s decision against affirmative action being cited as one such example.
Such divisive claptrap—which doesn’t belong in medical education, to say nothing of the rest of higher education—is precisely what Trump had in mind when he issued his promise to hold colleges and universities accountable. The lawsuits he promised are a good first step, but ultimately, legislation is key to achieving meaningful long-term change. Trump’s best bet is to pass Utah representative Burgess Owens’s Accreditation for College Excellence (ACE) Act.
The ACE Act would prevent accreditors from forcing or otherwise coercing schools to toe ideological lines. It would also bar accreditors from requiring schools to treat people differently based on race and other characteristics, while ensuring that accreditors uphold constitutional rights like equal treatment under the law. Accrediting agencies that violate these provisions would lose their authority. Another bill, North Carolina representative Greg Murphy’s EDUCATE Act, would eliminate all federal funding for medical schools that practice DEI. It could easily be expanded to cover every college and university. These reforms would help end racial discrimination and indoctrination in undergraduate and graduate education.
The ACE Act passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, and with Republicans now holding both chambers of Congress and the White House, the party should move it to the top of its legislative agenda for next year. I saw firsthand at the AAMC conference that medical schools have no intention of de-radicalizing. What’s true for those institutions is likely true for higher education more broadly. Trump deserves praise for promising to excise this ideological cancer from college campuses. Now he needs the support of Congress to keep his word.
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