Brown University Medical School now gives "diversity, equity, and inclusion" more weight than "excellent clinical skills" in its promotion criteria for faculty, raising questions about the quality of teaching and patient care at the elite medical school and underscoring how deeply DEI has penetrated medical education.
The criteria, which are posted on Brown’s website and have not been previously reported, list a "demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a "major criterion" for all positions within the Department of Medicine, which oversees the bulk of the school’s clinical units. Clinical skills, by contrast, only count as a "minor criterion" for many roles.
Doctors who reviewed the criteria were alarmed, saying they reflect an unusually frank admission that merit is taking a back seat to DEI.
"This is as stark as it gets," said Bob Cirincione, an orthopedic surgeon in Hagerstown, Maryland. The criteria "say what DEI in medical schools is all about. And it’s not about clinical performance."
Hector Chapa, a clinical professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine, said it was "difficult to comprehend" why clinical skills get less weight than DEI. "That is heartbreaking," Chapa told the Washington Free Beacon. "Clinical skills are of paramount importance and should be considered major criteria for any promotion."
The criteria, which were last updated in 2023, indicate that DEI gets more weight than clinical skills for positions focused on research and classroom teaching. It gets the same weight as "patient care" for doctors who train students in clinical settings.
A university spokesman, Brian Clark, declined to comment on the criteria but noted that they apply only to the Department of Medicine—whose 11 divisions include cardiology, oncology, and primary care—not to the medical school as a whole.
Other departments, though, have implemented similar practices. Brown’s psychiatry program says that faculty will not be promoted unless they "demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion," which can be done by participating in "antiracism reading groups," while the Department of Molecular Biology has instituted its own DEI requirements for promotions, according to a 2024 report by Brown’s diversity office.
The medical school also runs a fellowship that gives "underrepresented (URM) students" the chance to participate in clinical electives, per a university webpage that was live as of Friday afternoon. Clark said the fellowship was open to all students and that any website stating otherwise was "an error." By Monday morning, the language about underrepresented students had been removed, though the program’s title—"Diversity in Medicine Visiting Student Scholarship"—remained unchanged.
It is illegal for federally funded universities to discriminate based on race. Brown received over $200 million in federal funds last year, much of it for medical research. The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
News of the promotion criteria comes as President Donald Trump is preparing an all-out assault on DEI, instructing each federal agency to identify up to nine potential targets—including universities—for civil rights probes. Even before that order, some public colleges had shuttered their diversity offices under pressure from GOP lawmakers. The most dramatic reversals took place in corporate America, with tech titans like Meta and Microsoft axing scores of DEI programs in anticipation of the new administration.
Medicine, though, has been a notable exception to that trend. Medical schools and professional groups are doubling down on DEI even as other institutions retreat from it, raising concerns about the quality of future doctors and the politicization of science.
At UCLA, for example, whistleblowers alleged last year that the medical school was admitting unqualified applicants in order to boost the diversity of its student body, which saw a steep drop in Asian matriculants between 2019 and 2023. Over the same period, the number of students failing standardized tests exploded.
Some doctors drew a connection between those failure rates and the alleged affirmative action. Others argued that the medical school’s curriculum—which includes an entire course on "structural racism"—wasn’t spending enough time on basics like anatomy.
DEI has also been woven into the training standards for many medical fields. Since 2021, the American Board of Internal Medicine has asked questions about "health equity" on its board exams. And in November, the top neuropsychology groups in North America released a guide urging clinicians to use "social justice frameworks" and pursue "just scientific knowledge."
"Right now, almost every organization that you can possibly name is abandoning DEI," said Richard Bosshardt, a plastic surgeon in Tavares, Florida. "I don’t understand why medicine isn’t."