Leaders of the medical schools at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Francisco told Congress on Tuesday that they had discontinued mandatory social justice courses that claimed weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor" and endorsed unlawful takeovers of public infrastructure, telling the House Committee on Education and Workforce that the classes had not met the schools’ standards.
The testimony from UCLA medical school dean Steve Dubinett and UC San Francisco chancellor Sam Hawgood followed a series of Washington Free Beacon reports on the first-year curricula at both institutions, which are under investigation by Congress and the Trump administration. UCLA’s "Structural Racism and Health Equity" course described "ob*sity" as a slur "used to exact violence on fat people." UCSF’s "Justice and Advocacy in Medicine" course promoted an anti-Israel protest that shut down the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, delaying the delivery of frozen organs and putting transplant patients at risk.
Some portions of the class "did not meet our standards for relevance and scholarship," Hawgood said at the Tuesday hearing. Both men claimed the courses had been motivated by accreditation standards that required medical schools to teach about "the importance of health care disparities and health inequities." The standards were eliminated earlier this year.
"These classes are filled with propaganda," committee chair Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) said in a statement prepared for the hearing. "They do not prepare medical students to become qualified, skilled physicians. They are focused on topics that have nothing to do with medical science—because they seek to make medical students not into competent doctors, but into far-left activists."
Dubinett and Hawgood also denied that their medical schools consider race in admissions. Their denials come as UCLA is locked in a legal battle with the Justice Department, which concluded in May that the medical school "continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race." The department’s investigation was sparked by whistleblower testimony—first reported by the Free Beacon—that the school’s admissions committee was lowering standards for black and Hispanic applicants.
"My understanding is that race plays no role in decisions about applicants," Dubinett said. He declined to answer questions about the school’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, citing ongoing litigation.
UCLA has been in the hot seat since 2024 when a guest speaker in the structural racism class, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in anti-Israel chants and demanded they say a "non-secular prayer" to "mama earth." The school also hosted a talk by two psychiatry residents who glorified the "revolutionary suicide" of Aaron Bushnell, the U.S serviceman who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. At UCSF, meanwhile, chants of "intifada" could be heard from patients’ hospital rooms.
Both schools sought to institutionalize activism via required course content. UCLA’s structural racism course, which was mandatory for all first-year medical students, assigned texts on "decolonization," "disability justice," and "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." UCSF’s course described the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza" as an example of "structural trauma" akin to "redlining" and endorsed an "abolitionist approach to antiracist medical education." And a "curricular review" tool used by the school says that instructors should not "falsely equate[] body size with health."
A separate guide indicates that clinicians should say "pregnant people" instead of "pregnant women." Asked about the guidance, Hawgood said the "vast majority of pregnancies are in women."
UCSF also says that students should "consider reporting" instances of "white supremacy culture" such as "objectivity," "individualism," and "urgency." Students can flag "education oppression events" for the school using an online portal, "SAFE," designed to combat "education trauma."
