Do No Harm hails the change as a victory against racial discrimination in medical school admissions.
The Ohio State University College of Medicine removed race-based criteria from a research program description on its website following a federal civil rights complaint filed by Do No Harm.
The Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, offers extra research experience to prospective PhD students. It initially specified that only applicants who are “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” were eligible, according to the archived version of the description.
Now the description states that applicants must “have encountered obstacles to gaining sufficient experience and the skills necessary for admission into a research-centric PhD graduate program in their chosen field of study.”
The removal of the language follows a federal civil rights complaint against the public university, filed by Senior Fellow Mark Perry. Perry “argu[ed} that the program’s eligibility requirements violated Title VI,” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to Do No Harm. Title VI prohibits racial discrimination in higher education.
However, the Department of Education, which normally handles racial discrimination complaints against universities, deferred to Health and Human Services, since PREP is an NIH-program.
“Ohio State and NIH changed their eligibility requirements sometime last year to remove all race-based criteria while our complaint was being evaluated, either in response to legal challenges like ours or to avoid legal challenges in the future,” Perry said. “The favorable outcome at Ohio State is one more victory for Do No Harm’s ongoing legal challenges to stop U.S. medical schools from illegally discriminating based on race, color, or national origin in violation of Title VI.”
Do No Harm staff also stated, “Beyond being unlawful and immoral, practicing racial discrimination significantly compromises medical schools’ primary mission to properly educate graduate students free from divisive racial ideology. The best way to recruit, train, and develop talented physicians and scientists is to prioritize merit and not race.”
Editor’s note: Mark Perry was a paid consultant to The College Fix on an unrelated project.
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