‘One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot’
The University of California Los Angeles medical school is admitting underqualified racial minorities in the interest of diversity, according to a report in The Washington Free Beacon.
The report, published today, is based on interviews with medical professors and officials, many of whom have knowledge of the admissions process. The Free Beacon also obtained emails and “internal data on student performance.”
A professor said in the article that while there are “good graduates” from UCLA, “a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
UCLA’s admissions committee, under Dean Jennifer Lucero, a medical doctor, has pushed through under qualified minorities ahead of white and Asian applicants, the Free Beacon reported.
The decisions included in the article occurred prior to the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action last summer. California has banned affirmative action since voters approved a ballot proposition in 1996.
Lucero’s committee “gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics, four people who served on it said, while whites and Asians need near perfect scores to even be considered,” the Free Beacon reported.
At the same time UCLA’s ranking has declined and some students are going through medical school without grasping basic knowledge.
From the story:
One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.
“I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” the professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
And for those who’ve seen the competency crisis up close, double standards in admissions are a big part of the problem. “All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,” an admissions officer said. “For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.”
The story also alleges Lucero (pictured) has “lashed out at officials who question the qualifications of minority candidates.”
In one instance, she reportedly “chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister,” after the committee rejected a “Native American applicant.”
People will die if doctors misdiagnose patients https://t.co/VDZnIfe0HL
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The medical school has regularly embraced “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” including adding courses on “community service” and “social justice,” and providing less time for science courses, according to the Free Beacon.
George Mason University law Professor David Bernstein suggested there could be legal problems for UCLA.
“You’d have to go pretty far for me to say that a medical school should either be sued entirely out of existence or denied any additional federal funds, which would amount to the same thing,” he wrote on X.
“But if even half the allegations in this article are true, UCLA Medical School should cease to exist, and should be replaced by a new institution that (a) obeys the law; and (b) cares about the competence of the students it graduates.”
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IMAGE: Michigan Medicine/YouTube
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