Oath compelled students ‘to affirm political viewpoints,’ free speech group said
The University of Connecticut School of Medicine will no longer require students to recite its Hippocratic Oath that pledges support for social justice and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote in a post on X Tuesday that the school confirmed its “DEI-infused” oath is optional and “students will not be punished for refusing to recite it.”
“This is a huge victory for students’ freedom of speech and conscience at UConn,” the free speech group wrote.
Today @UConn School of Medicine confirmed to FIRE that its DEI-infused Hippocratic Oath is optional and students will not be punished for refusing to recite it. This is a huge victory for students’ freedom of speech and conscience at UConn. https://t.co/xYOXQOuZXB
— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) April 1, 2025
“UConn’s medical students can now rest assured that they needn’t sacrifice their ideas or beliefs to practice medicine. Forced ideological oaths have no place on campus, and FIRE will continue to fight against compelled speech,” FIRE Program Counsel Ross Marchand stated.
The change follows a letter FIRE sent to the school in January, demanding that it make the oath optional.
The letter states that the oath compels students to affirm political viewpoints, which they may not agree with, “as a condition of their education.”
“While UConn may encourage students to adopt the views contained in the oath, the First Amendment bars the university from requiring them to do so. The First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but the right to refrain from speaking,” the letter states.
In August, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 was the first to recite the newly revised version of the school’s Hippocratic Oath, The College Fix previously reported.
It reads, “I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”
Medical advocacy group Do No Harm previously stated that “many of these commitments, such as ‘health equity,’ contradict the Hippocratic Oath’s principles by implicitly endorsing racially discriminatory policies that, in practice, preference certain racial groups over others and thus harm unfavored patients.”
In January, Assistant Professor of Medicine Clara Weinstock, who spearheaded the oath’s revision, told The Fix that the updated version adopts a more “anti-racist” perspective.
“It’s not a lot itself that’s changing medical education, it’s the commitment of faculty to having an anti-racist, more proactive approach to addressing health-care disparities and addressing historical wrongs committed by the medical profession,” Weinstock said.
MORE: UConn invites trans people to train med students in ‘gender-affirming care’
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: University of Connecticut sign outside of campus; UConn/YouTube
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