Four weeks ago, David offered advice that could save your life: Avoid UCLA-educated, doctors, seriously. Just how seriously? Although the UCLA Medical School still retained top ratings in some specialties while falling out of the top ten rankings rather precipitously, its medical pedagogy had turned into a “deeply corrupted” ideological stew. The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium focused last month on the bizarre promotion of “fat liberationist” messaging, among other efforts to promote “diversity” rather than science.
Sibarium’s exposé must have set off alarm bells at the Westwood campus. In a follow-up from Sibarium today, sources within UCLA Medical tell the Free Beacon that the school has spent the last 27 years violating the state prohibition on race-based admissions policies as well as baking DEI into its lesson plan at the expense of actual medical science. The result is a shocking level of medical illiterates at what was once a premier medical school — and the promise of widespread malpractice by graduates:
Since [Jennifer] Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed. …
Within three years of Lucero’s hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report‘s rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.
Those tests, known as shelf exams, which are typically taken at the end of each clinical rotation, measure basic medical knowledge and play a pivotal role in residency applications. Though only 5 percent of students fail each test nationally, the rates are much higher at UCLA, having increased tenfold in some subjects since 2020, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.
Bear in mind that the scores at issue here do not only come from written examinations. The rotations themselves have become a disaster, according to Sibarium’s sources at UCLA. They are also failing in significant numbers during their practical phases of care at the hospital:
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.
Er … why was that student in the operating theater at all without a basic knowledge of anatomy? And how arrogant does a student have to be to chew out her supervising professor for asking what should have been an easy question to answer for a budding surgeon?
Sibarium’s sources blame the admissions process for enrolling students who cannot make the grade, literally and figuratively:
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.”
That certainly may be a contributing factor, but it’s not the whole story. As Sibarium pointed out four weeks ago, the school may be admitting students who can’t keep up with the rigors of medical education, but UCLA Medical isn’t even providing that education any longer. They are instead cooking their medical pedagogy with Marxism and “social justice” concerns rather than focusing on science. The science that gets priority isn’t medicine or even biology, but political science:
One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others attack “growth-centered economic theories” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 24, 2024
Can’t find a major artery during surgery? HOW DARE YOU ASK ME THAT! You know I can find the capitalist patriarchy in obesity management! Too bad about the guy on the table, though. What was all that red stuff coming out of his leg, anyway?
Lest one think that’s an overreaction …
“UCLA still produces some very good graduates,” one professor said. “But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
The collapse in qualifications has been compounded by UCLA’s decision, in 2020, to condense its preclinical curriculum from two years to one in order to add more time for research and community service. That means students arrive at their clinical rotations with just a year of courses under their belt—some of which focus less on science than social justice.
Somewhere between 33-50% of all UCLA Medical graduates are incredibly unqualified, according to one of the school’s own professors. Still feel good about trusting your health to a UCLA graduate?
Well, don’t feel too sanguine [pun intended] about your chances with other supposedly top-tier medical schools. In fact, at Yale, the first allegiance for any teacher in the sciences is not to truth or quality, but to diversity. In the Free Press today, John Sailer reveals the cult indoctrination at Yale starts at HR, where prospective tenure-track teachers and researchers had better be prepared to pledge fealty to DEI:
Want to be a molecular biologist at Yale? Well, make sure you have a ten-step plan for dismantling systemic racism. When making hires at Yale’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision,” according to a document tucked away on its website.
Meanwhile, every job advertised on the site links to a DEI “rubric” that tests candidates’ “knowledge of DEI and commitment to promoting DEI,” their “past DEI experiences and activities,” and their “future DEI goals and plans.”
The failure and collapse of American higher education isn’t an admissions scandal, although corruption of admissions certainly factors into it. The collapse came from the Marxists’ long march through the institution of Academia, gutting higher education and putting its reputational skin over their cult of radical nihilism and totalitarianism. At UCLA Medical, UCLA generally, and Academia as a whole, the intent isn’t to produce qualified doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other productive and learned citizens; it’s to deconstruct Western civilization.
And the Jennifer Luceros of Academia are getting precisely what they want.