Regular readers know that because I have been working with doctors for twenty-some years, I often joke the best medical advice I can give is "Do not get sick."
That started as a lighthearted jest. Here's how it ended, with this headline: "Penn medical school expands minority candidate program that does not require MCAT."
Pandering to blacks in higher education has been routine for some time before Penn's move. Blacks, for instance, had on average worse scores on the MCAT than Asians, but blacks were accepted at much higher rates than Asians. Here's one example of many, from AEI.
At the lowest MCAT scores, 56% of black applicants were accepted, but only 6% of Asians were, a difference of more than 9 times.
Another analysis found that blacks at the lowest MCAT scores and who had the lowest GPAs had a 50 times higher chance than of-no-colors of being accepted. This is a hilarious analysis because the author admits that if we held "black applicants to the 'same standards' as white applicants, we would...[be] effectively halving the number of blacks who get into medical school." (Memorize those scare quotes around <em>standards</em>.)
But then he assumes those missing blacks would be made up solely of of-no-color applicants, which proves, therefore, to the author, that more of-no-colors with worse scores would get in, lowering the average MCAT scores of of-no-color applicants. Which, though irrelevant and silly, is true. It also ignores that Asians with higher scores would take the place of blacks.
Anyway, the author gives the game away with throat clearing right before showing how admitting blacks with lower scores ackshually doesn't take seats away from of-no-colors with better scores:
In addition to righting the decades-long structural and historical factors that have limited opportunities for black students to enroll in medical school, there are many benefits to having diversity in the medical profession. A diverse physician population encourages [blah blah blah]
Point is, even with blacks being given tremendous advantages over Asians and other races, it wasn't enough advantage. DIE quotas were not being met, and if there is anything the woke are serious about, it is DIEing.
Now I have told us innumerable times that the dreadful and false theory of Equality destroys standards. The pattern is always the same. A group first pledges to DIE. It promises standards will not be lowered. Standards are then lowered. Then it is declared the standards were never necessary.
Then it is discovered full DIE has not been reached. It is then announced we must DIE harder. At which point---the point at which our medical schools are now at---the entire litany is repeated with the remaining standards.
According to the original article, even though ("racist"?) MCAT scores will no longer be required, a certain minimum undergraduate GPA will be.
My bold prediction (screenshot this) is that this GPA will be discovered to be too high, too arduous. Racial "disparities" will persist. So the minimum GPA will be lowered; the requirement of any GPA could very well be eliminated.
Even this will not achieve DIE. What could is to allow the matriculation of any black who wants to be a doctor, in much the same manner as City College's open admissions in the 1960s.
I hope you see the problem. No, it's not that, as a kindly doctor said in the original article, that "The stakes are too high (life and death) to start lowering standards or taking shortcuts with basic fundamental scientific knowledge necessary for developing critical thinking skills to diagnose and properly treat diseases".
No. It's that are still some standards <em>inside</em> medical schools. Not as many as before, and the few remaining (such as being able to tell male from female) are being tossed on various woke bonfires, but still enough to guarantee "disparities" in graduation rates.
Full DIE will not, and cannot, be achieved until all standards are eliminated.
Which is happening, as described in this City Journal article. "Step" tests, which must be passed to advance in med school, are being quashed.
A fourth-year Yale medical student describes how the specter of Step One affected his priorities. In his first two years of medical school, the student had “immersed” himself, as he describes it, in a student-led committee focused on diversity, inclusion, and social justice. The student ran a podcast about health disparities. All that political work was made possible by Yale’s pass-fail grading system, which meant that he didn’t feel compelled to put studying ahead of diversity concerns. Then, as he tells it, Step One “reared its ugly head.” Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student,” the student worried.
A very short time from now, if you are rational, and do not suffer from Equality, and do not feel the need to DIE, you will look at the black doctor approaching you and say to yourself, "Uh oh."
Which, for the same black doctor if there were no DIEing, no "affirmative" action, no cheating, and with standards galore, you'd say, "It hurts when I do this, doc."
And he'd say...
Bonus: It's not only medicine, of course, but every field that swears to DIE. Though you are not allowed to say so. If you do, you are canceled. You know Yours Truly was canceled. Well Amy Wax is undergoing cancellation now in law. Excellent interview here.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
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CJ states: "And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession."
That is to say that doctors do not want measures of medical merit and intellectual excellence; they wish to be free of standards. That is the essence of professional libertinism.
And in surrender (of course,) the multitude of doctors sigh: "Sa la vie. So it goes. Oh, well. Standards are overrated. Equity."
And there is nary a noise from atop the ramparts, behind the lines or within the barricades of medicine, because, once again, doctors have built no ramparts, they have trenched no front lines. There is no barricade. There is no rally cry, no leader, no brave Horatius at medicine's gate to shout, "And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods."
A mere finger of opposition and a whimper of protest is raised before our doctors crumble, deliver up their scruples, surrender their profession and sacrifice the public's health to POC predators.
There is heard only the afterword of Macaulay's lament, "As we wax hot in faction, In battle we wax cold: Wherefore men fight not as they fought In the brave days of old.”
And if you listen, you will also hear the AMA say of standards, "We are all libertines now."
History's most rememberd advocate of libertinism as normative was the insane Marquis de Sade.
Has the siren song of social justice made doctors sadists?
Oh, Hell no!
Socialized medicine with "doctors" who
finished in the bottom 5% of their class,
did their internship in the hood's STD Clinic
and their residency at a Drug Rehab
Center downtown while on probation.