Duke Medical School has adopted race-based promotion guidelines that reward doctors for recruiting and mentoring "BIPOC faculty" and "targeting specific groups of people," language attorneys say appears to violate civil rights law and could put the school in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The "Appointment, Promotion and Tenure Framework for Scholarship in Justice, Equity, Diversity, Antiracism and Inclusion" guidelines—which were posted on a Duke University website as of July 3—list a slew of race-conscious efforts as "promotable activities." Faculty can help their tenure case by "strengthening ties with Hispanic-serving institutions and historically Black colleges"; advising "BIPOC" trainees; leading K-12 programs that "foster a diverse pipeline of potential learners from BIPOC and other marginalized groups"; and devising strategies to "measurably increase the number of BIPOC learners."
The goal, according to Duke, is to shield minorities from what the guidelines refer to as the "Black tax"—that is, the pressure institutions place on "BIPOC individuals" to "represent the marginalized."
"Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals are frequently and disproportionately burdened by institutions and communities to represent the marginalized in committees, projects, tasks, and initiatives (aka the ‘Black tax’ or ‘minority tax’)," the guidelines read. "These efforts have rarely ‘counted’ as promotable work."
Attorneys who reviewed the guidelines said they seemed designed to encourage unlawful race discrimination and could inspire the federal government—already at war with multiple elite universities, including Harvard University and Columbia University—to make Duke its next target.
"These don’t sound like gray areas," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. "They sound like very open violations of federal law, of the kind this administration has prioritized ending."
David Bernstein, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University, said that at least some of the language in the guidelines was likely illegal. He added that it was "totally outrageous that any of this ideological nonsense counts toward tenure at a medical school, on the par with actual medical research and clinical work," regardless of its legality.
Duke did not respond to a request for comment. It did, however, remove the criteria from its website sometime after July 3, the day the Washington Free Beacon contacted the university.
The school has likewise remained mum about the racial preferences at its flagship law review, which last year sent a secret memo to minority applicants instructing them to disclose their race for extra points. The memo, first reported by the Free Beacon, included several examples of personal statements that had gotten students on law review. Most of those statements mentioned race in the first sentence, with one applicant writing that, "[a]s an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges."
The revelations about the law and medical school come at a sensitive time for the university: Duke, along with 44 other schools, is under federal investigation for allegedly sponsoring race-based graduate programs.
The promotion criteria reward a wide range of activities related to "Justice, Equity, Diversity, Antiracism, and Inclusion," including "JEDAI Scholarship" that examines "patterns of representation, incorporation, and inclusion." Faculty can also earn points by developing courses on "microaggressions" and the "history of systemic racism in the United States."
Duke is not the only medical school that has integrated DEI into its promotion guidelines. At Brown University’s Department of Medicine, the promotion criteria for faculty give "diversity, equity, and inclusion" more weight than "excellent clinical skills."