Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that schools cannot use racial preferences in its admissions process, Harvard University’s medical school continues to discriminate against its applicants, according to a Wednesday complaint.
America First Legal (AFL) filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice detailing a “calculated effort” from Harvard Medical School to continue race-based admissions while appearing to comply with federal law. The complaint, which includes evidence of sex-based preferences as well, notes that Harvard continues to do this because of its dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology.
“This is not only illegal, it is unethical. By using new labels to sustain the same discriminatory system and elevating identity over individual merit, Harvard is turning the training of physicians into a vehicle for demographic engineering and social activism,” AFL counsel Megan Redshaw told The Federalist. “The American people deserve physicians chosen for skill and competency — not because they checked the right diversity box.”
AFL’s complaint states that Harvard is violating Title VI, Title IX, executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The school uses “race proxies embedded within holistic review criteria and ideologically driven DEI frameworks — all designed to produce predetermined demographic outcomes,” the complaint states. “This is not a lawful adaptation. It is covert circumvention to achieve the very racial balancing the Supreme Court struck down as ‘patently unconstitutional.'”
The school uses a purportedly “holistic” method, which AFL says “utilizes diversity-based essay prompts structured to elicit racial and identity-based information about an applicant in ways that allow admissions officers to discern race and other protected characteristics.”
That is fully in-line with Harvard’s plan to find a loophole back in 2023 — a door opened by Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the Supreme Court opinion and decided to include the wink-wink, nudge-nudge line stating, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Immediately, Harvard leadership took that line and put its thumb in the eye of the Supreme Court, stating, tongue-in-cheek, “We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision,” before suggesting that there would be other ways an applicant can tell admissions teams their race without explicitly checking a box on an application.
The school also “constructed a parallel, race-conscious pipeline to identify, recruit, and advance individuals from its preferred demographic categories at every medical education and training state,” the complaint states, adding that the pipeline can start as early as middle school, and uses the phrase “underrepresented minorities and/or disadvantaged individuals” as a euphemism for race and sex preferences.
To pursue some of these preferences, the complaint states that Harvard used at least $49.1 million from federal taxpayers to fund its DEI programming.
Schools across the country have been attempting to hide their DEI regimes to avoid scrutiny, and Harvard is no different, as The Federalist reported. Hiding the DEI infrastructure and finding loopholes to continue race- and sex-based admissions preferences are slightly different, but Harvard signaled its intention to find these loopholes within hours of the high court’s decision.
“Once considered the gold standard of American higher education, Harvard today is better known for defying the Constitution than upholding it,” the complaint continues. “Rather than dismantle its ‘discrimination, exclusion, and intolerance’ practices as required, Harvard has chosen instead to rename, repackage, and redeploy the same unlawful practices under new euphemisms. It has chosen defiance over compliance.”
Harvard Medical School is “codifying identity-based ideological instruction under the guise of health care training,” by embedding DEI ideology as mandatory as part of a “design[] to shape every aspect of medical education and professional formation.”
AFL points to “Health Equity” and “Sexual and Gender Minority Health” as the school’s top concerns, both of which use “race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity as central organizing categories in curriculum, assessment, and professional development.”
Those themes are used to “embed race-conscious and sex-based viewpoints into medical training,” the complaint states. “Health Equity,” for example, is premised on the idea that disparities in health outcomes are the fault of systemic injustice, and Harvard Medical wants each of its courses to drive that point into somehow creating “more equitable health systems.”
One of the more grotesque outgrowths of this idea is the idea of “racial concordance,” which claims that doctors of a particular race systematically underserve patients of races different from their own. It therefore posits that patients need to be race-matched with doctors in order to obtain the best medical care, which is part of the reason some of these race-obsessed schools are trying to artificially change their own demographics.
Castle Connolly, which runs a search engine for finding a doctor, went so far as to create a filtration tool to match a patient with a doctor of their preferred race. The American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges have also pushed “racial concordance.”
“DEI in medicine is not a harmless fad but a direct threat to public health. When medical schools put identity politics ahead of merit, they compromise the quality of care, erode patient trust, and endanger lives,” Redshaw said. “There is no room for racial engineering or social activism in the operating room.”