Apparently just mentioning the word “Palestinian” can get a medical-school class canceled, at least if the professor doing the mentioning is Jewish. Sheldon Rubenfeld, in a course he has taught at Baylor University’s medical school for the past twenty years, routinely cites his own experience helping a suicidal Palestinian to illustrate the need for physicians to set aside their own political biases. Last spring, this example caused an unexpected reaction:
[T]wo Baylor faculty members informed me that a student in this lecture filed an “anonymous grievance” because the student “felt uncomfortable.” They offered almost no specifics other than my use of the word “Palestinian” and said that the course could be canceled if students filed additional anonymous grievances. A faculty member from Baylor’s Center for Professionalism then told me that the policy of anonymous grievances is based on the school’s belief that medical students are a “vulnerable population.” . . . A few weeks later, the course was canceled.
But that is only one symptom of a much deeper problem, Rubenfeld explains:
Students at elite universities now engaging in protests that oppose Israel’s existence and call for violence against Jews will bring their anti-Semitism with them to medical school, where this or any other of their harmful biases are unlikely to be challenged.
Since October 7, we have seen confirmation that anti-Semitism has crept into medicine. In social-media posts, Dana Diab, an emergency-room physician in New York City, applauded Hamas’s massacre as giving Israelis “a taste of their own medicine”; for this she was fired.
Unless DEI, which incubates anti-Semitism, is eliminated from medical education, the consequences for today’s patients, especially Jewish patients, could be grave. Medical educators must recall that the first responsibility of physicians is to do no harm to a truly vulnerable population: their patients.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/patients-not-medical-students-are-a-vulnerable-population