The Washington Free Beacon had a blow-out expose yesterday: Thanks to DEI, almost half of UCLA’s medical students are provably incompetent. They’re students at what was once one of the nation’s premier medical schools solely because they’re non-white, despite California voters having made affirmative action illegal in 1996.

Despite not being a doctor, I have some insight into what’s happened. In the early 1990s, I dated a medical student who attended the University of California in San Francisco, which was then (and probably still is) considered one of the best medical schools in the world. I knew most of my boyfriend’s classmates (class sizes were small). They were predominantly white and Asian, they worked insanely hard, and even the worst performing in the class, no matter their race, were pretty darn smart and quite capable of being decent doctors.

AI image by atlascompany.

By the mid-1990s, things were already changing. Through my legal work, I met a young man who had been railroaded by a cabal of minority women in his residency. They wanted him out and weren’t above making defamatory claims against him. The residency program backed the women, although it was clear they were lying.

In other words, the pieces were already in place for the Washington Free Beacon’s damning exposé about the DEI disaster unfolding at the University of California Los Angeles (“UCLA”) medical school. Under the guidance of Jennifer Lucero, who is also “vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion” in the anesthesiology department, the admissions program gave places in the class to manifestly unqualified people. It did so entirely based upon the applicants’ race. Now, that same cohort of students is proving to be dangerously incompetent:

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.

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

Reporter Aaron Sibarium interviewed several professors at the medical school, reviewed internal UCLA correspondence, and examined internal data about student performance. The latter, especially, show that the faculty members were right to be dismayed about what had happened to a once reliable institution:

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.

The test data align with the faculty’s experience with students who were obviously admitted under the new standards:

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.

If you’re wondering how UCLA managed to admit so many low-performing minorities even though racial preferences/affirmative action became illegal in California in 1996, the answer is academia’s workaround of focusing on applicants’ “life experiences.” If your life experience is that you’ve suffered from being a minority...you’re in.

Lucera routinely browbeat admission committee members into focusing entirely on that aspect of a minority’s application rather than on actual qualifications:

Lucero hasn’t been kind to dissenters. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.

She has lashed out at officials who question the qualifications of minority candidates, five sources said, suggesting naysayers are “privileged,” implying that they are racist, and subjecting them to diversity training sessions.

After a Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, for example, Lucero chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister, according to three people familiar with the incident. No applications were reviewed that day, an official present for the lecture said.

I urge you to read the entire article. It’s illuminating in a dispiriting way.

The great irony of all this is that Lucero is planting innumerable poison pills in the communities she claims to serve. When challenged about admitting an underqualified black candidate, she lashed out:

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

In other words, Lucero intends to send incompetent doctors to treat those dying black women, something that will only ensure that those same sad women die in ever greater numbers.

James Lindsay likes to say, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” For people like Lucero, if the road to revolution needs to be paved by the bodies of dead black women, so be it.