Patients Need Trump To Go Further With Higher Ed Reform
A year ago, President Trump signed one of his most important executive orders. He called out the decline of higher education, where merit and excellence have given way to indoctrination in “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” He then targeted the accreditors who have actively forced this decline in learning on colleges and universities. The president’s ultimate goal was to refocus higher education on actual education that strengthens our country.
Some accreditors that oversee health-focused colleges quickly responded by dropping their requirements on DEI. But a year later, others continue to prioritize indoctrination over education. For the sake of patients, President Trump needs to break their stranglehold on training health professionals.
The president already knows that health education is a hotbed of DEI. He specifically called out the medical school accreditor in his executive order last year. At the time, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education – which oversees more than 150 U.S. allopathic medical schools – required them to establish programs “aimed at achieving diversity,” a thinly veiled reference to illegal discriminatory admissions and hiring practices.
Thankfully, the committee abandoned that requirement after the president’s order. Most recently, in March, it also abandoned a separate mandate that forced medical schools to teach future physicians to “recognize and appropriately address biases in themselves, in others, and in the health care delivery process.” That’s DEI 101, effectively declaring that health care is systematically racist and doctors must be activists. Now that the mandate is gone, medical schools can actually teach medicine.
But certain accreditors have made no changes at all. Take the organization that oversees America’s 2,100 nursing programs – the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education. Its accreditation standards and requisite core competencies, taken from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, force nurses to learn how to “integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into team practices.” They must also learn how “to promote advocacy efforts that include principles of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This isn’t nursing education. It’s activist indoctrination.
The same is true for the accreditor that oversees social worker education. The Committee on Social Work Education forces social workers – who play a major role in connecting patients to medical care – to learn how to “Advance Human Rights and Social, Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice.” Another requirement aims to make them “Engage Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Practice.”
How will any of this improve people’s health? It won’t, but then it isn’t meant to. This is about politicizing social work, and the accreditor has no intention of turning back. In January, it said outright that it “remains steadfast in its commitment to the current standards.”
The list goes on. The psychology school accreditor has only decided to “temporarily not review for compliance” its DEI standards, leaving the door open to reimposing them in the future. The podiatry school accreditor has suspended – but not eliminated – its DEI mandates. The pharmacists and osteopathic school accreditors, however, have fully removed their DEI standards, though it remains to be seen if they’ll revert under a future administration.
The Trump administration should absolutely hold these DEI holdouts accountable. But it’s not enough to penalize or punish them. Their intransigence shows that the healthcare establishment will likely bring DEI back with a vengeance once President Trump is out of office. To prevent the continued indoctrination of the men and women who provide healthcare to Americans, the president should accelerate the creation of new accreditors altogether, completely free from DEI and focused on excellent health education.
President Trump could easily direct his Department of Education to search for new accreditors for various types of health care education while speeding up the approval process. States like Florida, which recently co-founded a new accrediting organization together with several other state university systems, could then step up to fill the gap. The establishment would surely try to stifle competition, but the president could still force a change. His administration would need to pressure states and licensing boards to recognize new accreditors. It would help if he told Americans that health education is undermining its own mission by training partisans, not professionals.
President Trump should start this process as soon as possible, so that health professionals can finally be freed from DEI indoctrination through competition. He took the first step with his executive order last April, but a year later, it’s clear that more profound change is necessary. Health education – for doctors, nurses, and every specialist under the sun – must be completely freed from DEI and refocused on merit and excellence. Clearly, the healthcare establishment won’t do that on its own. So President Trump should force more fundamental change, for the sake of American patients who deserve the best care.