Dr. Tom Woods has published a piece about racial quotas in medical schools. Actions like that of Dr. Wang indicate that the pendulum is swinging back.
Yes, I know we’re a “litigious society,” as they say, but it still makes me happy when a good guy sues bad guys who never expected to have to pay for their wrongdoing.
The good guy in question is Dr. Norman Wang, who until 2020 had been a mild-mannered academic who had attracted no controversy of any kind. A cardiologist, Dr. Wang was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the fellowship program in clinical cardiac electrophysiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
But then he decided to write an article about the history of affirmative action in medicine, with critical comments. You know as well as I do that that’s just not allowed.
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in university admissions (I devoted episode #2359 of the Tom Woods Show to the subject), Dr. Anish Koka decided it was opportune moment to tell the story of Dr. Wang, and that’s how I found out about it.
The paper in question was published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, and called “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019.”
Wang argued that the affirmative action programs in medicine violated the standards laid out by the Supreme Court, which had insisted that out-and-out quotas were not allowed. He further argued that they did no favors to the people allegedly helped by them, because the results of the program were mismatches between students and schools for which they were not qualified, and because genuinely excellent black and Hispanic physicians had to operate under the presumption that they earned their places through quotas.
Among other things, Wang found that as affirmative action grew more aggressive, so did attrition rates among black medical students. In the 1980s black medical students had three times the attrition rate of their white counterparts. Already by the 1990s the figure had shot up to ten times.
According to Dr. Koka, “A review of MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] scores by medical school applicant race shows that Asian and white applicants don’t bother applying with the lowest MCAT scores, while more than 50% of black applicants are applying with the lowest MCAT scores.”
Further, Wang wrote, “Racial and ethnic preferences at both the undergraduate and professional school levels for blacks and Hispanics result in relatively weak academic starting positions in classes. This has been postulated to lead to poor performance through compounding ‘academic mismatch,’ stress-related interference, and disengagement. Many do not complete their intended programs or do not attain academic success to be attractive candidates for subsequent educational programs or employment.”
This effect should be obvious and uncontroversial.
In fact, Wang observed, “Most medical schools now require students to pass the US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 to advance. Introduced in 1992, poor performance of blacks and Hispanics on the US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 was described as early as 1996. First-try passing rates for the graduating class of 1994 were 93.4% for whites, 58.2% for blacks, 77.5% for Hispanics, and 86.8% for Asians.”
The paper received a quiet reception until Wang’s university colleagues found out about the paper.
He was called in to a meeting where he was interrogated by Samir Saba, chief of the division of cardiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Kathryn Berlacher, associate chief of education in the division of cardiology and program director of the cardiology fellowship program there.
Shortly thereafter, Wang was removed as director of the fellowship program in clinical electrophysiology. Saba and Berlacher further forbade Wang from having any contact at all with anyone in any fellowship program at the school, as well as any residents or medical students.
Meanwhile, on social media, Wang was called a “racist” ceaselessly, as you surely knew.
Barry London, the cowardly editor of the Journal of the American Heart Association, went so far as to retract the paper, decrying its arguments “against affirmative action” and its claims that “Black and Hispanic trainees in medicine are less qualified than White and Asian trainees.” “These opinions, he continued, do not reflect in any way my views, the views of the JAHA Editorial Board, or the views of the American Heart Association. We condemn discrimination and racism in all forms.”
So it’s “discrimination and racism” to cite statistics. Facts are racist!
The Journal did publish a response to Wang’s paper. Among its sophisticated arguments against Wang’s constitutional claims was this: “The delegates at the original constitutional convention were slave owners.”
I’m happy to report that Dr. Wang is suing the whole lot of them — Drs. Saba and Berlacher, and the University of Pittsburgh — for violating his academic freedom.
You can be punished for having the wrong opinions and yet you’ll still be the fascist to these people.
It’s about time somebody stood up to them.
I echo Dr. Woods sentiments. It seems that more and more people have had enough of the chicanery that has been passing for righteous virtue.