Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, has voiced his opposition to the new “anti-racism” policies that are taking over the medical field, saying that they are “lowering standards and corrupting medicine.”
Dr. Goldfarb, 78, is a trained nephrologist and former Associate Dean of UPenn. He spoke to the New York Post about the dangers that come with admitting students to med school based on their race, arguing that it ultimately does a disservice to the minority students.
Goldfarb said,
“I understand we need to give people more opportunities. But there are some things you can’t sacrifice. This focus on diversity means we’re going to take someone with a certain skin color because we think they’re OK, that they can do the work. But we’re not going to look for the best and the brightest. We’re going to look for people who are just OK to make sure we have the right mixture of ethnic groups in our medical schools.”
Medical schools have begun to stop requiring the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) for certain students, eliminating a major test that has been used to filter out med school applicants since the late 1940s. Now, the new push for racial diversity and equity has caused many deserving, high-performing students to be rejected from med schools because the slots are given to black and Hispanic students who aren’t required to present high test scores.
“It’s manyfold harder for a white medical student who has average grades to get accepted into medical school, maybe 30 or 40 times harder than a minority student with the same grades,” said Goldfarb.
The professor then explained how the new affirmative action policies could hurt minority students more than they help them. Minorities could begin to be viewed by their peers as less competent because they had a much easier time getting into the program.
“The brilliant black doctors of the future like Ben Carson, who was considered one of the premier pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, may be looked at by someone who says, ‘Hey, this person doesn’t belong at Johns Hopkins – he’s only here because they wanted more diversity in the neurosurgery department,” Goldfarb warned.
In March, Goldfarb released a book titled, ‘Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.’
After beginning to publically speak out against ‘anti-racist’ policies and the harm they pose to American medicine, Goldfarb was censured by the UPenn Medical School chairman, Dr. Michael Parmacek, who also called Goldfarb a “racist” for his views.
Dr. Ashley Denmark, a minority advocacy group leader, started a petition earlier this year to have Goldfarb removed from the college faculty. A UPenn spokesperson also contacted the New York Post to clarify that Godlfarb’s opinions are not representative of the school’s “core values.”
However, Goldfarb admits he is not bothered by criticisms from other faculty members. This year, he founded an organization called ‘Do No Harm,’ which helps protect doctors, patients, and health care from “discriminatory, divisive ideologies.”
