Duke University Health Care System has come under fire this year because of its claim that racism is a “public health crisis,” its firing of respected emergency physician Dr. Kendall Conger after he questioned the validity of that claim, and shocking statements from Duke physician Dr. Vignesh Raman about the institution’s racial and political preferences.
Duke Health’s websites are littered with statements and information about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) — even claiming the institution has begun to evaluate employee policies around drug screening, background checks, and attendance to promote “equitable” hiring and retention. The dark implication appears to be that Duke believes it must lower standards to hire minorities. This is an ironic, generalized, and particularly negative view of minorities for an institution that claims to be anti-racist.
Notably adding to the inconsistency and hypocrisy is the fact that Duke’s joint medical school in Asia with the National University of Singapore has zero mention of DEI on its website. Duke-NUS Medical School is a prestigious institution that admits roughly 3% of its applicants. Duke-NUS apparently seeks to further academic excellence and appears to value merit over medically irrelevant things like politics and skin color. Much like the United States, Singapore’s citizenry does not share a single ethnicity. Yet in this prosperous multi-ethnic Asian nation, Duke has conveniently chosen not to promote the DEI policies it believes to be crucial in the United States.
Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong — while still in office earlier this year — identified “wokeness” as a Western concept that “makes life very burdensome” and said he didn’t think his country of 95 recognized ethnicities wanted to go in that direction.
The former Singaporean leader said this dynamic results in people being “super sensitive about other people’s issues” and leads to “very extreme attitudes and social norms, particularly in some academic institutions.” Perhaps most telling is the former prime minister’s remark that “wokeness” does not create a more “cohesive, resilient society with a strong sense of solidarity.”
Duke has not explained why, while offering zero scientific or clinical evidence, it believes racism to be a “public health crisis” in the United States — one that requires the lowering of hiring standards to ensure “equitable hiring” — while promoting none of the same rhetoric in its prestigious medical school in multi-ethnic Singapore.
Cohesiveness and solidarity are indeed lacking at Duke, and hypocrisy seems to be the order of the day. Earlier this year, Duke removed a video from its website where Dr. Raman said his “heart drops” when he sees a patient watching FOX News or wearing Donald Trump clothing. He also expressed his pleasure at the fact that Duke serves a majority non-white patient base. Additionally, Dr. Raman admitted that Duke was abandoning “all sorts of metrics” in its hiring of surgeons.
Maybe the issue of racism being a “public health crisis” is actually more of an in-house health crisis, given some of the institution’s actions and statements.
Duke also — shockingly and without context — displayed a graphic to a group of physicians that depicted white males as agents of oppression and exploitation while ominously identifying and depicting any member of a minority group as a “target.”
Duke’s Health’s DEI initiatives have — according to Dr. Conger — decreased the quality of its future health care professionals over time and have no ethical, scientific, or clinical basis. Duke Health’s anti-racism pledge claims the institution is “guided by science,” though a senior official admitted to Dr. Conger, that despite searching, he could not find a clinical study that proved racism resulted in worse healthcare outcomes for black Americans.
Although Duke invited its employees to communicate with them about the pledge before it was publicly released, Dr. Conger was eventually terminated after his repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get his employer to produce scientific and clinical data to back its dark claims.
The pledge also stated “we recognize our own implicit bias.” By standard definition, it is impossible to recognize one’s own implicit bias. The well known IAT test — used at Duke and other institutions — often used to measure implicit bias, is actually incapable of measuring racism according to respected academic Tony Greenwald, who helped develop the IAT.
Color Us United — a non-profit organization that advocates for a race-blind and merit-based society — has challenged Duke on its DEI hypocrisy and has gathered over 10,000 signatures on a petition demanding that Duke cease its unscientific DEI practices, reinstate Dr. Conger, and force Dr. Raman to publicly apologize for his shockingly inappropriate and racially and politically charged statements about Duke patients.
No such petition exists regarding Duke’s Singapore-based medical school, as concepts like racism and diversity apparently only matter to Duke in the western hemisphere. Duke has yet to make an attempt to publicly defend or explain its policies.