Discriminations

Rebecca Walsh, a columnist at the Salt Lake Tribune, is liberal-minded. She acknowledges that the inequality that permeates the University of Utah Medical School is not “all” the fault of one “Republican state senator,” other “Conservative lawmakers,” and their “fit of regressive policy-making.”

But most of it is.

Walsh liberal-mindedly notes statistics showing that “Utah minority students simply aren’t graduating from college or applying to graduate programs at the rate of their white counterparts,” but she is offended by “Conservative lawmakers” who “insist they simply want enrollment at the state's only medical school to reflect the applicant pool — without regard for social or economic factors that may skew those numbers.”

Of students enrolled in 1997, 4 percent were Latino. Last year, 3.9 percent were Latino. Meanwhile, Utah’s Latino population more than doubled — to 11 percent of the state’s population.

But it’s not just Latinos. Virtually every traditionally disadvantaged group lags in U. medical school enrollment. In 2007, a single American Indian was enrolled at the school. There are three Pacific Islander students. In the just-accepted class of 102, 40 percent are women. The only exception to the rule are Asian students, whose numbers at the school have doubled in the past 10 years.

It appears that until recently the medical school was engaging in what those nasty “Conservative lawmakers” stooped so low as to call “social engineering.” But those meanies didn’t simply engage in name-calling. They sent in “state auditors” who “dissected the university's admissions process” and “concluded that minority and women students were accepted to the U. medical school at a higher rate than white males.”

According to Wayne Samuelson, Associate Dean of Admissions, this audit “had a chilling effect on administrators and students.” One usually associates “chilling effect” with intimidating individuals from exercising their First Amendment or other Constitutional rights, but at the Utah Medical School it seems that what was chilled was the practice of giving preferential treatment to members of certain racial and ethnic groups.

Or was it? Ms. Walsh reports, apparently oblivious to the implication of her numbers, that

the U. School of Medicine is competitive. More than 1,300 students applied this year; only 8 percent got in. The university is required to reserve 75 spots for Utahns and eight for students from Idaho. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 14 Latino students applied to the U. in 2007 and six were enrolled.

So, 8 percent of all students who applied this year enrolled (not “got in,” as Ms. Walsh states here; earlier she had said that this year’s class consists of 102 students). But of the 14 Latino students who applied, six were enrolled. That’s 43 percent!

If that’s the result after the “chilling effect” resulting from the “fit of regressive policy-making,” I’d hate to see how hot things were before.

What is animating Ms. Walsh’s agitation about “inequality” at the Utah Medical School is what animates all those who support race and ethnic preferences — a commitment to a version of equality that requires something approaching proportional representation of all groups (well, not all groups; only racial and some ethnic groups). Because the idea of pure racial and ethnic proportionality is so widely unappealing, subordinating individuals as it does to the groups of which they are members, lately this idea of proportional equality has been dressed up with the trappings of “culture.”

Here is Ms. Walsh’s view of the terrible effect of the medical school refusing (to the degree that it does) to engage in “social engineering”:

Needless to say, it’s hard for many Utahns to find a doctor who looks like them, speaks their language and understands their culture.

But I wonder how many Utahns really share Ms. Walsh’s concern That is, I wonder how many would prefer to be treated by a doctor who “who looks like them, speaks their language and understands their culture” if the cost of having such doctors required the medical school to lower its admission (and perhaps graduation) standards in order to produce them. I would love to see poll results on this question.

Finally, let us assume something that is not at all self-evident — that the Latino, black, etc., “cultures” are so different from the mainstream culture in Utah that they require their own native or tribal doctors, that doctors must look like, speak like, and ... (what? eat and dance like?) their patients in order to provide good medical care. Assuming, as I say, that that’s true, doing what it would take for Ms. Walsh to conclude that the medical school was not practicing “inequality” would require it to admit and produce doctors who could not provide quality medical care to a substantial majority of the people of Utah.

In fact, perhaps to protect the public from doctors who do not look, speak, eat, etc., like them, perhaps medical licensing authorities would have to begin issuing conditional medical licenses, limiting their owners to practice among culturally appropriate patients.

The good news is that, unless Utah is considerably more liberal than states such as California, Washington, and Michigan, I suspect Ms. Walsh’s view of what equality means, and hence what constitutes inequality, is limited to college campuses (and there, to administrative offices and departments in the humanities and social sciences) and a few editorial offices.