According to the National Post, Canada has a new med school (Torontoo Metropolitan University, or TMU), slated to open next year, has bought into the full DEI ideology that seems to be waning in the U.S.
This is an op-ed piece, and of course reflects a conservative opinion with statements like the first one below one, but read the facts for yourself. At any rate, I’m not keen on the paragraph below, as we don’t know how admissions will work (the “sob stories” bit is somewhat invidious):
All considered, most of TMU’s prospective med students will be getting in on student personal statements, sob stories and extracurriculars — factors that actually tend to bias admissions in favour of those who are well-off, but perhaps less competent. That’s who many of these diversity doctors will likely be.
The particulars (indented) and remember this is a conservative partisan view, so the language is inflammatory. Look at the links to ensure that their conclusions are supported.
Canada’s newest medical school is slated to be one of the most discriminatory programs of its kind when it opens in 2025. Straight, white, “privileged” men won’t be warmly welcomed as MD candidates at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), as only a quarter of seats will be open to their kind.
It’s the exact kind of over-the-top, explicit, proud racism that diversity advocates assured us would never happen. Well, it’s here, and it’s vile, and in another decade, it might be the reason you switch to a medical AI for general needs and a Mexico-based private specialist for anything more complex.
You see, 75 per cent of spots in the Ryersonian med program will be reserved for “equity-deserving” folk: Indigenous people, admitted through their own stream, Black people, who also get their own stream, and everyone else who can check a diversity box, who get lumped into a final catch-all admissions pathway.
That list of diversity boxes is long, including LGBT people, disabled people, non-white people, children of non-white immigrants, poor-upbringing people, people over the age of 26, and people who have “faced familial and/or socio-cultural barriers such as loss of both parents, long term involvement with the child welfare system, and/or precarious housing.”
The standards for acceptance into the program, you should know, are quite lax. Applicants are required to have a degree and have achieved a GPA of at least 3.3 on a 4.0 scale, or a high B, but even that’s a soft floor — diversity candidates (i.e. most candidates) are eligible for consideration below that 3.3. No MCAT results are required, because the faculty is still under the false impression that standardized testing isn’t inclusive. Not all demographics perform as proficiently on these tests, but the data overwhelmingly show that it is predictive of academic ability across all backgrounds, which is what matters when we’re selecting future doctors.
But here is one thing I really object to (bolding is mine):
The administrators overseeing the place won’t be much better: as we speak, the faculty is searching for a “social accountability” associate dean to lead social justice and decolonization initiatives. They’re also looking for an “other ways of knowing” lead to ensure non-scientific perspectives are represented.
Seriously? What other “way of knowing” is there besides science construed broadly: empirical observation, experiment, doubt, replication, and all the stuff that enables us to understand the universe. Here’s from that page:
This is a bow to indigenous ways of knowing related to medicine but if that knowledge has been supported using modern scientific tests, it becomes “modern medicine”. I hope they won’t teach any indigenous “way of knowing” that haven’t been tested to see if they’re medically efficacious.
More from the article:
Hence, TMU Med aims to “Intentionally recruit diverse faculty and staff and those with a demonstrated commitment to (DEI)“; “include (DEI), intersectionality, health equity, human rights and the social determinants of health in curriculum.” That’s code for more courses about racist, systemic biases in health care more medical academics positioned to churn out bogus scholarly articles about microaggressions and race grievances, and the addition of political capacities, such as the ability to diagnose patients with “climate change”.
. . . Especially concerning for a program that should be rooted in reality is its rejection of absolute truth with regard to health: the school was designed with sensitivity to “ageism,” “fatphobia,” and “anti-madness.” It was also designed clearly to generate activist-doctors: “we work to acknowledge, understand, and challenge systems of power that privilege some groups over others,“ reads one planning document. “We take a race-conscious approach that recognizes the way racism is perpetuated in the healthcare system and that encompasses perspectives like Critical Race Theory.”
The rest of the article is more or less a conservative diatribe against these standards, but of course there is a concern when one prizes diversity over merit in a field like medicine: lives are at stake. So the $64 question is this: would you be hesitant to go to a doctor who got their degree from this school? Would you vet them more carefully than usual? Check out the links and weigh in below.
I am happy to report that another new Canadian medical school is at Simon Fraser University, which was (provisionally) lauded here for adopting institutional neutrality. (See WEIT, Sept 12, 2024). I presume that policy will extend to the School of Medicine which aims to begin classes in 2026.
I follow closely the developments of the new medical school at my university because it is likely to cannibalize ~all of our budget flexibility.
So far the admissions policy has anodyne references to “people from diverse backgrounds [who] will create a more equitable health workforce that better reflects the province’s diversity”, and a lot of nonsense about creating “culturally safe experiences” for indigenous people.
http://www.sfu.ca/medicine/plan/approach.html
There is no word yet on whether the new med school will prioritize admitting Canadians. There will be temptation to admit people from “diverse international backgrounds” who will pay differential fee$ to attend.
More worrisome is the focus on “holistic approaches to well-being that balance physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, which Indigenous ways of knowing prioritize [including] social accountability, the social determinants of health, and other things that make people well, like equal access to justice and opportunity.” It seems likely that SFU will focus on graduating activist doctors too. Maybe SFU and Ryerson (sorry I just can’t call it “Toronto Metropolitan University”) can have a woke-off in ten years after their first 4 or 5 classes have graduated.
http://www.sfu.ca/medicine/news/2024/05/equity-from-the-ground-up.html
Most worrisome is that if we build it students may not come. The new med school will focus on training in family medicine and placing new doctors in rural and indigenous communities. This is all great, but not many Canadians want such a career.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oma-declining-number-medical-school-students-family-medicine-1.7182901
http://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/mcmaster-turns-to-foreign-trained-docs-after-canadian-grads-shun-family-medicine/article_460651d9-68f1-5be2-a14f-41d71efd49fd.html
It’s unclear whether interest in family medicine is correlated with overall ability to pursue medical training. We sure hope not.
This was identified as spam because there were too many links. I found it and restored it but readers, please be aware that if you put in three links or more, it might go into the spam folder, where I never look.
Traditionally, the split between family medicine and specializing has been about 50:50 among medical graduates. It has been many, many years since people at parties asked the insulting question “And are you going to specialize or are you just going to be a GP?” Take the situation in the UK: the RCGP was founded in 1952, and by the 1970’s had transformed the landscape. A body of knowledge particular to general practice had been identified (mostly to do with exquisite history taking and physical examination skills, along with decision-making in the light of limited information, which you will understand is the usual case in primary care, and it is possible to make strategies to do so in the safest way possible), higher professional qualifications, and the first properly organized and mandatory post-grad training of all medical specialties. In my day that was five years of medical school, one year of house jobs in medicine and surgery, two years as a senior house officer involving six months of O&G, paediatrics, psychiatry and general medicine with clinics in dermatology, ENT and ophthalmology, then a year as a trainee in a general practice working under the supervision of an experienced GP. Most people in those days went to medical school with the intention of following that schema, not falling off a career ladder and having to settle for general practice.
I think your fear that interest in general practice is correlated (I assume you mean negatively) with ability to complete training is unfounded.
I follow closely the developments of the new medical school at my university because it is likely to cannibalize ~all of our budget flexibility.
So far the admissions policy has anodyne references to “people from diverse backgrounds [who] will create a more equitable health workforce that better reflects the province’s diversity”, and a lot of nonsense about creating “culturally safe experiences” for indigenous people.
_www.sfu.ca/medicine/plan/approach.html
No word yet on whether the new med school will prioritize admitting Canadians. There will be temptation to admit people from “diverse international backgrounds” who will pay differential fee$ to attend.
More worrisome is the focus on “holistic approaches to well-being that balance physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, which Indigenous ways of knowing prioritize [including] social accountability, the social determinants of health, and other things that make people well, like equal access to justice and opportunity.” It seems likely that SFU will focus on graduating activist doctors too. Maybe SFU and Ryerson (sorry I just can’t call it “Toronto Metropolitan University”) can have a woke-off in ten years after their first 4 or 5 classes have graduated.
_www.sfu.ca/medicine/news/2024/05/equity-from-the-ground-up.html
Most worrisome is that if we build it students may not come. The new med school will focus on training in family medicine and placing new doctors in rural and indigenous communities. This is all great, but not many Canadians want such a career.
_www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/oma-declining-number-medical-school-students-family-medicine-1.7182901
_www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/mcmaster-turns-to-foreign-trained-docs-after-canadian-grads-shun-family-medicine/article_460651d9-68f1-5be2-a14f-41d71efd49fd.html
It’s unclear whether interest in family medicine is correlated with overall ability to pursue medical training. We sure hope not.
Thanks for this information, depressing as it seems.
It’s interesting that the new SFU medical school will focus on family medicine and rural communities. Those are meant to be selling points in NZ for a new medical school which may be set up at Waikato University.
I keep reading SFU as short-hand for “Shut the F*ck Up”.
Apparently they were originally going to call it Fraser University but the initials were definitely no good.
I graduated from SFU in 1973.
Ha yes that’s how I feel most of the time. Faculty members with my POV are unwelcome at any administrative level higher than my department chair (who I admire and respect a lot). The deans view us as annoyances who can’t retire too soon.
Me, too😹
Apparently the Ryerson name had to go because of a (slight) association with residential schools.
Leslie Macmillan on another post yesterday showed just how slight the association was.
More wokeness.
Late edit: I notice he’s posted here too.
“So the $64 question is this: would you be hesitant to go to a doctor who got their degree from this school? Would you vet them more carefully than usual?”
No.
What that means is :
Last time I “selected” a doctor, it was an admixture of credential collecting and availability. Turned out to exceed expectations!
Then they retired all of a sudden, and I was assigned a new one. They are fine for the purposes.
The Revolution makes use of such “tired”, apathetic attitudes, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn is to have said :
“I understand, I sense that you’re tired. But you have not yet really suffered the terrible trials of the 20th century which have rained down on the old continent… You’re tired, but the Communists who want to destroy your system are not; they’re not tired at all.”
… this is one of numerous quotes I need to verify for these long years, so I’m getting Warning to the West again asap.
So I guess race-based admissions is alive and well in Canada?
Not just admissions. Faculty hiring. And with the blessing of the provincial human rights commission.
https://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2023/07/sfu-reaches-next-step-in-ambitious-plan-to-hire-more-black-facul.html
I would tend to treat their credentials as a bad joke unless they could demonstrate their compentance through other methods.
I cannot speak to how it is in Canada, but if the graduates have to compete with Drs from other institutions that are seen as churning out better physicians, they may well be passed up when it comes to employment, even though all Drs have to take the same Board exams.
Therefore, these graduates may find themselves forced to work in Health Care Deserts, where the communities are effectively desperate for medical access. I imagine that, in Canada, those areas are the same as in the US. Poor and isolated rural counties, urban hospitals in densely populated minority neighborhoods, and Indian reservations.
Ergo, this med school might find itself, by default, to be supplying Drs to the communities that make up their student body, though ironically, if the school isn’t any good, they’ll be supplying those underserved peoples with underwhelming Drs.
Putting it more starkly: given that some groups are being admitted to medical school with vastly lower scores, and given that the medical school must then graduate them (anything else would be racist), does it become rational and prudent for any patient to start doubting and avoiding any doctor who looks (based on appearance) as though they will have benefited from such “affirmative action”?
The answer is, of course, “yes”. (Glenn Loury recently said about this that: “if it was my critically-ill kid I’d go for the most Chinese-American-looking doctor I could find”.) Is this a future we want?
This is asking for trouble, heading for a system that could only be sustained by draconian taboos on speech. MLK had it right, we need color-blind standards, we need to place merit above identity.
“MLK had it right, we need color-blind standards, we need to place merit above identity.”
King’s famous quote was that people “should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, which is a little different. In his final book, in 1967, he also wrote “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
Much of this, in the Canadian context, may depend upon the lower threshold for admission. It’s possible that the ‘minority’ applicants who are admitted over ‘majority’ applicants have perfectly fine test scores, undergrad GPAs, etc. When my husband was in medical school the double joke was that medicine is not brain surgery… Still, I would not be optimistic were I Canadian!
That was 1967, only 3 years after America’s Civil Rights Act. But we’re now over fifty years since Western societies had seriously unfair treatment of blacks.
Black college students today have not experienced any significant degree of unfair treatment, and, further, nor have most of their parents. We’re already way past the time when “affirmative action” should have been sunsetted.
That may well be the case, but I was responding to the use of an inaccurate quote from King, not making any claim about affirmative action or the recent status of racial discrimination in the U.S., which is not really sequitur to the point.
I did not imagine that I would have to spell this out, but here goes: people often use an inaccurate quote from MLK to justify the use of “merit” over “identity.” But MLK did not propose that we use “merit” over “identity,” and in fact appears to have argued for the opposite. The lesson is to stop using MLK to justify the “merit” over “identity” position.
I hope this is not a minority or contrarian view of Dr. King’s legacy.
For information about what is not required by this medical school but is generally required for admission to medical school, look at the MCAT test. A significant element in the MCAT is biology and biological sciences. So unlike other medical schools, strong background in biology is not demanded of applicants. If you know any students hoping to go to medical school, they will be preparing by taking chemistry and biology as undergraduates. But not for this medical school.
Couple of points, and yes, the article is unnecessarily negative and carping.
1) It is perfectly legal in Canada to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and national origin. You just have to be careful to be explicit in which direction you are discriminating, as TMU plans to (and as Martin Luther King endorsed way back when, at least until a better future dawned.)
— Note that women are no longer considered to be an equity-seeking group (unless they are men calling themselves transwomen.) In fact, the inclusion of mature students with work experience as an equity-deserving group (huh?) will apply mostly to nurses and allied disciplines like physio-occupational therapy and social work, the vast majority of whom are women making pretty decent money and protected by labour unions. Hardly oppressed. In Canada there are only handfuls of black and indigenous students who could clear even the soft B and no MCAT bar — remember other med schools are trying to drink from this deep end of this pool also — but there are abundant burnt-out nurses wanting to become physicians, especially now that much of primary-care medicine has better work-life balance than hospital nursing. (TMU also has a baccalaureate nursing school.)
It’s hard for nurses to go back and do medicine because the competition at all traditional schools from regular current 22-year-old graduates is so intense. I can imagine that TMU might find its equity-seeking spots filled entirely with female nurses, of all races, creeds, colours, and sexual orientations (…no straight white men. Gotta keep them out no matter what.) Based on my personal experience in teaching, this could turn out to be a very strong cadre of intelligent, motivated, and mature students with more science and clinical preparation than the usual run of general degree students that TMU is likely to get otherwise.
2) The Indigenous stuff is part of TMUs mandate to indigenize the university and, it’s personal for TMU, to erase its connection (name only) with the unfairly maligned Egerton Ryerson. All universities in Canada are giving at least lip service to the concept to comply with one of the unilateral demands made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They couldn’t care less about science. Not even on their radar screen. What impact this will have on the actual curriculum, who knows? but the canard of self-humiliation in the name of culturally safe care* will be part of it. The thread leader’s job may just be to be an indigenous person in an office first and a pest only second. He won’t be the only one.
———————
* But if all the students (except those few annoying cis white people) are oppressed, how can they be made to humiliate themselves in the presence of their fellow oppressed patients? Aren’t we all in this together? Or are some more oppressed than others, which seems surely to be the case. Maybe all those white and white-adjacent former nurses will be the only ones who have to attend the struggle sessions.
That’s a very positive thought about possibly recruiting a lot of experienced nurses to become MDs. I hope that’s how it turns out.
+1
To answer PCCE’s $64 question:
No, I would not choose a graduate of this “medical school.’
In fact, given the pervasive DIE and other wokeness in education, I’m skeptical of any professional younger than about 40.
Once again, I must recommend Lionel Shriver’s new satirical novel “Mania”. It invents a world only a little further along than the wonders of TMU medical school.
As for where the graduates of TMU’s new program will practice, given that most
sane patients will keep as far away from them as possible—surely there will be a place for them in the clinics of the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut.
This is true, I am a 22 year nursing veteran and working on the application for the 2025 cohort. As nurses, this is our opportunity to shine in the TMU medical program, long live TMU!