Forget medical education . Radical ideology is in full control of medical schools these days.
Look no further than my own state's flagship institution, the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Students are being pressured into taking divisive political stands, while those who disagree are censoring themselves for their own protection.
I have witnessed CU Medicine’s educational and moral decline firsthand. In March, I filed a resolution with the Colorado Medical Society opposing transgender medical treatments for children. When my resolution came up for a vote in June, a strong majority of participating physicians supported it. That makes sense: We take an oath to “do no harm,” yet providing irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries to boys and girls is the definition of harm.
But at the 11th hour, my resolution suddenly and surprisingly lost. Why? Because a professor at CU Medicine emailed the student body and asked them to vote against it. More than 150 students did, sending my resolution to defeat and giving the impression that Colorado physicians support harming children so long as it happens in the name of transgenderism.
The professor’s email alone was disturbing. Professors shouldn’t harangue their students into taking political stands. That’s an abuse of their authority and antithetical to education. Medical educators should focus on doing their jobs, which last I checked, is teaching medicine.
The email made me wonder: Just how deep does the ideological rot go at CU Medicine?
I found the answer after the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, of which I’m a member, submitted a Colorado Open Records Act request. The findings, which I’m making public for the first time, show that radical ideology is rampant at CU Medicine.
To start, we found that students are afraid to speak out against the extremism. After the political professor sent his email to the student body, a faculty sponsor of the Catholic Medical Student Association responded, saying multiple students had privately expressed concerns with his hyper-divisive email. The faculty sponsor noted that students “struggle in an environment that sadly would punish them for openly speaking in the opposite direction.”
In other words, CU Medicine is so overrun with radicalism that students censor themselves so they don’t get punished for not toeing the party line.
It gets worse. Dr. Shanta Zimmer, CU School of Medicine’s senior associate dean of medical education and associate dean for diversity and inclusion, told the political professor that a number of students had expressed concern to her as well. She said they “fear retaliation by the school, faculty, and classmates.” She also pointed out that the professor’s email may be seen by students as “coercive,” since it came from someone who may have “significant control over their grades.”
That reality proves the email was inappropriate. But the senior associate dean supported this overstep, arguing the professor’s email made other students feel valued. That may be true, but how does it excuse injecting blatant political advocacy into medical education?
Finally, our records request found that the political professor had support from CU Medicine leadership. One assistant dean told him to “ignore” the concerns raised by others. It seems that no administrators or authorities at CU Medicine think the professor did anything wrong by pressuring students to make a political statement.
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Do taxpayers agree? They fund CU Medicine and have a vested interest in its success. Surely they’d be interested to know that ideology is replacing education at this prestigious state institution.
I sponsored my original resolution because radical transgender ideology has no place in young people’s medicine. It’s equally true that such extremism has no place in medical education.
Travis J. Morrell, MD, is a physician in Grand Junction, Colorado. He is a senior fellow at Do No Harm.
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