Justice Department attack on UCLA and other med schools shows it has no idea what makes a good doctor
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The Trump administration has stepped up its assault on U.S. medical schools in recent days with stern letters to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA on May 6 and a similar missive to the Yale School of Medicine on Thursday.
Both letters from the Department of Justice allege that the schools have quietly allowed the race of applicants to be a consideration in admissions, which the DOJ asserts to be a violation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that found racial preferences in university admission policies to be unlawful.
But these claims — and a legal filing the DOJ made in February to join a lawsuit accusing UCLA of illicit discrimination against white and Asian applicants — raise questions about its campaign against elite medical schools that the DOJ may not wish to answer.
Entire dimensions of physician quality — judgment, communication, professionalism, leadership, resilience, bedside manner, decision-making under pressure — are dismissed as irrelevant ‘woke’ distractions.
— Terry L. Simpson, M.D.
One is whether it has any conception of what it takes to make a good doctor. The other is whether the DOJ is pursuing a fundamentally racist campaign aimed at keeping white advantages in higher education secure. The short answers, respectively, are no, and yes.
Let’s take a deeper look.
The DOJ’s attack on the medical schools is explicitly part of its campaign against “DEI” programs — those devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion. This has been going on for years, emanating chiefly from the far right. In 2014, I examined one of its origin documents, an article in the right-wing Washington Free Beacon that labeled UCLA a “failed medical school,” ostensibly because it was admitting unqualified Black and Hispanic applicants.
The article and the DOJ complaint have relied on the same observation, which is that Black and Hispanic UCLA applicants’ median undergraduate grade point averages and scores on the Medical College Admissions Test, or MCAT, are lower than those of white and Asian applicants.
Therefore, the argument proceeds, Black and Hispanic applicants get into medical school ahead of whites and Asians with similar scores and grades solely because of their race and ethnic background.
A right-wing website claims UCLA is a ‘failed medical school,’ but it’s making a transparently racist argument.
The Beacon article had numerous flaws, which I identified at the time. Among them was its assertion, voiced by an anonymous source, that “a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified” due to the flood of Black and Hispanic students.
But over the three years examined by the Beacon the number of nonwhite and non-Asian students at the Geffen school, which admits about 170 students each year, had increased by only 30. So even if every single one of those students was “incredibly unqualified,” they only accounted for 17% of the class, not a third to a half.
The DOJ case is based on the notion that MCAT scores and undergraduate grades are the absolute, indisputable, immutable guideposts to applicants’ suitability for admission and consequently, their future medical abilities.
Nothing else matters, such as efforts to measure applicants’ cultural backgrounds, empathy, compassion and interpersonal skills — to list non-academic factors the DOJ suggests should be out-of-bounds for admissions committees. But it’s dead wrong about that.
What do grades and MCAT scores measure? To some extent, they point to a talent for taking tests. “I’m a good test-taker,” says Terry L. Simpson, a practicing bariatric physician in Ventura County and a vigorous debunker of medical folderol online, “but that doesn’t mean I’m smarter or more talented than the guy next to me. It means I’m good at test-taking.”
Simpson, who says he has trained thousands of aspiring surgeons and has participated in admissions reviews at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, says it’s essential for admissions committees to make subjective judgments about applicants’ qualities rather than relying only on objective factors like test scores — “How do they perform in interviews, what do their letters of recommendations say, what activities have they participated in and what do they want to get out of medicine?”
The UC faculty went to court to fight Trump’s funding cutoffs and won. Why has the university system tried to negotiate instead?
Simpson recently wrote online of having “seen residents with extraordinary scores struggle under pressure, collapse when uncertainty enters the room, communicate poorly with families, or lack operative judgment ... and seen others with less dazzling paper metrics become superb clinicians whom nurses trust, patients adore, and colleagues rely upon at 2 AM. The body does not care about your percentile ranking when the anatomy is distorted, the bleeding starts, and the room becomes quiet. At some point experience should teach us that medicine is evaluating human beings, not sorting calculators.”
A comparison of the DOJ’s statistics on MCAT scores and GPAs at UCLA and Yale demolishes the agency’s argument that those stats are the ultimate — indeed, the only — indicators of an applicant’s suitability.
According to those figures for the 2024 entering class, the median MCAT scores and GPA of Black students at Yale (517 or 94th percentile and 3.92, respectively) were higher than those of white students at UCLA (513/86th percentile and 3.83). Following the DOJ’s logic, anyone seeking medical care should avoid the white UCLA grad in favor of the Black Yalie.
That’s not the only sign that the DOJ can’t avoid tripping over its own feet in this campaign. Its Yale letter and the UCLA complaint both cite a line from the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision stating that racial considerations in admissions “may not operate as a stereotype.” Yet that’s exactly what the DOJ has done by categorizing applicants and their test scores solely by race.
The DOJ didn’t respond to my question whether its arguments in the UCLA and Yale cases don’t reflect a racist bias of its own.
The DOJ asserts that factors such as race and national origin are “unrelated to medicine,” as it states in its letter to Yale. The truth is exactly the opposite. A robust medical literature documents that “Black and Hispanic clinicians are more likely than White clinicians to practice primary care in communities where unmet need is highest,” experts from Yale, Harvard and Tufts reported in 2023.
The DOJ’s letter to UCLA dismisses the argument that “increasing ‘diversity’ of the healthcare workforce will improve healthcare outcomes for Black and Hispanic patients,” asserting that the implication is that “denying Black and Hispanic students admission to medical school now will injure and kill Black and Hispanic patients in the future.”
Consider the following fundamental principles: First, billionaires should be allowed to donate their money however they wish, short of financing criminal enterprises.
That’s a caricature of the argument, however. What has been found is that matching patients with physicians of their own race, especially Black uninsured patients and Black doctors, reduces patient mortality, quite possibly because the patients have greater trust in their providers and the providers are better equipped to diagnose the patients’ complaints.
That’s especially important for institutions, such as UC, whose mission includes getting trained doctors back to the communities they serve. In few other places are the effects of inattention to social conditions more evident than in Los Angeles, Geffen Medical School Dean Steven Dubinett told me in 2024 when I asked him about the Beacon article. “We can look no further than what’s outside our front door — if I drive 15 minutes to the south from my office, life expectancy falls by 15 years.”
The signs are abundant that for the Department of Justice, the cases against UCLA and Yale amount to a performative assault on elite education, a very Trumpian approach. In announcing her launch of a series of “civil rights investigations” on March 25, Harmeet Dhillon, the Californian culture warrior Trump appointed as his assistant attorney general for civil rights, declared online, “Another day in paradise!”
What is made crystal clear from these latest accusations is that the DOJ has shown that it has scant interest in what makes a good doctor. College grades and MCAT scores need to be good enough to get an applicant through the front door, Simpson told me. But that’s the beginning of the admissions process, not the end, and there’s a long path ahead to becoming a good doctor.
The difference in median MCAT scores between the white and Black applicants accepted at UCLA, Simpson points out, could be as few as seven answers on a test with 230 questions. “Meanwhile,” he wrote online Tuesday, “entire dimensions of physician quality — judgment, communication, professionalism, leadership, resilience, bedside manner, decision-making under pressure — are dismissed as irrelevant ‘woke’ distractions.”
Who do you want operating on you when your health is at stake? Someone who aced the MCAT in the year before he or she applied to medical school, or someone who emerged from four years of medical school and years more of professional training with the respect of his or her colleagues? Don’t ask Trump’s DOJ; you’ll get the wrong answer.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column contends that the Justice Department’s campaign against UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and other elite programs shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a good doctor, by treating MCAT scores and GPAs as virtually the only legitimate admissions criteria while dismissing qualities like judgment, communication, resilience, and bedside manner as “woke” distractions.[1][2]
It argues that the DOJ’s recent letters to UCLA and Yale, and its move to join a lawsuit alleging discrimination against white and Asian applicants, are best understood as part of a broader political assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education rather than a good-faith effort to enforce civil rights law.[1][2][3]
The piece emphasizes that test scores and grades primarily measure test-taking ability and prior academic performance, not core clinical competencies; it cites a bariatric surgeon and longtime educator who reports seeing residents with “extraordinary scores” fail under pressure or struggle with patient communication, while others with less impressive “paper metrics” develop into superb clinicians trusted by nurses, patients, and colleagues.[2]
Building on that, the column maintains that holistic review in medical admissions—which includes interviews, recommendations, life experiences, community service, and applicants’ motivations for entering medicine—is essential to identifying applicants who will become strong, trustworthy physicians, and thus should not be caricatured as illegitimate or purely ideological.
The article challenges the DOJ’s use of racialized data on MCAT scores and GPAs, arguing that the department itself is stereotyping by grouping applicants strictly by race while quoting Supreme Court language warning that race in admissions may not operate as a stereotype; it notes that, by DOJ’s own numbers, Black students at Yale in 2024 had higher median MCAT scores and GPAs than white students at UCLA, undermining the notion that race-conscious policies automatically mean lower qualifications.
It highlights research showing that race and national origin are in fact relevant to medicine, citing literature that Black and Hispanic clinicians are more likely than white clinicians to practice primary care in high-need communities, and that patient–physician racial concordance, particularly for Black patients and Black doctors, is associated with better outcomes and reduced mortality due to increased trust and more accurate diagnosis.[5]
The column stresses that these findings are especially important for public institutions like the University of California, whose mission includes training physicians to serve diverse and underserved communities; it recalls UCLA’s dean pointing out stark life-expectancy gaps just minutes from campus as evidence that physicians’ cultural competence and community ties matter for public health.
It portrays the DOJ’s rhetoric—such as dismissing diversity rationales as implying that denying admission to Black and Hispanic students will “injure and kill” patients—as a caricature that trivializes a serious empirical argument about how workforce diversity can help reduce longstanding racial health disparities.[1][2][5]
The piece characterizes the department’s actions, including the tone of public announcements by civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon, as a “performative assault on elite education” rooted in culture-war politics, and suggests that the campaign effectively works to preserve traditional advantages for white applicants under the guise of enforcing colorblindness.[1][2][3][5]
Ultimately, the column argues that numerical thresholds like MCAT percentiles and GPAs should be seen as a starting point—ensuring students are academically capable—but not the end of the admissions process; it insists that what matters to patients is not who aced a standardized test years earlier, but who emerges from training with proven competence, sound judgment, and the confidence of colleagues and communities.
Different views on the topic
The Justice Department maintains that UCLA’s medical school illegally considered race in admissions in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision, which barred affirmative action and limited the use of essays or other “proxies” that might serve as stand-ins for race.[1][2]
DOJ findings assert that UCLA’s admissions process discriminated against white and Asian applicants by favoring Black and Hispanic candidates with lower average GPAs and MCAT scores, arguing that this pattern demonstrates race was a significant factor and that non-academic criteria were misused to achieve diversity goals rather than to identify individual merit.[1][2]
Officials have pointed to specific practices, such as an application question asking whether applicants were part of a “marginalized group” and documents circulated to admissions committees explaining how to preserve “diversity goals,” as evidence that UCLA was intentionally seeking to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling by using racial proxies.[1][2]
The department’s civil rights leadership argues that using race or racial proxies in this way violates federal civil rights law, including Title VI, and has framed affirmative-action-style policies in medical schools as “racism in admissions” that is both unlawful and contrary to American principles of equal treatment.[1][2]
DOJ investigators also stress that disparities in MCAT percentiles and GPAs—such as median MCAT scores for Black and Hispanic admits in the upper 60s to low 70s percentiles versus the mid-90s for students who did not report their race—are, in the department’s view, compelling evidence that academic merit was subordinated to racial targets.[1][2]
A related lawsuit brought by Students for Fair Admissions and the group Do No Harm alleges that UCLA’s medical school has engaged in impermissible racial balancing, holding Black and Latino applicants to lower standards than white and Asian applicants, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and federal civil-rights statutes.[3][4]
Whistleblowers cited in coverage of that suit describe admissions officials allegedly pushing through minority candidates despite comparatively weak grades or test scores, and they claim that the share of Asian matriculants has fallen sharply as a result, which critics take as proof of systemic discrimination.[3]
Some critics, echoed in right-leaning media accounts, argue that UCLA has become a “failed medical school” by prioritizing identity politics over academic excellence, alleging a “palpable decline” in average student competence and pointing to elements of the curriculum focused on topics such as “fatphobia” and “abolitionist” health as evidence that ideological concerns are displacing rigorous medical training.[1][3]
Opponents of race-conscious policies contend that emphasizing diversity in admissions, even through holistic review, inevitably introduces unlawful racial considerations, and that the only fair and legally compliant approach is to focus on race-neutral academic and experiential criteria applied uniformly to all applicants.[1][2][3][4]
While some legal analysts caution that aggressively restricting what schools can consider in admissions may impinge on academic freedom, the DOJ and allied critics argue that enforcing a strict colorblind standard is essential to protect rejected applicants from unlawful discrimination and to maintain public confidence that medical degrees are awarded based on merit rather than on race.[1][2][4]
