Medical schools are the latest private institutions grappling with President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign to shutter DEI programs.
As private institutions continue to grapple with President Donald Trump’s executive orders to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, scholarships aimed at diversifying the medical field are the latest potential casualties of the White House’s pressure campaign.
According to a recent report by The Washington Post, at least seven scholarships established by Black doctors at the University of Cincinnati to increase the number of Black medical students are in jeopardy. One of them, an endowment created by former Cincinnati Black surgeon general Kenneth Davis and his wife more than 20 years ago, grew to a whopping $1.4 million.
Now, the University of Cincinnati wants to open the endowment’s application to all students and not just Black applicants.
“This isn’t about fairness or equality,” Davis told the Washington Post. “This is about life and death. We have a severe shortage of Black doctors in this city, and Black people here can’t find culturally competent physicians who understand them.”
A similar scholarship established in 2013 to cover the tuition for Black medical students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham was discontinued in April–notably in a city where Black residents make up two-thirds of the population.
“They’re just another parrot parroting the same misguided racial nonsense and tropes and policies at the expense of deserving Black medical students, in this instance,” Herschell Lanier Hamilton, son of the UAB scholarship’s namesake, told AL.com. “It literally is ridiculous and it’s unconscionable that you require an institution to divorce itself from a student scholarship that honors the work of somebody like my father, who wasn’t a controversial figure.”
Doctors who established some of the scholarships at the University of Cincinnati are endeavoring to fight the institution’s effort to open them up to non-Black students. They worry that the progress made to increase the number of Black students attending medical school will be undone. Evidence of a decline has already manifested following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions. Despite the percentage of Black doctors nearly doubling in recent decades, medical school enrollment has noticeably declined since the ruling.
The disparity is especially felt in Cincinnati, where there are fewer than 100 Black or Latino doctors, or just 5%, according to a 2020 report by the Doctors Foundation.
Public health experts have long argued that improving the number of Black doctors could contribute to better health outcomes for Black communities, who are disproportionately affected by chronic diseases and illnesses.
Clyde Henderson, a retired surgeon who established a scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, told the Washington Post, “Disparities exist at nearly every part of the health care system, and the data shows that Black folks do better when they’re taken care of by folks who look like us, so it would be immoral for us not to address the shortage.”
He added, “This is just a setback, and it’s going to take a concerted effort to reverse it. But we can’t just give up, we don’t have that choice.”
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