IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? ‘Pedagogical Malpractice:’ Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class.
Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”
Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.
The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”
I don’t, after watching the healthcare industry flip on a dime in the spring of 2020 from “mandatory lockdowns” for all” to “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
And as Mary Katharine Ham notes:
Katie Couric noted there is a lot of anti-intellectual/elite resentment in this country (driving MAGA). I agree w her in part. There is resentment of the intellectual elite bc they are neither intellectual nor elite but are very sure they should tell the rest of us what to do. https://t.co/n3Be0CDdY4
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) April 25, 2024