Who Supports the “Great Awokening” in Science and Medicine?

There is a “great awokening” that is spreading from the higher education system and into institutions across America. According to Jarrett Stepman, all Americans should be concerned because it is “transforming science and medicine.” 

A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently. As many have noted, this “student-led initiative” sounds cult-like.

Fox News reported that “the August 2021 ceremony was the first time in the medical school’s 255-year history that the incoming medical students recited their personalized class oath, a spin on the Hippocratic Oath to ‘better reflect the values [students] wish to uphold as they enter their medical training.’” …

“We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past,” the oath begins. “We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression effected in the name of medicine. We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine’s capacity to liberate.”

Stepman’s suggestion for anyone having serious health problems: Look “for an older doctor.” He reported that the woke’s attempt to make temples of wokeness from the institutions of science and medicine. He said that the effort has become systemic as shown by a “recent report by the national Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”

“Calls for the National Academies to pursue such a report had been building for years, the authors write, but took off after the murder of George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,” Star News reported. “The authors note that they first started with a literature review ‘to illuminate how historical policies, practices, and laws can have lasting effects’ and note that they use the term racism ‘because it is scientifically accurate … even if it makes readers uncomfortable.’”

The National Academies report doesn’t specifically cite critical race theory or the works of Ibram X. Kendi – the leading public proponent of “anti-racism” – but it clearly relies on a similar network of ideas.

The central premise of this ideology is that the United States and Western societies in general were founded in racism, that their basic institutions inculcate white supremacy, and that racial disparities in nearly any profession or societal outcome proves that structural racism exists. Therefore, it dodges the need to prove individual or literal acts of racism and instead pins the discrepancy of outcomes on “unconscious bias” and other structural barriers.

The report from the National Academies claims that “Racism is embedded in our society” and uses as evidence the racial disparities in careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. According to Kendi and others, the only way to correct the problem is to use anti-racism, which is another way of saying “racial discrimination against whites and Asians in the name of equity.”

The number of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are taking over higher education. If there is any hope of saving America, we must act now to reverse the takeover of higher education. Otherwise, we will have so-called professionals who earned their degrees on the color of their skin rather than their skills and knowledge. If you want a preview of what it will look like, just take a look at our current Vice President and her communication and leadership skills. Politicians have long been chosen for the color of their skin and/or their sex. Do we really want our doctors to be chosen on that basis?