Five medical schools in the United States are being accused of civil rights violations after allegedly discriminating against scholarship applicants based on race.
Do No Harm, an anti- “anti-racism” non-profit association of medical professionals, filed five complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on June 1.
The complaints allege that the University of Florida, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Minnesota, the University of Utah, and the Medical College of Wisconsin offer scholarships reserved for applicants of specific “racial and ethnic populations.”
Do No Harm maintains that such scholarships violate the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“[The schools] put out scholarships … and they restricted it to people of certain racial categories, which is not legal,” lamented Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm. He said to The Epoch Times, “The idea that they’re going to separate people out on the basis of their race we found to be disturbing and discriminatory.”
Do No Harm cites a scholarship at the University of Florida College of Medicine as an example of such discrimination. The scholarship is explicitly reserved for applicants “who belong to groups that are recognized as historically underrepresented in medicine,” which include “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.”
Applicants are required to submit a photograph with their applications.
Similar qualifications are a condition for receiving a particular scholarship at the University of Utah School of Medicine’s Division of Otolaryngology, which can only be obtained by applicants who identify as “American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.”
The schools did not respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.