The Outstater
Operating-Table Diversity
MARQUETTE BASKETBALL COACH Al McGuire said it: “Winning is only important in war and surgery.” That would seem a good place to start in dismantling affirmative action both in the military and in medical schools.
After a half century, if you think that affirmative action is still a good idea and you act on it then there’s not much hope for you. Every day will hold unpleasant surprises. Friends will turn away. Your best efforts will be denied profit or achievement. You will be unable to distinguish who will be productive and who will not, who will be a good neighbor, citizen, etc. You will be clueless about how life works, why equality of opportunity and not equality of results is what makes America the envy of the world.
For it is as the economist Thomas Sowell observed: Even children raised by the same parents are not equal; indeed, a man is not equal to himself from one day to the next. To assume that all of us can be made equal by fiat is a uniquely 21st century insanity.
Let’s begin with the military, the obvious goal being to win battles rather than demonstrate social constructs. Are there some women who could serve effectively? Certainly, but there are not enough Tulsi Gabbards to make a difference or to justify the social and organizational disruption. In short, in military terms, there’s no point to it. And no, nothing has ever been fair about the U.S. Army.
So let’s put behind us the absurdity — true case — of the plan to reduce the size of hand grenades (and their explosive charge) so that female recruits could reliably throw them beyond the blast zone.
Ok, what about medicine? There are real challenges facing healthcare (see the special issue linked in the above artwork) but ensuring administratively ordered racial diversity is not one of them. How many of us of whatever sex or race would choose a doctor just to make a social point?
That is a suggestion from the Indiana University. Last month, the physician who oversees the medical school’s residents had this to say in an interview with the Indianapolis Star:
“When I have had residents who are not white in my clinics, the connection and warmth and closeness they can have with our patients is so much more because there’s a feeling of trust when they walk into a room and look like the patient they’re about to serve.”
He assumes that affirmative action would have no effect on the skill of the physician — that “equity by fiat” assurance again. But the number of qualified applicants to medical schools do not fit nicely into demographic compartments. If you require a more diverse hospital staff, you will have to adjust standards here or there for certain identities.That is mathematics, not medicine, and let us hope it is not the IU policy.
If the university thinks it is important to have more blacks and hispanics in its medical school, if we need more “warmth and closeness” that it believes comes with skin color, then the place to start is in the public schools. They have failed those two groups miserably.
A report last year by the U.S. Department of Education found that 5,500 public high schools with high enrollments of black and Latino students offered fewer science courses than 12,300 public high schools with low enrollments of black and Latino students. To fix that in Indiana, to adequately prepare more blacks and hispanics for admission to IU Medical School, the Legislature would have to return control to the Individual schools by wresting it away from the unions and the state Collective Bargaining Act — much harder work than simply commanding, or wishing, that everyone be equal.
Finally, Alan Bakke, the complainant in the 1978 court case that upheld affirmative action, scored 72 overall on his MCAT entrance exam. The average applicant under the affirmative-action program back then scored 33. After all these years, it would be interesting to compare the professional records (dismissals, malpractice judgments, license revocations) of those who scored with Bakke or higher with those admitted under affirmative-action programs.
We might learn a thing or two: Either that entrance standards developed over decades are irrelevant or that instant affirmative action is a futile if not deadly exercise.
Lying on the operating table, what would be your best guess? — tcl
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