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  4.  » Half of trainee doctors at UCLA’s prestigious medical school ‘are failing basic tests after dean who’s anti-white ignored affirmative action ban and terrorized staff with DEI rules’
  • Standards plunge at UCLA medical school amid claims of reverse discrimination
  • Dean Jennifer Lucero has presided over exodus of Asian students since 2020

Dominic Yeatman – Daily Mail May 24, 2024

UCLA Medical school dean Jennifer Lucerno

A DEI-fixated dean at UCLA’s world-famous medical school has allowed standards to plummet by discriminating against white and Asian applicants, it is claimed.

The David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles boasts Nobel Prize winners on its faculty and accepts just 173 students out of the 14,000 who apply to it each year.

But it has plunged from sixth to 18th place in the rankings since the appointment of Jennifer Lucerno as dean of admissions in June 2020 amid claims that the admissions bar for underrepresented minorities is now ‘as low as you could possibly imagine’.

‘All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,’ an admissions officer told the Washington Free Beacon. Lucerno has been accused of flouting California‘s affirmative action ban and hindering the career of a highly-qualified doctor because he is a white man.

‘For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.’ Among the disturbing anecdotes shared are of a student lashing out in an operating room and accusing a surgeon of picking on her after being asked to locate a major artery – a basic medical request.

The number of students failing tests on basic medical knowledge has increased 10-fold in some subjects since 2020, the Free Beacon reported.

And a majority of students are now flunking standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics among some cohorts.

The collapse in standards has turned the institution into a ‘failed medical school’ according to one former member of the admissions staff.

Admitting students on racial criteria has been banned in California since 1996 and outlawed federally since a Supreme Court ruling last year.

But faculty at the school said that Lucerno has ignored bans on affirmative action and allegedly told colleagues she wanted a highly qualified white male candidate pushed down the residency rank list because ‘we have too many of his kind’.

Business was suspended for the day in 2021 when a Native American applicant was rejected and a furious Lucero made committee members sit through a two-hour lecture on indigenous history delivered by her own sister.

She is accused of stuffing the 25-strong admissions committee with her hand-picked members and terrorizing dissenters into silence by implying they are racist and threatening them with diversity training sessions.

‘We were always outnumbered,’ an admissions officer told the website.

‘Other people would get upset when we brought up GPA.’

Two members recalled Lucero becoming incensed at an admissions meeting in November 2021 when members voiced doubts about a black candidate with grades way below the usual standard

‘Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?’ she raged.

‘We need people like this in the medical school.’

Her arrival in June 2020 – shortly after the murder of George Floyd – coincided with an overhaul of the school’s curriculum which cut pre-clinical training from two years to one, to free up time for ‘community service’.

Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin sparked a huge surge in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, with Lucerno this week being held up as an example of the ideaology going very wrong.

Now students spend seven hours a week on ‘Foundations of Practice’ which includes modules on ‘interpersonal communication skills’, described by one student as ‘telling us how to be a good person’.

They are also required to spend at least three hours of fortnight in a class on ‘Structural Racism and Health Equity’.

 

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