A prominent medical school silently removed a race requirement from a National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded research program on its website following an October 2022 civil rights complaint alleging the admission criteria was illegal and discriminatory.
The Ohio State University College of Medicine Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP), which is designed to equip pre-medical students with additional research experience to bolster their medical school applications, originally stated that applicants must be “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” in order to qualify for NIH funding through the program but silently removed the requirement sometime in late 2023 after Do No Harm’s complaint was filed. The program’s website now replaces the requirement with one stating applicants must “have encountered obstacles to gaining sufficient experience and the skills necessary for admission into a research-centric PhD graduate program in their chosen field of study.”
Do No Harm, an organization that works to keep politics out of medical education, research and clinical practice, alleged that criteria is “unlawful racial discrimination in violation of Title VI” of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.
“Ohio State and NIH changed their eligibility requirements sometime last year to remove all race-based criteria while our complaint was being evaluated, either in response to legal challenges like ours or to avoid legal challenges in the future,” Mark J. Perry, senior fellow at Do No Harm, said in a statement. “The favorable outcome at Ohio State is one more victory for Do No Harm’s ongoing legal challenges to stop U.S. medical schools from illegally discriminating based on race, color, or national origin in violation of Title VI.”
The program also originally listed that applicants from “disadvantaged backgrounds” or that have a disability would be considered, according to an archived version of its website.
The program is guided by the National Institute of Health, the government medical research agency led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which openly advertises its diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives.
“NIH encourages institutions to diversify their student and faculty populations to enhance the participation of individuals from groups that are underrepresented in the biomedical, clinical, behavioral and social sciences,” the website’s diversity statement details.
The original PREP page quoted directly from the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” but now only briefly mentions the agency. The complaint was referred to the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services on July 30, but Do No Harm has declared the issue resolved in light of the program’s updated website;
“Beyond being unlawful and immoral, practicing racial discrimination significantly compromises medical schools’ primary mission to properly educate graduate students free from divisive racial ideology. The best way to recruit, train, and develop talented physicians and scientists is to prioritize merit and not race,” Perry said in a statement following the program’s update.
Ohio State University and NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Luis Melendez/Unsplash)
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