The dean of UCLA’s world-renowned medical school is accused of causing standards to plummet by systematically discriminating against white and Asian applicants.
The David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles has Nobel laureates on its faculty and accepts only 173 students of the 14,000 who apply each year.
But it has fallen from sixth to 18th in the rankings since Jennifer Lucerno’s appointment in June 2020, amid claims that the admissions barrier for underrepresented minorities is now “as low as you can imagine.”
“All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,” an admissions officer told the university Washington clear beacon.
“For other people, those criteria are completely ignored.” Among the disturbing anecdotes shared are a student who lashes out in an operating room and accuses a surgeon of bullying her after being asked to locate a major artery – a basic medical request.
UCLA Medical School Dean Jennifer Lucerno has been accused of a collapse in standards since her appointment in 2020 amid accusations of affirmative action
Lucerno, pictured left, is described as someone who “actively participates in the recruitment of underrepresented students to the profession of medicine”
The number of students failing tests on basic medical knowledge has increased tenfold in some subjects since 2020, the Free Beacon reported.
And a majority of students are now failing standardized tests in 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 a former member of the admissions staff.
Admitting students based on racial criteria has been banned in California since 1996 and banned federally since a Supreme Court ruling last year.
But the school’s faculty said Lucerno ignored the ban on affirmative action and allegedly told colleagues she wanted a highly qualified white male candidate moved lower in the residency rankings because “we have too many of his kind.” .
Matters were put on hold for the day in 2021 when a Native American candidate was rejected and an irate Lucero made committee members attend a two-hour lecture on indigenous history given by her own sister.
She is accused of stuffing the 25-person admissions committee with its hand-picked members and silencing dissenters by suggesting they are racist and threatening them with diversity training.
“We were always in the minority,” an admissions officer told the website.
“Other people would get angry if we brought up GPA.”
First-year students were forced to attend a lecture by Hamas-backed homeless activist Lisa Gray-Garcia, who demanded that students kneel and pray for “Mama Earth.”
Gray-Garcia denounced Israel just hours after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 7, expressing support for Palestine but none for the murdered Israelis
Two members recalled Lucero becoming outraged during an admissions meeting in November 2021, when members expressed doubts about a Black candidate with grades far below the usual standard.
“Didn’t you know that African American women are dying faster than everyone else?” she raged.
“We need people like this in medical school.”
Her arrival in June 2020 – shortly after the killing of George Floyd – coincided with an overhaul of the school’s curriculum, which saw the pre-clinical training reduced from two years to one year, to allow time for ‘community service’.
Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin led to a huge wave of diversity, equality and inclusion programs, with Lucerno cited this week as an example of the ideology gone very wrong.
Now students spend seven hours a week on ‘Foundations of Practice’, including modules on ‘interpersonal communication skills’, described by one student as ‘telling us how to be a good person’.
They must also attend a class on ‘Structural Racism and Health Equity’ for at least three hours every two weeks.
This was followed by lectures by a homeless activist supporting Hamas who demanded that students kneel on the ground with her and pray to “Mama Earth.”
Lisa Gray-Garcia led students in the chant “Free, Free Palestine” during her two-hour presentation in March, to the visible discomfort of Jewish students.
She later posted a report from the class on her social media pages challenging the “myth of clean” and what she described as “HELLthcare.”
Another mandatory part of the curriculum is now an essay by self-proclaimed “fat liberator” Marquisele Mercedes, who claims that “fatphobia is the status quo of medicine” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”
All first-year medical students at UCLA should read an essay by Marquisele Mercedes (pictured), a self-proclaimed “fat liberator” who claims that “fatphobia is the status quo of medicine” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”
Mercedes has also led presentations on how “anti-fatness comes through in the work you do” – which she says includes using “fear-mongering language to encourage healthy eating and physical activity”.
Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s leading experts on obesity, said the course amounted to malpractice and promoted “vast and dangerous misinformation.”
“This is a deeply misleading view of obesity, a complex medical condition with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” he added.
Lucero’s tenure coincided with an exodus of Asian students, whose numbers fell by almost a third between 2019 and 2022.
And the students who remain are increasingly entitled to their ignorance, with one professor reporting being verbally abused by a student in the operating room who accused him of abandoning her when she couldn’t identify a major artery.
Jeffrey Flier (pictured), the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s leading experts on obesity, denounced the course, saying the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”
“I don’t know how some of these students are going to become physician assistants,” said one colleague.
‘The faculty sees a shocking decline in the knowledge of medical students.
“UCLA continues to produce some very good graduates,” added another.
“But a third to a half of medical schools are incredibly unqualified.”
Lucero also serves as vice chair of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the school’s anesthesia department, where she has opposed efforts to withhold racial identities from admissions committees, insisting that “we are not required to blind information ‘.
The university’s Discrimination Prevention Office received several complaints about her behavior over the past year, but concluded that none were worthy of investigation.
The school’s structural racism class is currently under review and experts warned the Beacon that the university was opening itself up to a legal challenge.
Adam Mortara was a lead litigator in the case of Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, in which the Supreme Court banned affirmative action last year.
“You can’t have evidence of this kind of overt discrimination without someone coming forward,” he told the website.
And the disagreements are starting to make themselves felt, with faculty members warning that the reputation of the institution itself is now at stake.
“This has been a colossal failure,” one professor wrote on a forum last month.
“The new curriculum is not working and the students are completely unprepared for clinical rotations.”
The school has fallen from sixth to 18th in the rankings since Lucero’s appointment
‘The faculty I work with have noticed a dramatic decline in the knowledge of medical students.’
Another noted the fear of how patients would fare at the hands of their underqualified students.
“We have asked for figures on how these people are actually doing,” said an admissions official.
“None of that is ever revealed to us.”
DailyMail.com has contacted the medical school for comment.