Thread by @aaronsibarium

NEW: In a required class for first-year medical students, UCSF praised an anti-Israel protest that shut down the Bay Bridge, delayed the delivery of donated organs, and put UCSF's own patients at risk.

If you find that hard to believe, wait till you see the other lessons.🧵

UCSF has a mandatory unit on "justice and advocacy in medicine," which covers "issues like racism, ableism, and patriarchy" and spans six weeks—more than the amount of time spent on basic anatomy or cardiovascular health.

Those six weeks contain some shocking material.

One lesson describes "objectivity" and "urgency" as characteristics of "white supremacy culture"—and says students should "consider reporting" those traits, each of which is depicted as a bottle of poison.

Another lesson is an "advocacy workshop" where students design their own activist campaigns and map out the power structures arrayed against them.

During that workshop, UCSF described the protest on the Bay Bridge an example of "direct action," akin to "sit-ins" or "vigils," that disrupt "business as usual" to "pressure targeted decision-makers."

It did not mention that the protest, which took place last year, forced UCSF to postpone pressing operations and put organ recipients at greater risk. "Every minute of time on ice is hard for the organs," Garrett Roll, a UCSF transplant surgeon, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Held the first week of October, the advocacy workshop also referred students to the "Queering Reproductive Justice Toolkit," promoted an "abolitionist approach to antiracist medical education," and referenced the "Settler-Colonial Determinants of Health."

The workshop was led by Yalda Sharam, an associate professor of medicine, whose bio on UCSF’s website quotes the Marxist educators Angela Davis and Paulo Freire.

Medical schools across the country have injected DEI content into their curricula. Some, such as UCLA medical school. now require entire classes on race and identity.

But few have gone quite so far as UCSF, which has reorganized its entire curriculum around social justice.

Courses are audited for "harmful" content and stripped of gendered language. Instructors are grilled on whether their materials "disrupt oppression" or "falsely equate[] body size with health," according to a "curricular review" tool obtained by the Free Beacon.

Students sit through lectures on "white supremacy," "structural trauma," and the "medical industrial complex," defined as a web of health care institutions that perpetuate "transphobia and ableism."

Those lessons are an outgrowth of an "anti-oppression curriculum initiative" launched in 2021 after three black students, citing "content and process concerns," left a small course. Three years later, the initiative has cannibalized the entire curriculum.

Professors say the curriculum has encouraged a wave of disruptive protest at UCSF, chants of "intifada" have been heard from hospital rooms and doctors wear pro-Palestinian while interacting with patients—some of whom have requested they be removed

While such convulsions are hardly unique to UCSF, physicians say the new curriculum has helped to legitimize them, in part by presenting an extraordinarily one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a lecture on "trauma-informed care" delivered by a second-year medical student, Sidney Ezenwugo,UCSF cited the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza" as an example of "structural trauma," likening it to "redlining" and "historical medical prejudice."

The lecture did not mention the history of terrorist attacks targeting Israel or say whether they qualify as structural trauma, which the slides defined as trauma "built into the structure of the community."

House Republicans are already investigating UCSF for possible civil rights violations against Jewish students. With Trump threatening the accreditation and federal funding of top universities, the curriculum could make UCSF an attractive target for the next administration.

Though the justice and advocacy unit is only six weeks, the school says its ambition is to purge all classes, across all four years of the curriculum, of "oppressive beliefs."

It has built up oodles of bureaucracy designed to do just that, including an online portal, "SAFE," where students can report "education oppression events" that lead to "education trauma."

UCSF also uses an 11-page checklist to review courses for "harmful" content. Examples include "stigmatizing language," "anti-fat bias," and the inconsistent use of they/them pronouns.

A supplementary guide instructs professors to "replace gendered terms with gender neutral language," in part by swapping "pregnant women" with "pregnant people" and "erections in men" with just "erections."

When presenting pediatric patients, the guide goes on, professors should use children’s "self-reported gender identity" even if it conflicts with the views of the parents. Materials that do not meet these criteria have in some cases been scrubbed from UCSF syllabi.

A UCSF spokeswoman, Kristen Bole, declined to answer detailed questions about the review process, including how frequently it is conducted and whether faculty can be reprimanded for using gendered terms.

"We are concerned that the story is being written with a pre-determined conclusion and the information you are inquiring about is being taken out of context," Bole wrote in an email. She declined to specify any factual errors in the Free Beacon’s inquiry.

The most heavy-handed guidance comes in a 47-page "primer" on "developing anti-racist educational materials." Updated on a yearly basis, the primer coaches faculty on how to avoid "inadvertent stereotypes" when crafting lectures and case studies.

As part of that guidance, it offers examples of vignettes that could "trigger generational trauma and cause psychological distress." Here is one of them:

According to the guide, "homeless," "complaining," and "frequent flier" are all words that perpetuate the "stereotype of a poor Black man seeking secondary gain." "No known family," meanwhile, "could reinforce the stereotype of Black men having no family ties."

While the guide says that instructors should "take stock of the representation in your case examples," it also dings the vignette for mentioning race, since a swollen right foot, unlike sarcoidosis or sickle cell anemia, is not associated with African ancestry.

Another vignette describes how cystic fibrosis is more common in people of color due to social and genetic factors. While this example "does a good job" of covering the science, according to the guide, it could make students feel "burdened by vicarious trauma."

It is unclear how the guide’s proposed revision—inviting a "patient of color" to "reflect on the ways they sustained themselves through this ordeal"—would solve that problem.

The school is so solicitous of students’ feelings that it hosted an eight-week yoga program this spring to help "BIPOC identified" students "heal" from "trauma" and "discrimination."

Since 2021, it has also sponsored an annual "Black Day of Healing" that minority residents are allowed to take off. "We encourage program directors to release their trainees interested in attending," UCSF said in April.

This year’s programming included yoga and meditation sessions, a talk on "financial wellness," and dinner at a physician’s home. "It is a day that highlights UCSF’s commitment to prioritizing diversity, equity, belonging, and anti-oppression," the school said in May.

Tldr: UCSF, one of the top medical schools in the world, is encouraging students to engage in unlawful protests that put patients' lives at risk and teaching them that "urgency" is an actionable offense.

Read our full report on the curriculum here.

freebeacon.com/campus/advocac…