1 week Ago By National Post View
Earlier this week came the good news that, after much-needed pressure from Doug Ford’s government, Toronto Metropolitan University is backing away from its plan to fill 75 per cent of its new medical school’s seats from “equity-deserving” groups. It’s a good start, but it’s not enough. Discrimination is still in the picture, and it needs to be off the table entirely.
TMU believes its admissions program for doctors-to-be was never discriminatory in the first place. In a Thursday statement, TMU President Mohamed Lachemi defended the school by insisting that “we have no quotas and there have never been quotas around who we will accept.” “We understand that aspirational language on the website was causing confusion on this point, and that language has been removed.
” That last bit is true: TMU’s webpage has been updated. The “selection process” explainer for its MD program once stated , “It is expected that 25 per cent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 per cent collectively through the Indigenous, Black and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways.” Now, those words have been wiped from the site.
But Lachemi’s representation that TMU’s diversity quotas were only ever “aspirational” is contradicted by his own vice-president, Dr. Teresa Chan, who is also the dean of the medical school. “TMU is committed to admitting a majority of students through equity pathways and aspires to have a school with a majority of diverse learners who have demonstrated academic excellence,” she wrote in a Toronto Star op-ed Oct.
31. So, which is it? Either it was a commitment to achieve a certain demographic composition through a tailored admissions process — that is, a quota — and the university president is flat-out wrong, or it was never a commitment to begin with, and the medical school’s own dean is flat-out wrong. Weasel words aside, TMU’s medical school is just as enthusiastic about identity politics as it was last month.
Per the university president, it still plans to use “equity pathways” to admit students. It still has a minimum GPA requirement of 3.3, or a B+.
It still won’t require applicants to provide MCAT scores, the standard entry exam for medical school in North America. It’s still committed to creating a medical school “as diverse as the communities it will serve,” indicating a demographic goal. Lachemi insists that his medical school is “highly competitive.
” TMU med’s lower grade threshold is shared with some other med schools in Canada, he writes, and any student entering on the basis of diversity will be held to that standard. Further, every applicant will be “evaluated fairly on their qualifications and potential to become an outstanding doctor.” But fairness here is highly subjective.
In the case of TMU’s medical school, anyone entering through an equity-based admissions pathway will be able to submit a personal statement about their identity for admissions consideration. It’s a leg up that won’t be granted to other applicants. The fact that other schools are pulling this move doesn’t excuse it.
All of the above means taxpayer dollars are still supporting a lower-bar program that provides unequal treatment to students based on their identity, with the intention of producing equal outcomes between groups. It’s a feel-good program that only stands to benefit the emotions of the progressive administrators who engineered it, and not the people of Ontario in need of competent medical care. It’s not good for TMU’s own graduates, either: admitted on the basis of diversity or not, each fresh MD will hold a piece of parchment that represents a program known for its rejection of merit and excellence in the name of social justice.
Further down the line, as more crops of students complete their residencies, TMU’s diversity agenda will threaten the profession of medicine itself. Canadians can’t trust their physicians and surgeons if they know a good number of them were held to a low standard. Indeed, TMU’s med school is planting the seeds of discrimination by telling the rest of Canada — patients and professional peers — that only white, straight and able-bodied doctors are guaranteed to have earned their place on merit.
As Mark D’Souza, a Toronto physician, wrote in the Post, “It’s soft (indirect) bigotry to assert that certain demographics need a helping hand and can’t get in on their own achievements alone.” TMU’s assertions aren’t just bigoted, by the way. They’re wrong.
Canada is home to high-achievers of many backgrounds, and they’re all capable of making it into our most esteemed professions. This much is plain from the available statistics. One 2020 survey of Canadian medical schools found that only Chinese and South Asian students were over-represented among MD candidates.
White students were under-represented, along with their Black and Indigenous counterparts, defusing the notion that the shadowy racist undercurrent of Canada is shunting them into medical schools at a disproportionate rate. Elsewhere, estimates of the profession put it at 70 per cent white, which is just about on par with the country according to the 2021 census. And, if Black and Indigenous students with top grades were applying to medical schools and being rejected en masse, and if there was evidence to prove they were actively being barred from the opportunity, Canadians would rightly call for admissions staff to be fired.
At no point should entry standards be lower, however. Whatever the composition of these schools, what matters is that students are getting in on intelligence, hard work and good bedside manner. Prospective doctors shouldn’t just be good enough — they should be the best.
National Post.
