Here’s How Much Medical Schools Pay For Membership In Woke Academic Association

The University of Utah’s medical school paid over $75,000 to be a member of the influential Association of American Medical Colleges, the DEI-focused organization that facilitates medical education throughout North America, according to an invoice shared with The Daily Wire. 

The invoice, obtained through a public information request by Do No Harm, an organization opposed to the politicization of medicine, shows that the University of Utah’s Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine paid $75,760 for a year-long institutional membership in the AAMC starting on July 1, 2024. The AAMC counts as members all 158 American medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which the organization co-sponsors. 

The AAMC has been accused of harming medical education through leftist political initiatives, including its commitment to DEI initiatives, “anti-racism,” and promoting transgender ideology. A comprehensive report from Do No Harm highlights the full extent of the AAMC’s DEI programs. 

“It’s just ironic that the medical schools are held captive to pay this kind of money to be dished out all the crap that comes out of the AAMC,” Laura Morgan, the author of the report and Do No Harm’s senior director of programs, told The Daily Wire.

Additionally, the medical school twice paid over $20,000 to the AAMC over the last two years for a booth and marketing services at the organization’s annual conference. For this year’s AAMC conference in Atlanta, the school paid $18,000 alone for marketing services and another $5,250 for the booth. 

During some of their previous appearances at the conference, the school has hosted talks on “The Power of Diversity in Medicine,” “Is Climate Change a Health Care Issue?” and “Developing Leadership Opportunities for Women in Academic Medicine.” 

AAMC member schools receive professional development for faculty, policy advocacy before Congress, access to data and research, applicant and student services, and accreditation services. The organization was founded in 1876. 

In recent years, the AAMC has moved beyond medicine to promote race-based academic admissions policies, racially-focused medical theories, and transgender medical procedures for children. The group has also declared that DEI in health care is one of its top priorities. 

”Because the AAMC promotes so much of the ideologically based information, then that just trickles into the medical schools and they perpetuate it,” Morgan said. “What’s it going look like when there’s a whole generation of doctors who can tell you all about microaggressions or transgenderism, but they don’t know anything about how your heart works.”

Do No Harm director of research Ian Kingsbury pointed out that the AAMC’s DEI agenda has gone beyond mere recommendations. He said in one instance, the LCME pressured the University of Utah School of Medicine because it said the school’s “diversity/pipeline programs and partnerships” were “unsatisfactory.” LCME later claimed that it had a broad definition of diversity that expanded beyond race and gender. 

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“They play a game of pretending that these are simply recommendations but we have reasons to suspect that they are enforcing this ideological agenda,” Kingsbury said. “It’s not simply that they are recommending these things, they are saying that schools must do this.” 

He added that it might be necessary to have the federal government intervene because the AAMC had “lost the plot so badly,” and had no competitor to force them to focus on academics. 

“There is a social contract in medicine which says that doctors will do medicine and we will largely leave them alone while they practice medicine,” he said. “Once they stop doing medicine and start doing whatever the hell this is, you forfeit your end of that social contract.”