Alumni of the University of Oklahoma’s medical school are revolting over the institution’s implementation of a radical diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda, prompting many to speak out and even cease donations to the university.
In conversation with Fox News neurosurgeon Christopher Boxell, a university alumni said, “I’m not happy with where they’re headed. The diversity, equity and inclusion [agenda] I think is better named DIE for DEI because I think that’s what’s going to happen because of it.”
The university’s medical school recently created a “‘diversity alliance’ to ensure equity was incorporated at every level and aspect of the institution,” Fox News reported.
“We all should be looking at his best qualified. I don’t care which race they’re from. If they’re best qualified, that’s who should be there. Do you want that person who is at the top of the class or do you want the person at the bottom of the class? A lot of [patients] don’t ask those questions. They say, well, they graduated medical school, they’re a doctor,” Boxell said.
Boxell, who recently donated $250,000 to the school, said he was “really very disturbed” about the direction the school is taking.
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According to Fox News, Mo Anderson, a former donor to the school, penned a letter to the president of the school, Joseph Harroz Jr., in 2021, accusing him of promoting Marxism.
“OU has embedded a Marxist-derived worldview in its colleges via so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) programs that foster racial and social division. OU’s DEI efforts produce the opposite of diversity and inclusion. Mainstream Oklahomans know they will now be labeled ‘privileged’ individuals regardless of life circumstances, meaning OU is not a welcoming place for all students,” Anderson wrote, adding that, “As a proud Oklahoman, I cannot support the deliberate destruction of our state’s future. I will not donate to OU’s academic efforts any longer.”
Another alumni, Susan Bergen said that after 35 years of donating an average of $50,000 a year to the school she will be halting donations over the schools direction.
“They train the teachers for the state of Oklahoma. So we count on them to put out quality teachers. And what they’re doing is sending a lot of woke people that believe somehow White people are bad and wrong,” she said.
John Brock, a Korean War veteran and former Shell oil company employee who says he has donated around $2 million to the school over the years said, “I think everybody ought to be treated with respect and that we ought to spread love and kindness,” adding that, “And they have a requirement that you go to a three-hour class to graduate… that teaches people that if you’re a white person, you’re guilty of racism, even though you don’t think so.”
Brock says that he has ceased donating to the school over the mandatory class.
“And they teach people that no matter how hard they work and white people are going to keep them down. I don’t think any of those things are true, in my opinion,” he said.
READ MORE:
- Jordan Peterson Resigns From Tenured Professor Position at the University of Toronto, Cites ‘DIE’
- Jordan Peterson Shows ChatGPT May Backtrack on Controversial Narrative Framing If Challenged
- First Amendment, Freedom of Expression Under Threat at MIT
‘DIE must DIE’
University of Oklahoma alumni are not the only academics raising the alarm over the DEI agenda.
Famed Canadian psychologist, author and media commentator Jordan Peterson penned an opinion piece late last year entitled “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity (DIE) Must DIE.”
“The ‘Academy’ is dead…” he wrote, adding that, “It was cowardly and fecklessly allowed to be slowly choked to death and murdered by the Marxist professorial class and its academic minions. The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) is demolishing education and business…and has now driven a brilliant man from its realm.”
Peterson’s piece came after he resigned as a full tenured professor at the University of Toronto, citing “DIE” and an environment that put his students at a disadvantage.
“My qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers,” Peterson wrote, adding that, “This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates. These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified ‘minority’ candidates were ever overlooked.”
He said that this environment rendered his position at the university “morally untenable.”
He fears that universities implementing a DEI agenda risk producing “a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.”
He wrote that his “craven colleagues” are required to craft “DIE statements” in order to obtain research grants, statements that Peterson says are full of lies in order to navigate the bureaucracy.
“Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes,” Peterson wrote.
He ends his over 2,200 word letter imploring people to stop “going along” with DIE activists stating that those who choose to comply are responsible for the “untenable” situation.
He calls out CEOs and artists alike asking that they “stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition.”
“He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising,” Peterson wrote.
