Harvard Medical School Tries Healing Itself

Harvard Medical School (HMS) has just released the Report of the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group, which contains detailed recommendations for restoring liberty to the school. These recommendations, if put into practice, would institute significant reform at HMS. But that is very important—and even if successful, they would leave vital work undone.

The Working Group was a serious effort. Dean George Daley called on HMS’ emeritus dean Jeffrey S. Flier to chair it—and Flier has an impressive track record of pronouncements in favor of intellectual pluralism. His selection as chair indicated a real commitment to reform.

The Report includes eleven proposals for reform and states outright that higher education should be devoted to the pursuit of truth. It includes a vital corollary: “HMS should articulate general principles and reasonable boundaries for activism by students and faculty”. The Report makes clear that these reforms will require comprehensive administrative action.

In remarkably blunt language, the Report explains what has gone wrong with HMS, describing how HMS has been reshaping itself into an Orwellian dystopia. 

• Students and faculty may not understand essential habits of mind for open discourse.

• Some students see themselves as advocates and activists with a responsibility to educate patients even in the context of clinical encounters.

• Some faculty feel uncomfortable in classrooms for fear of offending students or generating complaints through one or another mechanism.

• Some see activism as integral to being a physician.

Wherever the Report suggests that something bad should not be done, or that something bad may be done, readers should understand that these have been HMS’ repressive and discriminatory status quo.

At HMS, politicization, repression, and discrimination have been extensive. 

For one, HMS has used discriminatory DEI criteria for student admissions, as part of a general integration of DEI policies into its procedures. In 2022, HMS professors were calling for race-based “reparations” as part of the so-called “antiracist” agenda for medicine. In 2023, HMS inserted climate change into its health care curriculum. In 2024, HMS students and faculty disrupted a speech by the president of the AMA to forward anti-Israel activism.

In August 2025, America First Legal (AFL) filed a formal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against HMS, for continuing discriminatory DEI policies under a thin disguise. Its alleged practices include:

• Harvard Medical School has embedded race- and identity-based preferences into its outreach, clerkship, and fellowship programs, reinforcing a broader admissions and training framework that prioritizes protected characteristics over merit, skill, and competency.
  
  
• Harvard-affiliated residency programs publicly emphasize DEI in residency recruitment and training.

• Harvard has attempted to evade federal law by rebranding its DEI offices, renaming programs, and embedding race-conscious policies under euphemistic labels like “inclusive excellence,” “health equity,” “community and culture,” and “community engagement.”

Yet the Report is silent on several crucial areas and underplays the consequences of HMS’ systematic illiberalism and discrimination. It mentions Dean Daley’‘s statement that the key challenge was “how to implement the goals we propose.” This is indeed vital and isn’t simply a question of bureaucratic inertia. It is a question of the opposition of the activists who have taken over much of HMS.

The Report indicates that activists now are a substantial portion of the HMS administration, faculty, and students. It recommends that HMS take vigorous action to restore open inquiry to HMS. But how is this to be done if it is to be entrusted to staff, teachers, and students who support activism on principle and are dedicated to castrating open inquiry wherever it conflicts with their activist ideals? 

The Report’s attempt to secure institutional buy-in risks weakening its ultimate execution. The Report recommends incorporating the same  bureaucratic means that were used to suppress free speech at HMS, such as ideologically pointed surveys and bias response teams. Of course a Bias Reporting System devoted to preserving open inquiry can be corrupted. But even more: the existing bureaucrats at HMS who run the reporting systems are devoted to activism. The Report is too credulous that these bureaucrats  will now work for open inquiry.

It is telling that the Report accepts language that blends the old DEI illiberality and discriminations with a purported new devotion to open inquiry: “Community Standards for Inclusion and Open Inquiry,” notably, stitches together DEI boilerplate with its Open Inquiry commitment. The Report cites a panel called “The Honoring Our Shared Humanity: Combatting Islamophobia and Antisemitism”—which is doubling-down on the rhetoric that confects a putative equality between the vast amount of administratively-facilitated Jew-hatred on campuses (notably Harvard’s) and the insignificant-to-nonexistent “Islamophobia.” This is an example of the old DEI catechism pretending to be open inquiry.

The DEI bureaucrats who formed “inclusive classroom environments” that were devoted to suppressing open inquiry and free speech, who used “bias” as a label to stigmatize all dissent, are now expected to keep their old language, add on a commitment to “open inquiry”, and enforce it against their old activist commitments. That the activist, illiberal bureaucracy is helping to craft the supposed program for open inquiry should be another red light.

Then too, the Report is silent about DEI and racial discrimination, in HMS’ medical education. A recent Quillette article, Too Much Science in the Curriculum, is only the latest in a continuing series of reports on how race preferences are hollowing out medical education and providing the fuel for its ideological perversion. The Report concerns itself with “open inquiry”—but that is only the procedural symptom of deeper ailments. 

The DEI activist takeover of higher education, and its substantive policies are what is at issue. These manifest in part by suppressing open inquiry and free speech. But HMS must root out the activists and their illiberal, discriminatory policies from its administration, its faculty, and its student body if it is to be healthy once more. It needs to commission another workgroup to address that graver illness.

Maybe the authors of the Report have a hard-headed plan to overcome activist resistance, implement these “open inquiry” changes, and then move on to effective, comprehensive reforms. But their plan is apt to be sabotaged by activists who will use its recommendations as a fig-leaf to camouflage continuing illiberal discrimination. 

If the internal reform approach fails, as seems likely, HMS reformers must turn to the strategy of systematic external reform. At the very least, this could include involuntary receivership to make possible the removal of activist personnel from Harvard administration and the elimination of policies that subordinate medical education to discrimination and illiberalism. A figure such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health, could nominate a committee of external reformers to restore HMS to its proper calling. If HMS proves that it cannot reform itself, then others must do so on its behalf.