|
WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) calling for an immediate investigation and enforcement action against Johns Hopkins University for discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices within the School of Medicine. Johns Hopkins’ discrimination has afflicted admissions, scholarships, faculty hiring, curricula, residency programs, and federal research grants.
The complaint alleges that Johns Hopkins is violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, multiple federal civil rights laws, and President Trump’s recent Executive Orders.
As one of the nation’s premier medical institutions and the largest recipient of federal funding among American universities, Johns Hopkins bears a heightened responsibility to uphold fairness and merit. Instead, it has entrenched a DEI regime through its School of Medicine that infuses preferences based on race, color, sex, national origin, ethnicity, and other impermissible, immutable characteristics into every facet of medical education.
These practices, often hidden behind euphemisms such as “inclusive excellence” or “health equity,” systematically favor certain racial and ethnic groups deemed “underrepresented in medicine” (URiM) while penalizing others who do not fall into those preferred categories.
Even more concerning is the university’s calculated effort to evade the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), that prohibits race-based admissions. Rather than dismantle the discriminatory admissions infrastructure it shares with Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Johns Hopkins moved the goalposts. It engineered an upstream recruitment system that favors and pre-filters applicants to achieve predetermined demographic outcomes before the admissions process even begins, and subsidizes it downstream.
“Johns Hopkins has constructed a façade of legality around a deeply illegal system. They have replaced explicit race-based admissions with upstream sorting, downstream subsidies, and bureaucratic double-speak designed to preserve racial preferences,” said Megan Redshaw, Counsel at America First Legal. “This is not only unlawful under the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes—it has no place in medicine where competence must come first.”
AFL’s investigation uncovered, among other evidence of unlawful practices, the following:
- Through its Diversity Leadership Council, Johns Hopkins promotes race-based recruitment and directs policy decisions based on race, sex, and other protected traits.
- Johns Hopkins’ House Staff Diversity and Inclusion Council gives preferential treatment to URiM students, “LGBTQIA+” and “historically minoritized” students in medical residency programs.
- Pathway and mentorship programs, including “Diversity University,” “Hopkins C.A.R.E.S.,” “Pathway Programs,” and the “Doctoral Diversity Program,” provide preferential access to admissions support, training, and research opportunities based on race, sex, and ethnicity.
“The use of DEI-based discrimination in medical education isn’t just unlawful, it’s indefensible. Nowhere is the need for objectivity and merit more critical than in medicine, where a physician’s decisions can mean the difference between life and death,” said Megan Redshaw. “This is why AFL is urging the Department of Justice to investigate the Johns Hopkins University Medical School’s discriminatory practices and ensure that equality before the law is preserved as a constitutional guarantee, not a platitude academic elites are free to ignore.”
Read the full complaint here.
Read more here.
|
