The University of Washington School of Medicine has something delightful planned for med students, to make sure they’re indoctrinated as Social Justice Warriors. Look at this from an e-mail that went out to

Diversity Issues in Teaching and Learning:

Response versus Reaction in Challenging Times

Presenters:
Theresa Ronquillo, PhD

Tikka Sears, Theater Artist

Co-Directors, Theater for Change

April 25, 2017
9:00 am -11:45 am

Health Sciences Building, Room T550

Remote Access available to WWAMI participants on a first come first served basis.

Goal:  To provide participants the opportunity to generate and rehearse a variety of responses to challenging situations related to inequity, institutional climate, and interpersonal conflicts in classroom and clinical settings.

Description:  Through theater games, intergroup dialogue, and critical reflection, participants will cultivate skills to discuss and respond to instances of institutional power, privilege, and oppression. Collaborative problem solving and generating strategies for interrupting oppression will enable participants to proactively “rehearse” responses in these situations.  Moreover, taking action and collective reflection can promote continued discussion and action taking on and off the stage. Interactive theater can spark the beginning–not the end–of important conversations. In this workshop, mini ‘plays’ will be performed once without interruption, and then be repeated, allowing audience members, known as ‘spect-actors,’ to enter the scene, take on a character, and transform the oppressive situation.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• advance dialogue among students, faculty, staff educators, and administrators about issues of power, privilege, and oppression;

• co-create inclusive and equitable teaching and learning environments;

• employ strategies to interrupt oppression;

• identify and explore power inequities rooted in ethnocentrism and stereotypes;

• define and problematize whiteness and racial micro-aggressions in teaching and research.

Yeah, that’s just what we need: to turn hospitals into breeding grounds for racial grievance among doctors, nurses, and staff. What kind of white medical student or medical professional would sit through this idiotic exercise, in which they are invited to participate in their own racial demonization? This stuff is going to destroy this country by turning its people on each other. I hope some angry white person sues the medical school for creating a racially hostile work environment. Make them defend this racist pantomime in civil court.

Just to let you know what kind of lunatic mission the Theater For Change is on, check out its website.  Excerpt:

We use Theater of the Oppressed and other participatory theater approaches to:

• Generate and rehearse a variety of responses to challenging situations related to inequity, institutional climate, and interpersonal conflicts.
• Advance dialogue among faculty, students, staff educators, and administrators about issues of power, privilege, and oppression that affect us all.
• Promote performance and arts-based pedagogies (i.e., active learning and multi-modal approaches) in educational settings.
• Co-create inclusive and equitable teaching and learning environments.

TfC UW is a collaboration between the Center for Teaching and Learning and Memory War Theater, a Seattle-based theater company devoted to personal and community transformation through performing arts, partnerships and education.  Since 2012, TfC UW has engaged hundreds of audience members in intersectional, critical dialogue on issues such as White Privilege, Racism, Heterosexism, Policed Bodies, Socioeconomic Classism, Ableism, and Microaggressions.

Here’s a link to one of the Theater’s lesson plans for a workshop. Imagine trying to get through this without laughing hysterically.

In a sane society, these vibrant people and their Rich Inner Lives™ would be confined to an empty classroom in the English department or the basement of the local Unitarian church. But no, now they have been weaponized to ideologically instruct medical students, and teach them how to hate class enemies.

UPDATE: Reader Mungling says medicine ought to be free from politicization, but it isn’t:

Hey Rod, it’s definitely worse than you think. I doubt there will be much laughter going on in those workshops.

To understand why, you need to understand the medical application system. For many pre-meds, medicine is a passport to a life of power, prosperity and prestige. Speak to your average science undergrad and you’ll quickly understand that for a large group of students, it is their only goal in life. It’s treated as the highest and noblest vocation, something akin to the priesthood in the Middle Ages. As a result, there are far more applicants than there are open positions. In Canada, for example, something like 4% (take that number with a grain of salt, but if it’s not 4% it’s another low number) of individuals who apply to medical school in a given year will get an acceptance offer. The result is there are far more qualified applicants than there are positions, and so the field is ripe for a little social engineering.

Recently, a publication in a high-profile bioethics journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.12288/full) suggested that medical students should be weeded out during interviews if they are opposed to performing abortion, euthanasia, or contraception. Anecdotally, I know that many of my Catholic and Christian peers are afraid of leaving any identifying information on their applications for fear of discrimination. The ironic thing is that many of the experiences they’ve had in youth ministry (with respect to leadership, problem solving, resolving conflict, facilitating rather large events, responsibility, etc.) are exactly what they would be looking for in a typical candidate. Still, the advice from anyone in the system is if they think you are religious they will actively prevent you from getting a seat. Thirdly, as someone who has gone through the interview process, I can that they will ask questions which will pick out those of a non-SJW persuasion. I can’t reveal specifics due to a non-disclosure agreement, but I can say that at my most recent interview, one questions focused on a very recent, hot button SJW type social issue, and the other looked at religious healthcare practitioners in a potentially very critical way. I can’t say for sure whether they were looking to push an SJW agenda there, but it was certainly my impression.

I am not a medical student, but I am a student in another health care discipline. Yes there are some people who don’t take the SJW rhetoric seriously, but there are many who do and they tend to dominate the classroom narrative. Oppression, privilege and the whole range of buzz words are a frequent discussion topic. For some of the students, the problem isn’t the SJW instructor but the fact that the instructors don’t go far enough.

Ultimately, if you think healthcare is in any way immune to the SJW politics then you’re wrong. Being composed of hard sciences won’t protect medicine. In fact, I think the average learning cohort is already there.