Indiana University’s ‘Implicit Bias’ Training Module for Hiring Faculty Under Scrutiny

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm. Courtesy of Do No Harm

The Indiana University Office of Academic Affairs is under scrutiny for its “implicit bias” training module about hiring practices at the university.

Do No Harm (DNH), an organization that spotlights discriminatory practices in academic and medical institutions, highlighted a training module used at the university for faculty search committees, encouraging committee members to consider ideological concepts such as their own “implicit bias” and “whiteness” instead of the applicant’s experience.

The training module, titled “Faculty Selection: Minimizing Implicit Bias in Search Committees,” insists that the committee members have an implicit bias that leads to unfair outcomes for who gets hired, and also explains how this can be reduced.

The module defines “implicit bias” as an automatic, deeply entrenched mental association about social groups that influences one’s actions and decisions on an unconscious level, while “whiteness” is defined as the ideologies and structures in one’s context that condition and socialize others according to this norm.

“A 2021 study suggests biases are cognitive reflections of systemic racism in the environment,” the speaker in the training video said. “If we apply this to academia, all the ways people of color are systematically disadvantaged lead academics to hold these biased perceptions of what a faculty member should be. Whether or not we intend to evaluate faculty in a biased way, our implicit biases automatically creep in and cause bias in our judgments.”

‘Acutely Radicalized’

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of DNH, said this is a problem because the essence of hiring faculty is to recruit people who are going to be the most qualified.

“For them to say, ‘We’re going to hire people based on these characteristics that have nothing to do with their academic achievements at all’ is to say, ‘We’re not going to hire the best, smartest, and most talented people to become faculty members,’” Goldfarb said.

Though affirmative action policies have existed since first being enacted in the 1960s, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies were fully embraced after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Since then, academics have scrambled to make the concept of systematic racism the foremost issue that must be addressed in the United States.

“Americans got acutely radicalized during the pandemic, and all of the sudden, systematic racism became not ‘an’ explanation but ‘the’ explanation, for everything,” Goldfarb said.

Goldfarb, a retired physician, was a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine when he began to see social justice theories creep into medical education.

He said there are several faulty ideas at play that fuel the DEI ideologies, one being the incorrect assumption that a highly qualified minority wouldn’t be hired because he or she isn’t white.

“Everybody supports hiring highly qualified people who come from minority groups,” Goldfarb said.

Then there is the assumption that the people doing the hiring are suffering from an unconscious bias, he said.

“This idea that we are so biased that we can’t consciously rise above it when we are interacting with people is ridiculous,” Goldfarb said. “No one is denying that when you look at someone who is different than you, you will take notice, but that doesn’t mean you will act in a way that denies that person’s achievements or merits.”

This notion that there aren’t enough black faculty members because there’s widespread bias against the hiring of black people is another faulty assumption, he said.

“The reason there aren’t enough black faculty members is that there aren’t enough qualified black individuals,” Goldfarb said. “The solution is not to say, ‘We’re going to forget about qualifications and only hire people we normally wouldn’t because of their skin color.' That’s what this has come down to.”

‘A Hypothesis Without Evidence’

Much of this is also based on another false idea that because there are disparities in health outcomes for black people compared to white people in general, there must be bias on the part of the physicians who aren’t giving black people the best care, Goldfarb said.

“That’s a hypothesis, and it’s a hypothesis without any evidence,” he said. “But nonetheless, it keeps being promoted. So, every time a black patient has a bad outcome, the conclusion is the doctors must have had a bias.”

The problem, Goldfarb said, is that there are real issues such as cultural, diet, and genetic factors that contribute to poor health outcomes in the black community that are marginalized when institutions place emphasis on “implicit bias training.”

Because these institutions can’t do anything about real social factors that are contributing to poor health outcomes, such as diet and lifestyle changes, they look at what they think they can control by setting up DEI departments to reprogram the attitudes of physicians and nurses, he said.

“But it’s like the drunk who loses his keys and looks for them under light poles because it’s the only place he can see,” Goldfarb said. “It’s the same thing with these institutions. They have no capacity to fix what’s almost certainly the real causes of these disparities in health care outcomes, so they decide to set up these DEI departments, hire a bunch of people, and proclaim how free of racism they’re going to make the health care system.”

‘Not Enough Health Care’ for Black Communities

There is a solution, however, Goldfarb said.

“The problem is not a bias health care system,” he said. “The problem is not enough health care being delivered to the black community.”

However, Goldfarb said there’s little interest in fixing this, especially under the system of Medicaid, which he said “dramatically underpays hospitals and doctors.”

When there’s a community with a large Medicaid basis for their insurance, hospitals aren’t going to seek out more of those patients or want to build facilities in those communities, he said.

Creating Mistrust

The DEI initiatives also create distrust between the patient and physician, specifically when black patients are being told they are being discriminated against, Goldfarb said.

“Once you go down that road, it’s very hard to recover from it, because now you have anger and mistrust that contributes to patients not wanting to follow recommendations,” Goldfarb said.

Then there is the idea that physicians conspire to facilitate poor health outcomes in a patient because of his or her skin color, he said.

“I think about my own personal experience,” he said. “I walk into a room, see a patient, and think, ‘What can I do to improve this patient’s condition?' We’re not interested in harming them. What would be the incentive for doing that?”

‘Woke’ Medical Decisions

The danger of these ideas is starting to show itself in real-world discriminatory policies that use faulty data to support medical decisions that will cost lives.

In an article for City Journal, Goldfarb details new policies that have been written to make race an essential factor in deciding who receives life-saving kidney transplants, based on the claim that the former system for determining who receives a kidney transplant is racist.

“The shift is perhaps the most dangerous victory for wokeness in health care to date,” Goldfarb said in the article.

Though the old formula for calculating kidney assessments for patients was never shown to be inaccurate and has been validated in multiple studies, Goldfarb said that activists still demanded a new formula, which was enacted and 2021 and found to be less accurate.

“It is a case study in politicized manipulation of data to achieve a predetermined goal,” Goldfarb wrote in the article.

‘Discrimination by Another Name’

Goldfarb recently praised Mississippi State Auditor Shad White for his call to state universities to report how much they are spending on DEI programs. He medical schools have embraced DEI initiatives and that the consequences could be dangerous, and possibly even deadly.

“By its nature, DEI demands a greater focus on people’s skin color instead of their character or individual characteristics,“ Goldfarb wrote in the letter to White. ”It has already been used to lower standards for admission to medical school, leading to worse quality students who will provide worse quality care as physicians. DEI has even been used to justify policies like preferential medical treatment by race, which is racial discrimination by another name.”

The Epoch Times contacted Indiana University for comment.