The university is claiming that the story omitted details it included
When doctors reached out to the dean of Brown University Medical School regarding a Washington Free Beacon report published earlier this month, they received a reply from medical school dean Mukesh Jain.
“What has been reported about criteria for faculty promotion at The Warren Alpert Medical School is an egregious mischaracterization,” Jain wrote. He was referring to a piece on promotion guidelines that give DEI more weight than “clinical skills” for many roles within the medical school, which declined to comment on the piece before publication.
Now, Brown is scrambling to correct the record, claiming that the story withheld crucial context in order to malign Brown unfairly. What it’s saying, however, is not true.
The Free Beacon reported last Tuesday that Brown’s Department of Medicine gives a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” more weight than “excellent clinical skills” in its promotion criteria for faculty, adding that those weights only apply to research and teaching roles. “For doctors who train students in clinical settings,” the report said, DEI “gets the same weight as ‘patient care.’” The Free Beacon also uploaded the criteria for readers to look over themselves.
After the report was published, Brian Clark, the university’s vice president for “news and strategic campus communications,” told the Free Beacon that Brown planned to tell those who contacted the university about the report that it was a “blatant effort to mischaracterize Brown’s rigorous assessment in considering appointments and promotions for medical faculty.”
He asked for no factual corrections to the story and declined to respond to further questions.
Since then, the Free Beacon has obtained correspondence between Jain and a concerned physician regarding the report.
Jain’s response contains several false statements, including that “the reporting entirely omits” the criteria for faculty “with a focus in the clinical arena”—information included in the report. Jain also implied that the Free Beacon had conflated the Department of Medicine with the entire medical school. In fact, the report states that the DEI criteria “apply only to the Department of Medicine … not to the medical school as a whole.”
The correspondence underscores Brown’s efforts to stem the fallout from the Free Beacon story, which gained traction on social media and is now drawing the attention of federal civil rights agencies. It is not illegal for private universities to screen faculty for a commitment to DEI. But Andrea Lucas, the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said that such practices “can be legally suspect” and facilitate discrimination.
“Criteria (whether for promotion or hiring) that screen candidates based on ‘diverse backgrounds,’ ‘diverse perspectives,’ or ‘commitment to diversity’ can be legally suspect, if the employer is using these criteria as pretext or a proxy for racial preferences,” she told the Free Beacon.
Those criteria are especially risky when they encourage faculty to disclose their race. “The EEOC has long taken the position that soliciting any pre-employment information that tends to disclose an applicant’s race creates a presumption that the employer unlawfully will use race as a basis for making selection decisions,” Lucas said. She added that the agency could not comment on the specific criteria used by Brown.
Pressed on the inaccuracies in Jain’s statement, Clark, the university spokesman, again said that the report had used “selective extracts to mischaracterize the qualifications for a single department.” He did not address the factual errors flagged by the Free Beacon.
“Our ongoing intent,” Clark added, “is to provide the Free Beacon with information to support accuracy in the original coverage and any follow-up reporting.”
In other crisis communications situations, Clark has taken up the pen to assure students that the university provides enough subscriptions to local media outlets.
“The University values the critical role that news organizations play both locally and globally in informing citizens, promoting understanding of key issues and unearthing stories that need to be told,” Clark told Brown’s student paper in 2018. “The University has long offered access to many news publications, but there are many ways in which the University supports first-rate journalism beyond the subscriptions that we purchase.”
