If the doctor you see is a recent graduate of UCLA Medical School, you may want to find a new one.

A recent deep-dive article from The Washington Free Beacon reports on how the woke contagion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is killing UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

UCLA’s medical school is one of the best in the world. Its curriculum is so rigorous and demanding that last year, just 173 out of some 14,000 applicants were accepted. A 3.8 GPA in difficult college courses and testing at or above the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test are prerequisites for even being considered.

The point is that UCLA Medical is supposed to be for the best of the best. But then, in 2020, a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, came in, and the school’s famously high standards began to slip. Lucero brought with her the DEI contagion. Racial considerations in admissions, which are explicitly banned by California law and which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to be unconstitutional last year, became the name of the game.

With Lucero, the applicant’s race supersedes GPA and MCAT score. As a result of prioritizing DEI over and against ability and talent, the school’s standards have fallen. As a former admissions staffer observed, UCLA is now a “failed medical school,” adding, “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

Another admissions committee member noted, “I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything. People get in, and they struggle.”

A UCLA faculty member echoed that sentiment, telling the Free Beacon, “I wouldn’t normally talk to a reporter. But there’s no way to stop this without embarrassing the medical school.”

And the data appears to back up these claims, as UCLA Medical’s place in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking for medical research has slipped from sixth place in 2020, prior to Lucero taking over, to 18th place. Even more troublingly, the Free Beacon reports that “more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.”

To put this in perspective, just 5% of medical students nationwide fail these tests on average. And, tellingly, UCLA Medical’s recent rise in student testing failure coincides with a precipitous drop in the number of Asian students attending the school.

One faculty member laments that students have never been so badly prepared. “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors. Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Those in the know say the fault lies with DEI. “All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,” one admissions officer stated. “For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.”

DEI at UCLA Medical has elevated racial identity above all else. Attempting to artificially make things “fair” when it comes to race or gender or any other arbitrary identity dynamic does not produce genuine justice. The problem of racism in the past was predicated on exclusion. Today’s woke racism is predicated on including people based on their racial makeup, irrespective of their ability and talent or lack thereof.

What makes a good doctor has nothing to do with one’s race; it has everything to do with knowledge, talent, and abilities. UCLA Medical has chosen to reject this reality not only to its own reputational detriment but also to the danger of others who may find themselves looking to doctors who lack the knowledge and skills for the job.