UPMC removed Norman Wang, a cardiologist and an associate professor of Medicine, from a fellowship program after he penned a “white paper” criticizing affirmative action efforts in the medical field.
Wang was removed by UPMC from his position as program director of the Electrophysiology Fellowship following social media backlash against the paper.
In the paper, originally published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on March 24, Wang argued that affirmative action efforts through diversity, inclusion and equity in medicine have been largely unsuccessful because of a “limited qualified applicant pool and legal challenges to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions to institutions of higher education.”
“Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their racial and ethnic identities,” Wang said.
Wang also said in the paper that there “exists no empirical evidence by accepted standards for causal inference to support the mantra that ‘diversity saves lives.’”
In his conclusion, he said, “long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics.” Wang said racial and ethnic preferences for undergraduate and medical school admissions should be dismissed by 2028.