Some Harvard doctors worry Trump’s anti-DEI push will harm health care

“My concern is that the medical school and the hospitals will forgo critical health research and programs, either at the explicit direction of the Trump administration or, anticipatorily, to avoid offending it,” said Dr. Mark Eisenberg, a Massachusetts General Hospital addiction specialist. “As medical providers and researchers, we are obligated to refuse this pressure to harm public health.”
That executive order threw uncertainty over many efforts that took years to build aimed at diversifying the ranks of doctors and improving different communities’ access to health care. Now, with the Trump administration’s letter to Harvard this week demanding it cease DEI programs or risk losing billions in federal dollars, some doctors and researchers said they feel even more worried that vital work to reduce health disparities will be shut down.
Since President Trump’s first week in office, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, like all federal grant recipients, have been facing a late April deadline to pledge they have no “illegal” diversity, equity, or inclusion programs to keep receiving federal grants.
Dr. Bruce Fischl, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School who runs a neuroimaging lab at MGH, fears the ultimatum might imperil programs designed to help young students from disadvantaged backgrounds enter the biomedical field. He’s seen the power of such initiatives, citing one local lab’s internship program for high school and undergraduate students in which they get to observe and participate in brain research on Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
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The goal of the internship program, he said, is to “demystify biomedical research” and provide opportunities to young people who have limited opportunities to pursue science careers. More than half of the roughly 50 students who have participated are children of first-generation immigrant families. One of the students was recently hired as a research associate in the lab.
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“The program has been freaking amazing,” Fischl said. “It gives young people an opportunity to be seen and heard and flourish in an environment that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. It’s not an alternative to meritocracy, it’s a way to broaden the pool of people who have access to be considered for meritocracy.”
In its Thursday letter to Harvard, the Trump administration demanded the university adopt “merit-based hiring policies” and “cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring.” The administration also said “all efforts should be made to shutter” DEI programs, which it said foster “snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes, which fuels division and hatred.”
The demands also included that Harvard crack down on programs and departments that stoke antisemitism and report on disciplinary actions taken against people who violated antisemitism rules since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The letter from the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force accused Harvard of failing to protect students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment. The administration had said on Monday that it was reviewing $9 billion in federal grants and contracts destined for the university and its affiliated institutions, including such renowned hospitals as MGH, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Several Jewish doctors who teach at Harvard Medical School said that meeting the demand by the administration’s antisemitism task force could actually fuel hatred of Jews and undermine merit-based programs while imperiling research at Harvard’s hospitals.
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“The tragedy of all this is that the professed rationale for these demands is to reduce antisemitism, and this will absolutely have the opposite effect,” said a Jewish physician and researcher at Brigham, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “[Administration officials] are demanding that Harvard take a wide range of actions that will be very unpopular.”
Rachel Petherbridge, a doctoral student in systems biology at Harvard Medical School, exclaimed “damn, damn, damn!” on Friday as she read through the list of demands in the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper.
Petherbridge has spent much of the past five years studying maternal health, including gestational diabetes, a complication of pregnancy in which a pregnant woman is unable to limit the level of sugar in her blood. While not focused on diversity, her work includes descriptions of race and population data — which now has her worried about whether it will get swept up in the widening crackdown on health-equity research.
In June 2020, a Black Lives Matter sign was displayed on the window of a business in Boston. John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
“The Trump administration wants us to be color blind,” Petherbridge said. “But how far does that go when we are considering differences between people in our research and trying to be careful and conscientious? . . . It’s Kafkaesque. Because no one knows what the crime is and what the rules are, then everyone is afraid.”
In 2023, Harvard received about 10 percent of its revenue from federal grants and contracts, and its affiliated hospitals rank among the nation’s top hospital recipients of federal health research grants. Last year, two hospitals, MGH and Brigham, together received more than $1 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
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A spokesperson for Beth Israel Lahey Health declined to comment on the demands but said “research and innovation are at the center of our mission as an academic health system, and federal funding is critical in supporting the work of our researchers. Any changes to federal research funding will have a significant impact on our ability to recruit talented clinicians.”
Spokespersons for Mass General Brigham, Dana-Farber, and Children’s declined to comment.
The crackdown on diversity programs drew particularly fierce criticism from several physicians and researchers.
Scott Delaney, a research scientist in environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he is concerned that the Trump administration is using diversity programs as a pretext for gutting university funding and undermining scientific research.
“DEI is a slur that they use for anything they don’t like — and generally, that’s research that is not specifically tailored to straight, white men,” he said.
He said the targets of the administration’s review of Harvard likely will widen over time, much as they have with the review of NIH research grants. At first, the NIH terminated grants focused on transgender identity and diversity, but has recently expanded its grant cancellations to include studies of COVID-19 and climate change.
“It feels a little bit like we’re standing on a train track and we can see the train coming,” Delaney said.
One veteran physician-scientist at MGH said he hopes Harvard refuses to bow to the ultimatum from the Trump administration. But in a telling sign of the fear sweeping the school and other Ivy League universities, the doctor insisted on anonymity.
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“This is absolute bullying, and capitulating to a bully never works out,” he said of President Trump. “I hope that not only Harvard but the combined academic enterprise gets a backbone and resists as best as they possibly can. This autocratic approach is what leads to fascism.”
Tiana Woodard of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com. Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres.