Norman Wang: The Truth Is No Defense

Dr. Norman Wang is not afraid to speak the truth. A professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, he was removed from his position supervising a fellowship program in electrocardiology, prohibited from contacting students, and publicly attacked over an article he wrote documenting the harm to minority medical students caused by the overuse of racial preferences. Through it all, he has stood firm and defended his work.

     In March 2020, Wang published a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association warning that recent efforts to achieve proportional representation in medical education are unlikely to succeed and that advocates of racial preferences fail to address well-documented harms of admissions preferences to minority students.

     When university administrators heard about Dr. Wang’s article, they swiftly removed him from his position as a program director and prohibited him from contacting medical students. To justify their actions, they publicly attacked his reputation as a scholar in a series of mass e-mails.

     In addition, Dr. Wang was subjected to a vicious Twitter campaign. Woke activists bombarded the journal with tweets accusing Dr. Wang of racism, demanding that it retract his article. The journal capitulated.

     Last year, CIR filed a lawsuit against everyone involved in the campaign against Dr. Wang. The public university’s employment actions violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Moreover, the American Heart Association — publisher of the journal — and several Pitt administrators libeled Dr. Wang by falsely attacking the veracity of his work.

     Dr. Wang is not the only person to by silenced for questioning progressive orthodoxy. Two editors for the Journal of the American Medical Association were compelled to resign after publishing a podcast expressing skepticism about “systemic racism.” By contrast, articles that make accusations of systemic racism have been published with little, if any, comment.

     This censorship campaign shields activists from criticism as they make increasingly extreme demands on hospitals and medical schools. Among other measures, activists now propose to allocate medical treatment, in part, by race rather than need. The AMA has put forward a “Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity,” explaining that equitable medical care would address social drivers of illness. Recently, New York and Minnesota both began to allocate scarce COVID treatments partly on the basis of race.

     In late December, the District Court granted certain of the Defendants’ motions to dismiss Dr. Wang’s claims. CIR will amend the complaint and likely appeal other portions of the District Court’s decision.

     Victory for Dr. Wang will be a major step toward reestablishing the right to dissent from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy at some of America’s most influential universities and storied academic journals.