Trump DEI policies threaten millions in scholarships raised by Black doctors

CINCINNATI — It took Kenneth Davis and his wife more than 20 years to raise the $1.4 million endowment they established for Black medical students entering the University of Cincinnati.

Davis had spent 36 years as the only Black general surgeon in Cincinnati before retiring in 2020. Now, according to the Cincinnati Medical Association, which represents Black doctors in the city, there are none. The scholarship, Davis hoped, would help grow the minuscule ranks of Black doctors in the region.

The endowment is now one of many across the country caught in the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Washington and pressuring corporations and universities to pull back from such efforts nationwide. The University of Cincinnati wants to make all students eligible for Davis’s scholarship, not just Black applicants. At least six other scholarships worth about $4 million established by Black doctors at the school are also under review, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

“This isn’t about fairness or equality,” Davis said. “This is about life and death. We have a severe shortage of Black doctors in this city, and Black people here can’t find culturally competent physicians who understand them.”

As the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI have ramped up, universities across the country have started reevaluating their race-based scholarships, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham which is ending a scholarship for high-performing Black medical students established by the family of the city’s first Black general surgeon to be certified by the American Medical Association.

Some of the doctors in Cincinnati who established scholarships are fighting the changes, arguing that they were already struggling to hold onto the inroads they have made to address racial disparities in medicine and worry all progress will be lost. The percentage of doctors who were Black has nearly doubled over the past few decades, but medical school enrollment faltered after the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning the use of race in college admissions.

Since the ruling, Black and Latino enrollment in medical school is down about 11%, while Native American enrollment has fallen 22%, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ analysis of data for the 2024-25 school year, the first admissions cycle since the decision. White enrollment was changed little, and the number of Asian students entering medical schools increased by 8%.

Now, the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts could roll back decades of efforts to inject more racial diversity into the medical profession and cause long-term harm to the health of Black communities, according to Black doctors and public health professionals in Cincinnati. A 2023 national study published in the American Medical Association’s journal found that the more Black doctors a community has, the longer Black people there tend to live.

“Disparities exist at nearly every part of the health care system, and the data shows that Black folks do better when they’re taken care of by folks who look like us, so it would be immoral for us not to address the shortage,” said Clyde Henderson, a retired orthopedic surgeon in Cincinnati, who also established a scholarship at the University of Cincinnati.

The disparity is particularly stark in Cincinnati where there are fewer than 100 Black or Latino doctors in the region, according to a 2020 report by the Doctors Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to recruit and retain a diverse physician population in the city. That amounts to less than 5% of the physicians in the region. Black residents comprise 40% of Cincinnati’s population, and Latino residents make up 5%.

But this comes at a time that the University of Cincinnati — home to Ohio’s oldest medical school — is under intense pressure to end diversity programs. In March, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed a sweeping overhaul of the state’s higher education system, banning DEI training and offices and calling for the end of race-based scholarships. The bill was “designed to restore free speech and diversity of thought on campus,” said Jerry C. Cirino, the Republican state senator who sponsored the legislation.

The awards could continue if they are administered by private foundations, not public universities, he said. “I am not against scholarships, I think they’re great, but they just can’t race based,” Cirino said.

It is also one of 45 public and private colleges under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for its DEI policies.

University of Cincinnati officials didn’t return repeated calls and emails for comment. “We have asked our leaders to ensure that university programs and practices do not rely on race, color, or national origin when it comes to how we make decisions related to admissions, scholarships, hiring, and procurement,” it said in a March statement.

Black doctors who established scholarships at the university are now scrambling to protect the original missions of their endowments, hoping the political environment will change or the college will back their efforts. Some are considering moving their endowments to outside foundations. But others are losing hope.

“The need here is great,” Davis said. “I get calls from friends of mine all the time looking for a Black physician. And the few we have, their practices are full.”

Cincinnati has long suffered from racial disparities, including in life expectancy, that public health experts link to a history of racist government policies. In Cincinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where 86% of the population is white, the average life expectancy is 84 years old, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Less than a 10-minute drive away in the Avondale community, where 81% of the residents are Black, people are expected to live to just 69. That pattern repeats across the city.

Davis was born and raised in Cincinnati’s working-class, predominantly Black Evanston community.

He attended virtually all-Black elementary and junior high schools. “Black and white people didn’t socialize much together,” Davis said. “High school was my first exposure to white people other than on television.”

He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in biology and then attended medical school at St. Louis University.

“I got into medical school in 1972, and I’m not ashamed to tell anybody that it was because of affirmative action,” Davis said. “I wasn’t the dumbest guy in the class. There were the children of faculty, alumni, and donors, and some of them struggled a lot more than I did, so I say I’m living proof that affirmative action worked.”

But he remembers the racist comments he and other Black medical students faced from classmates and instructors who doubted their capabilities. Once, a white doctor suggested, with no evidence, that a Black’s woman’s arthritis was the result of gonorrhea.

“Those were the things we had to sit there and quietly endure, we couldn’t say anything or react at all,” Davis said. “But I was out to prove them wrong, we all were.”

He returned to Cincinnati in 1984 for a position as an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

After years of sitting on the University of Cincinnati’s medical school admissions committee, Davis, 74, said he grew frustrated with how few Black students were enrolling.

In 1999, Davis and his wife pledged $10,000 to start their own scholarship and then began reaching out to friends, family members, and colleagues to raise more money. They sent out hundreds of fundraising letters for what they called the Lucy Oxley MD, African American Medical Student Scholarship.

Lucy Oxley was the first African American to graduate from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1935. She was also the only woman to graduate from the medical school that year.

When they met with the university’s development office, Davis said he emphasized that the scholarship would only be open to Black students. Davis said university officials agreed and the scholarship was launched in 2012.

The scholarship started modestly, offering one student a year a $3,000 award. As the endowment grew, it began to cover the recipient’s first-year tuition.

It was followed by scholarships established by several other Black doctors in the region, including Henderson, a retired orthopedic surgeon, who grew up playing little league baseball with Davis.

Kadi-Ann Rose received the award in 2021, which she said helped chip away at the costs of attending medical school.

“Med school is hard no matter where you go. I think what truly helped me is having a support system in my friends and mentors like Dr. Henderson that I’ve met along the way,” said Rose, who graduated May 3 and will begin a residency at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The scholarships were going well, Davis said, but over the years, the university’s lawyers raised questions about how they were being administered and suggested that it should to be open to more than just Black students.

The pressure began to build during the early days of Trump’s second administration.

On Feb. 14, the Education Department warned universities they could lose federal funding if they did not eliminate DEI. A few days later, the University of Cincinnati began notifying some of the Black doctors who had established scholarships at the school that they would need to make changes.

On Feb. 26, Henderson received a text from a University of Cincinnati’s development office official telling him that he should check his email, adding, “don’t shoot the messenger.” The university had determined that they needed to alter the “title and purpose” of the scholarship, the email said.

Henderson’s scholarship does not explicitly mention race but says it’s open to anyone from an underrepresented community who has a financial need.

Henderson said he and other doctors are fighting any changes. His scholarship shouldn’t be treated any differently than legacy scholarships that are only open to children of alumni, Henderson said.

“This is just a setback, and it’s going to take a concerted effort to reverse it,” Henderson said. “But we can’t just give up, we don’t have that choice.”

But at an April 30 meeting with administrators, the doctors with scholarships were told to change their criteria or the university would make them unilaterally. University officials also said they wouldn’t allow the money to be sent to a private foundation to administer the scholarships, said Anisasattara Shomo, president of the Cincinnati Medical Association, which has its own scholarship.

“It feels like a hostile takeover,” she said.

Shomo said her organization, and other Black doctors with scholarships, will stop fundraising for the university-run awards and find ways to privately administer money they raise for Black students in the future. “We will organize like we’ve always done around a system that wasn’t built for us,” she said.

Davis said he hopes that eventually the political environment will shift back in their favor, but isn’t hopeful. “We’ve been playing whack-a-mole for all these years, changing little things here and there, but I think this time they’ve closed all the loopholes,” Davis said.