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Sunday, May 10, 2026
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University of Miami Med School Dean Wants to Stop Picking Doctors Based on Whether They're Good at Medicine

Henri Ford, the dean of the University of Miami's medical school, stood at a podium at the University of South Florida on Friday and told a room full of people that selecting medical students based on their academic ability might be a problem.

"If we relied strictly on MCATs and GPA," Ford said, "we could end up with individuals who lack those soft skills."

The event was a debate on DEI in medical school admissions, hosted by USF. Ford's position was that merit-based selection — the practice of admitting the students who demonstrated the highest aptitude for medicine — produces too "homogenous" a class. His proposed alternative was never quite spelled out, but the direction was clear enough.

"You could actually just rely on AI to select the class, right?" Ford continued. "And if we did that, what would happen? We would end up with a fairly homogenous group."

Translation: if you let the numbers pick the doctors, the wrong people get in. Ford didn't define "wrong." He didn't have to.

Stanley Goldfarb, a medical doctor who leads the Do No Harm watchdog group, was on the other side of the debate and had the kind of response that shouldn't need to be said out loud in a functioning society: "Academic performance before medical school is the best predictor of success, and it should be the key metric."

Goldfarb added that "life experiences and leadership traits are all fine to consider," provided academic achievement remains the primary filter. The distinction matters. Nobody is arguing that bedside manner is irrelevant. The argument is whether you should admit someone who can't pass organic chemistry because they have the right "soft skills" — and whether "soft skills" is even what Ford is actually talking about.

Jay Wolfson, senior associate vice president at USF Health, sided with the data. "I think we have to have some empirical basis for the initial selection," Wolfson said. That's a polite way of saying the dean of a medical school just argued against empiricism.

The timing is worth noting. The Department of Justice has already found that schools including UCLA School of Law, George Washington University, UCSF Medical School, and Yale University discriminated against white and Asian students in their admissions processes. The pattern is documented. The legal exposure is real. And here's Ford, arguing that the solution to documented discrimination is more subjectivity in admissions, which is precisely the mechanism that enabled the discrimination in the first place.

Ford's "soft skills" framing is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Medical schools already evaluate research experience, clinical volunteering, interviews, and personal statements. The holistic review he's describing already exists. What he's proposing isn't adding soft skills to the equation. It's subtracting the hard ones.

The person who decides which applicants get to spend the next decade learning how to perform surgery on your family believes that test scores measuring medical aptitude are producing the wrong results. Not inaccurate results. Not incomplete results. The wrong demographic results.

Dr. Bonzo Reddick, Georgia's public health director, participated in the same debate. The full scope of positions represented suggests this isn't a fringe conversation happening in a faculty lounge. It's an active policy debate inside the institutions that credential the people who write your prescriptions.

Ford's medical school at the University of Miami currently trains students who will go on to perform heart surgeries, deliver babies, and diagnose cancers. The dean thinks the selection process that identifies who is best equipped to do those things needs less emphasis on whether candidates are, in fact, best equipped to do those things.

The MCAT exists for a reason. Ford just told you he thinks the reason is the problem.

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