Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) had a reasonable institutional story to tell.

U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, MD, MBA, is an alumnus. He is an emergency medicine physician, a Marine veteran, a former student body president, and the first MSM graduate elected to Congress. From the perspective of a communications office, the announcement almost writes itself: alumnus returns home to deliver the commencement speech; physician-leader addresses the next generation; a school devoted to service celebrates one of its own who has reached national office.

However, students objected to his selection because they believed McCormick’s public record stood in direct opposition to the mission of the institution granting him the platform. In their open letter, they quoted MSM’s mission: to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities, increase the diversity of the health professional and scientific workforce, and address primary care through education, research, and service, with emphasis on people of color and underserved urban and rural populations. Their argument was that a commencement speaker should not publicly undermine the very principles the school exists to advance.

The students pointed to McCormick’s comments opposing DEI, including his statement that DEI “creates racism,” as well as his rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, his support for restrictions on gender-affirming care and reproductive health care, and his vote for legislation they said would cap borrowing for medical students.

One can acknowledge McCormick’s right to speak, his genuine connection to MSM, and even the conciliatory tone of his commencement message while still questioning the wisdom of the invitation. His speech, while never addressing the elephant in the room except, facetiously, his “age,” emphasized unity and influence through friendship rather than argument, and encouraged students to “celebrate diversity,” which may have seemed like a slap in the face to many.

Clearly, medicine does require bridge-building. Physicians must treat people across political, religious, racial, cultural, and ideological differences. But that duty applies to physicians treating patients seeking care, not to commencement speakers receiving ceremonial honor. The objection was not that McCormick failed a purity test. It was that his public positions appeared to undermine the very equity-centered mission that made MSM necessary in the first place.

Adrienne Jones, a former political science professor at Morehouse College, argued that HBCUs may maintain relationships with conservative politicians partly as a matter of survival, particularly in an era of funding pressure and attacks on DEI. Institutions that serve marginalized communities often must negotiate with power structures that have never fully protected them.

Still, survival cannot become the only value that matters. When an institution’s public choices appear to contradict its stated mission, students, faculty and alumni notice. Patients eventually notice, too. This is especially true in medicine, where mission statements shape who gets recruited, who gets admitted, what research is funded, what communities are served, and what students learn to see as professional duty. MSM was created to address health inequity, underrepresentation, and the persistent neglect of Black and underserved communities. Its mission is tantamount to a clinical intervention.

That is why DEI is not a side issue here. In medicine, diversity is not merely about representation in brochures. It is about access, trust, cultural humility, research priorities, maternal mortality, rural care, language barriers, and whether patients believe the health system was built with them in mind. The students’ petition cited evidence that Black newborns have better survival when cared for by Black physicians, connecting workforce diversity to measurable outcomes. Whatever one thinks of specific DEI programs, dismissing the entire enterprise as reverse discrimination ignores the clinical reality that inequity is deeply built into the health care system and spread throughout it.

The most persuasive criticism of the students was that universities should expose graduates to disagreement. It is true that medical students should hear difficult arguments. They should learn to debate policy, challenge assumptions, and engage people whose views they oppose. But disagreement is not the same as ceremonial honor. A classroom debate, a moderated forum, a policy panel, or a private alumni meeting could have created space for exchange. Commencement is different. It is the final institutional word spoken over graduates before they enter the profession.

The students understood that. Their letter did not simply ask that McCormick be silenced. It asked that the school reconsider the speaker, include students in future selection processes, allow graduates to decline ceremonial interactions without retaliation, and publicly clarify that the school did not endorse any candidate for political office. Those are not unreasonable demands. They are governance and trust demands.

The reaction from physicians and alumni on internet platforms was raw because the symbolism felt personal. Some saw McCormick as having benefited from an HBCU while later supporting policies they believe harm the same pipeline. Others urged tolerance, noting that he had once been embraced by the MSM community and elected student body president. Both can be true. A person can have genuinely belonged to a community and later take public positions that many members of that community experience as betrayal.

The controversy is not only about McCormick. It is about what an institution owes its students when institutional prestige collides with institutional memory. MSM may have intended to showcase the breadth of leadership its graduates can achieve. Instead, it exposed a division between administrative symbolism and student experience. The administration saw an alumnus in Congress. Many students saw a speaker whose public positions threatened the communities they entered medicine to serve.

A question on some people’s mind was whether the invitation to McCormick was worth the soul of an HBCU. Institutions do not lose their soul in a single commencement speech. They lose it more gradually, when they stop recognizing the difference between access to power and fidelity to purpose.

The students were not asking medicine to become less inclusive. They were asking their institution to remember why it exists. They were asking whether a school born of exclusion should celebrate someone who publicly disparages the mechanisms designed to repair exclusion. They were asking whether unity without accountability is anything more than politeness in ceremonial dress.

That is not disrespectful. That is a moral diagnosis made by medical students.

Arthur Lazarus is a former Doximity Fellow, a member of the editorial board of the American Association for Physician Leadership, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books on narrative medicine and the fictional series Real Medicine, Unreal Stories. His latest book is Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These: Hard Truths from Physicians—and What They Mean for Medical Practice.