Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the College Fix on December 9, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission.

An Indiana University humanities course teaches students about the health consequences of “mass incarceration,” while having students watch a movie that portrays white people as violent.

“Survive, Breath, Thrive, Black Health and the Humanities” is a cross-listed course in African studies and medical humanities at the public university in Bloomington.

The syllabus, which is publicly available, connects racial health disparities to racist public policies.

“The pandemic and protests of 2020 exemplified the interplay between health justice and social justice in the Black American experience,” the syllabus says. “The disparate impacts of COVID-19 and state violence prompt a ‘biopolitical’ analysis of policies — segregation, redlining, policing, mass incarceration — that disproportionately result in ill health and premature death.”

Class assignments include a research presentation that connects the course’s material to a “Black health” topic, a work of “speculative fiction that addresses themes of race/racism and health,” and a paper on the film “Get Out.”

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“Get Out” is a horror movie about white people transferring their brains into black people to steal their bodies.

The syllabus and the university’s website do not provide the professor teaching the course, but Coursicle lists it under Elizabeth Nelson. Nelson is an assistant professor of medical humanities and health studies. She also teaches history classes.

Professor Nelson and the university’s media team did not respond to two emails in the past several weeks that sought comment on the course, including criticism raised by experts who spoke to the Fix.

The university media team and Nelson also did not respond to voicemail messages left on December 2.

The Fix emailed the Africana Studies and Medical Humanities departments at Indiana University multiple times this past month, but did not receive a response.

Courses use ‘false lens of structural racism,’ doctor says.

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However, a medical expert criticized the ideology behind the course.

The course “frames health disparities through the false lens of structural racism, sidelining other factors like access to care, medical comorbidities, behavioral choices, and biology,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for Do No Harm, told the Fix via email. “This singular focus oversimplifies and misconstrues complex issues.”

Do No Harm is a medical advocacy group that pushes for science-based healthcare and the removal of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) from higher education and medicine.

“The course doesn’t hide from its political ambitions—looking to make healthcare professionals into social justice warriors,” Miceli said.

An editor for a higher education reform group offered his own criticism.

The humanities course “may appear on the surface to provide insight into ‘black health,’ but the assignments reveal the underlying ideological messaging,” Jared Gould wrote in an email to the Fix.

He is the managing editor of Minding the Campus, which regularly reports on higher education issues and liberal bias.

“Students are expected to interpret health disparities primarily as evidence of systemic oppression or white malfeasance, blurring the line between education and political indoctrination,” Gould said.

“It’s not that there are never real differences in health outcomes by race, ethnicity, or gender,” Gould said. “The problem arises when medical schools frame these disparities in the language of oppression or white supremacy—as if differences in outcomes are evidence that whites are actively harming minorities.”

Gould has previously researched DEI in medical schools for the group Speech First and found that many schools promote “a distorted medical education that aims to turn physicians into social justice warriors.”

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“Students are taught that addressing disparities requires prioritizing patients by race or gender rather than focusing on objective medical criteria,” Gould said. “Some courses explicitly suggest that disparities exist because of white supremacy, effectively turning a complex set of social and biological issues into a narrative of racial blame.”

Miceli, with Do No Harm,  also identified a broader trend within medical education of promoting DEI principles over science-based research and evidence. He finds that such an approach does little to solve healthcare problems.

“Academic institutions and professional associations alike need to refocus on critical thinking and balanced inquiry—not serve as echo chambers for ideological conformity and indoctrination,” he said.

“When students are taught that race is the central cause of healthcare disparities, it promotes a misleading narrative that is not only inaccurate, but also divisive,” he said. “This reductive approach leaves future healthcare professionals ill-equipped to address the multifaceted challenges of patient care.”

He said healthcare teaching should “prioritize” “disease, effective treatments, and meaningful ways to improve health outcomes.”

Image: “Indiana University Bloomington Sample Gates” by SUZUKI Hironobu on Wikimedia Commons