“We will resist obeying in advance,” said Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, as he recently laid out the institution’s response to executive orders from the Trump administration concerning DEI, gender, immigration, and other contentious issues.
“We won’t do any anticipatory obedience,” he said. “The existing laws have not changed. No court directives will require any change in compliance at this time.”
The comments made by Kruse, who is also the father of former SIU School of Medicine poetry professor and “beach witch” Emily Kruse Carr, were made public through a leaked video initially reported on by Fox News in May after being obtained by Do No Harm, a medical watchdog organization.
The comments were made as part of a “a speech in a small group discussion,” the outlet reported.
The version of the video presented by Fox is edited. Do No Harm told The College Fix via email that a full version has not been posted online.
In the edited video, Kruse said: “Immediately after the inauguration for a second term, President Trump and his administration issued a myriad of executive orders and took a number of executive actions in very specific areas that potentially will have a direct negative effect on the SIU School of Medicine.”
In addition to DEI, immigration, and gender, Kruse also cited federal grant funding, health care programs, nutrition programs, global health, and student loans as among the things that may be impacted by Trump administration policies.
The Trump administration’s stances on these issues, Kruse said, “constitute direct attacks on all that is important to us” as well as “the people we serve, the people to whom we are accountable.”
Kruse went on to focus on Trump’s executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
“This executive order seeks to narrowly define sex and gender in order to target transgender, non-binary, and intersex people for mistreatment and discrimination,” he said. “While the order allegedly attempts to protect women and girls, what it really does is threaten any woman or girl who doesn’t conform to sex based stereotypes and opens them up to invasion of privacy.”
“This is an attack on women, on gender identity, on sexual orientation, and on basic human rights,” Kruse said. “These issues demand a strong institutional and collective response.”
Later, Kruse asks: “What can employees do to fight back?”
When asked by The Fix whether someone from SIU cared to comment on the statements made in the video in general or, more specifically, whether the school stood by the calls for resistance and disobedience, Lauren Crocks, SIU Medicine’s director of marketing, communications, and engagement, replied, “Southern Illinois University School of Medicine is committed to following the law.”
Kruse’s faculty page still has him as provost as of June.
Internal medicine physician, Brownstone Institute fellow, and author of the new book, “The Medical Masquerade,” Dr. Clayton Baker described Kruse as “appear[ing] to think he [is] some kind of feudal lord rather than a medical school Dean. This is hubristic behavior.”
“SIU is not a sovereign political entity,” Baker told The College Fix via email. “It’s a publicly funded school.”
Some of Kruse’s vows of defiance, said Baker, fall “far outside the authority of a medical school dean — immigration law, for example.”
Do No Harm chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb told The College Fix that by “putting itself directly at odds with President Trump, the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine is begging to be investigated by the federal government.”
“The school’s officials made their playbook clear: ignore executive orders until forced to obey; this strategy must be exposed and nipped in the bud,” he said via email.
Other SIU administrators that partook in the discussion include the school of medicine associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Wendi El-Amin, and associate dean of clinical affairs and population health Vidhya Prakash.
“The only thing that’s different about our medical school is that the work that we’re doing around equity, diversity, [and] inclusion is a life or death issue for some people,” El-Amin said in the video.
“Please understand that no member of our school of medicine, whether it’s an employee or a trainee, should have to engage in conversation or discourse with ICE,” Prakash said in the video, noting that protocol is to call security, which in turn will engage with ICE and bring in the Office of General Council if deemed appropriate.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: SIU med school dean discusses plans to fight President Trump / Fox News, Do No Harm video screenshot
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