In 2016, the Council on Education for Public Health—the agency that accredits schools of public health—updated its requirements to emphasize the importance of “health equity.” According to these standards, anyone who receives a masters of public health must be able to “discuss the means by which structural bias, social inequities and racism undermine health and create challenges to achieving health equity at organizational, community and societal levels.” Likewise, schools of public health must make “systematic, coherent and long-term efforts to incorporate elements of diversity.”

How do these requirements manifest? The University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health recently released an updated Inclusive Excellence Action Plan—a laundry list of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures. The plan cites the Council on Education for Public Health requirements, and mandates that “racism, social justice and health equity are integrated throughout and across curricula,” and that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts be a condition for faculty promotion and tenure.

Across the country, public-health schools have adopted virtually indistinguishable plans. Last year, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health—which ranks first in the country—released its Inclusion, Diversity, Anti-Racism, and Equity (IDARE) Action Plan. Measures include required land acknowledgments at school events (statements noting that the events are located on former Native American land), a new core competency “addressing the importance of IDARE in public health” required for all curricula, and new course evaluation questions on “diversity, inclusivity, anti-racism, and equity in the classroom climate and curriculum.”