Lawsuit: University of California systematically discriminates against Asian American applicants

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment that banned preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in state hiring, contracting, and admissions. 

But a California student group alleges that the state’s University of California system has systematically violated that state law, and the pain has hit Asian American applicants hardest. 

In its Feb. 3 federal lawsuit, Santa Ana-based Students Against Racial Discrimination (SARD) says the University of California has been “using racial preferences in student admissions at all nine of its campuses — a practice that violates the clear and unequivocal text of Title VI and 42 U.S.C. purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fighting race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”

SARD asks the court to declare that the state universities violated the law in order to boost “non-Asian racial minorities in student admissions” and to permanently block the UCs “from considering race in student admissions.” It also makes a dramatic request for federal intervention – “a court monitor to oversee all decisions relating to the defendants’ admission of students to ensure that these decisions are free from racial discrimination of any sort.”

Representatives of the University of California unequivocally denied the allegations. 

The suit details a number of incidents and faculty studies that, SARD claims, prove a pattern of discrimination, specifically against Asian-American applicants.

SARD filed its lawsuit just days before another suit hit the UC system. In Stanley Zhong and Nan Zhong v University of California, the plaintiffs allege that UC admissions officers last year rejected Stanley Zhong despite his 4.2 high school grade-point average, near-perfect SATs, and the fact that he founded a software company while still a high school sophomore. The Zhongs are representing themselves in that case.

The SARD suit notes that, until about 2006, the UC system generally followed state and federal law. The result astonished many: after Proposition 209, the University of California actually saw a rise in black and Hispanic admissions. That boom was likely the result of programs based on economic disadvantage but not race.

Then the shift came. SARD’s lawsuit notes that the UCs established “holistic” admissions as a way of working around the state ban on affirmative action. Beginning at UCLA and then adopted by every other UC campus, the nine-campus system gave admissions directors the right to consider proxies for race – including essays that prompt applicants and the people referring them to describe the racial, ethnic and gender barriers they’ve faced on the road to college.

SARD’s suit says holistic workarounds have even injured those it intends to help. Allowing “applicants with inferior academic credentials to obtain admission” on the basis of race and ethnicity places those students “at a significant academic disadvantage” in classrooms, the lawsuit claims. They “experience worse outcomes, because of the university’s use of racial preferences.”

“Students of all races are harmed by the University of California’s discriminatory behavior,” SARD concludes.

The suit also contends that the problem of race-based admissions is not limited to undergraduate applicants. Graduate schools have also gotten in on the act. In its suit, SARD calls out multiple UC law schools for alleged discrimination. Medical schools may be added soon.

One possible target is UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, whose diversity efforts appear to be negatively affecting first-year students’ scores on “bench tests,” tests designed to assure that students are gaining basic knowledge that will determine future success. Geffen’s bench test scores have fallen dramatically in recent years.

Over the past year or so, thanks to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine has become notorious for its aggressive DEI programs and standards and classes, for a rise in reports of antisemitism, and for the actions of one of Geffen’s admissions directors, Dr. Jennifer Lucero.

With an acceptance rate below 2 percent, Geffen is one of the nation’s most difficult medical schools to enter. In 2021, the Free Beacon reported, Lucero intervened dramatically in the application of a black candidate who appeared bound for rejection.

Lucero “exploded in anger,” two sources told the Free Beacon. They recalled that she asked the admissions committee members, “Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, Lucero continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

“UCLA still produces some very good graduates,” one professor told the Free Beacon. “But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”

Even the most-qualified students may struggle at Geffen – thanks to a curriculum that sacrifices actual medical training for political indoctrination. Geffen’s first-year med students take such courses as “History and Legacies of Immigration and Imperialism,” “Anti-Settler Colonialism/Indigenous Health and Disability Justice at the Intersections” and “Carceral Ableism, Medicine, and Racial Capitalism.”

In one such class last year, the Geffen’s paid “activist in residence,” Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, called on medical students to pray to “mama earth,” called medicine “white science,” and led students in “Free Palestine” chants. 

Gray-Garcia describes herself as a “formerly unhoused, incarcerated poverty scholar, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher, single mama of Tiburcio, [and the] daughter of a houseless, disabled, indigenous mama Dee.”  

UCLA law and economics professor Richard Sander, who is working with SARD, has seen the same phenomenon in UCLA’s law school. Just six years after Proposition 209 banned affirmation action, Sander says, the law school created a “critical race theory” track with its own admissions process. Sander says every student accepted through that track was black, though other racial and ethnic applicants applied. Since then, he says, the law school added “public interest” and “native American” tracks.

Each of these tracks – which can take an applicant outside of the standard admissions and classroom process – has an “ideological or racial focus or both,” Sanders said. And because graduate school admissions committees may allow or even require in-person interviews, admissions officials can easily determine an applicant’s race, ethnicity and gender.

Like UCLA’s law school, its David Geffen School of Medicine features a program called “iDIVERSE.” That program’s web page was deleted shortly after the general public noticed it. Defending himself against charges that iDIVERSE violated state and federal law, Steven Dubinett, dean of the medical school, said his students and colleagues “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” 

“He subsequently told an obscure Los Angeles Times opinion columnist that the allegations, published in the Washington Free Beacon, are ‘fact-free,’” the Free Beacon reported. “Hiring and admissions decisions, he wrote in his message last week, are ‘based on merit,’ not race, ‘in a process consistent with state and federal law.’

“But Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that houses a race-based fellowship experts say is illegal,” the Free Beacon continued. “Participants in the ‘iDIVERSE’ program ‘must be’ black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, LGBT, or a woman, according to screenshots of a now-deleted webpage obtained by the Free Beacon.”

The University of California denies SARD’s allegations. 

“If served, we will vigorously defend our admission practices,” a spokesperson said of the group’s lawsuit. “We believe these to be meritless suits that seek to distract us from our mission to provide California students with a world class education. Since the consideration of race in admissions was banned in California in 1996, the University of California has adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law. We stand by our admission policies and our record of expanding access for all qualified students.”

Thomas Buckley is a senior fellow at California Policy Center. If you know someone who may have been denied admission to a University of California undergraduate or graduate program on the basis of race or ethnicity, please contact uclaAdmissions@calpolicycenter.org.