The Department of Health and Human Services launched a civil rights investigation in March into the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. The probe, HHS said in a press release, would investigate whether the school’s admissions office discriminates based on race.
Less than two weeks later, UCLA instructed admissions officers to do exactly that.
On April 8, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, the medical school circulated a memo that outlined “guiding principles for student representation on the admissions committee,” which includes third- and fourth-year medical students as well as faculty members. Those guidelines require the committee to consider race when picking students to serve as admissions officers.
“The Chairs of the [admissions committee] will review all submitted recommendations to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LGBTQ+,” the memo reads, according to a screenshot obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The memo has a UCLA watermark and was sent to all second- and third-year medical students, the person with knowledge of the matter said. It appears to have been approved by the medical school’s Faculty Executive Committee, which has oversight of admissions policy.
UCLA did not respond to a request for comment.
HHS said its probe would examine whether admissions officials at the medical school give “unlawful preference to applicants based on their race.” The memo suggests that a subset of those officials are themselves chosen using racial criteria—5 of the committee’s 20-30 members are student representatives—and provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the school’s admissions bureaucracy is flouting federal law.
Lawyers who reviewed the guidelines said they were patently illegal and would be exhibit A in any kind of enforcement action against the medical school.
“Putting in writing, while under federal investigation for discrimination, that your faculty will ‘review’ the proposed slate of students included in a program ‘to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LBGTQ+’ is astonishingly brazen,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “You have to wonder how it’s possible for no one either in the administration or with its outside counsel to even roughly read either the law or the room.”
William Trachman, the general counsel for Mountain States Legal Foundation and a former official at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, described the admissions committee as a “Russian nesting doll” of discrimination.
“These committee members need to be prepared to be held personally liable for violations of Title VI,” he said. “This is a good example of how oblivious schools are to their legal duties and how entrenched the rot is in postsecondary education.”
Another example came last week when the Harvard Law Review, facing two federal civil rights probes, asked applicants to disclose their race three days after the investigation was announced. Like UCLA, the journal put the request in writing: Applicants should describe their “racial or ethnic identity,” it wrote in a memo to prospective editors, so that the law review could pick candidates from “diverse … backgrounds.”
The HHS probe of UCLA was based on whistleblower testimony from five admissions officials who alleged that the medical school holds black and Latino applicants to a lower standard than their white and Asian counterparts. The result, they and three other professors said, was a glut of unqualified students who were flunking exams in droves, with as much as a fourth of one class failing three or more standardized tests.
Leaked data from the school backed up those allegations, which were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. Whistleblowers said that the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, would lash out at officials who questioned the qualifications of minority applicants, and that she had stacked the committee with members inclined to give low grades and test scores a pass.
The allegations came as the medical school was facing blowback for a mandatory first-year class, “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” that has featured anti-Semitic speakers, described weight loss as a “hopeless endeavor,” and drawn criticism from prominent health experts including former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier.
The medical school said last year that it would review its entire first-year curriculum in the wake of the controversy. The structural racism course is still mandatory, however, according to UCLA’s website, though one of its sessions was canceled without explanation two days before it was set to take place.
“I am writing to let you know that we will not be able to deliver the session on Environmental Effects on health that was scheduled for 1-3 PM on Wednesday,” the school’s associate dean for curricular affairs, Jason Napolitano, told students in an email on April 21. “I apologize for the late notice and appreciate your patience while we create upcoming sessions.”
UCLA also states on its website that it uses “a holistic review” process—based on “broad based selection criteria”—to “achieve … diversity” at the medical school.
The admissions committee “believes that the core values of diversity and inclusion are inseparable from our institutional goals,” the website reads. Admissions officials take “a balanced view of an applicant’s experiences, attributes, and metrics.”
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