UCLA medical school was sued for race discrimination on Thursday after whistleblowers alleged that the school holds black and Latino applicants to a lower standard than their white and Asian counterparts, the latest challenge for a beleaguered university already in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
The complaint is based on multiple Washington Free Beacon reports about the extent of racial preferences at the medical school. It was filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the group whose lawsuit against Harvard University resulted in the Supreme Court decision, in 2023, that outlawed affirmative action in higher education.
In a statement to the Free Beacon, SFFA president Edward Blum framed the lawsuit as a sequel to the Harvard case.
“This lawsuit sends an important message to every institution of higher education: Any school and administrator that uses race and racial proxies in admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard will be sued,” Blum said. “University administrators in their official and personal capacities will face vigorous legal challenges if they use race and racial proxies in the admissions process.”
The complaint, which was filed jointly with Do No Harm, a group that opposes identity politics in medicine, comes as the Department of Health and Human Services investigates UCLA medical school’s admissions practices as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on race-based programs. That probe was launched almost a year after whistleblowers described a pervasive pattern of race discrimination at the top medical school, where the share of Asian matriculants fell by almost a third in just three years.
The drop coincided with a sharp rise in the number of students failing standardized tests. Concerned that the school’s race-based admissions were pushing UCLA toward an academic crisis, several professors took the extraordinary step of leaking confidential admissions deliberations to the press. Their testimony, which the Free Beacon published last May, provided a granular account of how affirmative action operated at a top medical school, with officials disregarding low grades and test scores in order to push through minority candidates.
Combined with a new curriculum that discussed “fatphobia” and “abolitionist” health, the result was a palpable decline in the competence of the average medical student.
“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon at the time. “People get in and they struggle.”
It later emerged that UCLA had refused to provide retaliation protections to four whistleblowers who were prepared to testify against the medical school’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, as part of an internal probe. Left without legal cover, the whistleblowers declined to speak to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office, which eventually tabled the investigation.
The medical school “thus effectively shut down UCLA’s internal probe,” SFFA’s lawsuit states. UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint, which asks a federal court to award punitive damages, draws extensively on anecdotes that whistleblowers shared with the Free Beacon. In one case, Lucero attacked a member of the admissions committee who raised concerns about a black applicant’s test scores, asking whether the committee member knew that “African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everyone else.” In another case, she forced the committee to sit through a two-hour lecture on Native American history after it had rejected a Native American applicant.
Lucero, who is being sued in her personal capacity, has also written that “we want diversity, but we also want qualified people” is a racist sentiment.
The drama over medical school admissions came as UCLA was embroiled in a separate scandal related to its handling of anti-Semitism. Jewish students reported being unable to get to class after they were blocked by pro-Palestinian protesters, an incident that resulted in a lawsuit against the university that has since been joined by the Justice Department.
Another imbroglio occurred when the medical school forced students to sit through a lecture by an anti-Semitic guest speaker, Lisa Gray Garcia, who has described the October 7 terrorist attacks as “justice” and led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine.”
UCLA is now 1 of 60 universities being investigated by the Department of Education for anti-Semitic harassment. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that the probe, which is separate from the one HHS launched into the medical school, could result in the revocation of federal funds.
The legal onslaught does not appear to have chastened UCLA. Just last month the medical school said that its admissions office—already under investigation for race discrimination—would take steps to “ensure representation” of “BIPOC” students on the admissions committee, according to a memo sent to all second- and third-year medical students.
Thursday’s lawsuit cites that memo as an example of the school’s determination to discriminate based on race. It also provides new data on how UCLA’s practices have affected the demographics of the medical school, citing statistical evidence obtained through public records requests.
In 2023, for example, black matriculants made up almost double their share of the applicant pool, with African Americans comprising 14.29 percent of admitted students but only 7.86 percent of applicants. Whites and Asians, on the other hand, were significantly underrepresented relative to their share of applicants.
“In 2023, Asian applicants constituted 40.79% of the total applicant pool,” the complaint states. “Yet only 29.71% of the matriculants were Asian.”
Those statistical disparities, the lawsuit adds, “confirm that Lucero and the Admissions Committee are using race.”
Read the full article here
