Students Against Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Against UC System for Race-Based Admissions

The coalition suing the University of California System for illegally making race-based admissions decisions throughout its schools scored a big victory in December when a federal judge ruled the case can proceed.

United States District Court for the Central District of California Judge John Holcomb ruled that Students Against Racial Discrimination–an organization composed of students, academics and parents–made plausible claims that UC discriminates against Asians and whites in favor of lesser-qualified  blacks and other minorities.

“SARD supports its allegations that UC schools engage in racial discrimination in admissions processes with facts in the form of data and anecdotes. The issue, therefore, is whether those data and anecdotes are sufficient to make SARD’s claims of racial discrimination plausible,” wrote Holcomb. “The Court concludes that, at the pleading stage, they are.”

UCLA Law School Professor Richard Sander, one of the founders of Students Against Racial Discrimination, told the California Globe that “Judge Holcomb’s ruling was generally in line with our expectations.  Our complaint is detailed and well-grounded, and Judge Holcomb is an able and conscientious judge.”

“California voters have twice made clear, in passing Proposition 209 in 1996, and in overwhelmingly rejecting an attempt to repeal Prop 209 in 2020, that they do not want state programs and state universities to use racial preferences.  The University has increasingly disregarded this principle of racial neutrality.  Our lawsuit represents the most significant attempt to hold the university accountable.”

Holbrook’s ruling was not a total victory.

The judge threw out discrimination claims against the University of California medical schools. He reasoned that the individual plaintiffs who said they would face discrimination if they applied had no standing to sue because they had not taken the MCAT admissions test yet.

The lawsuit was filed this February. It says that after Proposition 209 was enacted, University of California schools initially stopped giving racial preferences. But after negative publicity due to the number of black students admitted dropping dramatically they again made efforts to favor blacks.

The lawsuit charges that discrimination by the University of California violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibition against discrimination by federally-funded schools,  as well as the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection.

It says that UC gives “discriminatory preferences to non-Asian racial minorities,” allowing “applicants with inferior academic credentials to obtain admission at the expense of rejected candidates with better academic credentials.”

“This discriminates against large numbers of Asian-American and white applicants, who are denied admission to UC schools based on their race.”

The lawsuit devoted considerable attention to UCLA.

It says that in 2006 UCLA took heat because the number of black students admitted fell below 100. So UCLA implemented a more subjective way of evaluating candidates known as a “holistic” review that gave admissions officers more leeway to favor blacks.

“UCLA’s then chancellor, Norm Abrams, met with the admissions committee and urged them to overhaul the admissions, and in particular to move to a more subjective ‘holistic’ policy, to address concerns about low black admissions numbers. One of the members of that admissions committee, political scientist Timothy Groseclose, has written an entire book documenting how this new policy became a subterfuge for reactivating racial preferences in admissions.”

Sociologist Robert Mare was then commissioned by UCLA to determine if the holistic review was, in fact, generating race-based admissions.

His two reports “showed unambiguously that UCLA had awarded many more undergraduate admissions to blacks and Hispanics, and many fewer admissions to Asian-Americans, than could be explained by considering all of the non-racial factors used in admissions. Mare even provided numerical estimates of exactly how many student offers(by race) resulted from the consideration of race. Over five years, over two thousand offers were thus affected, by Mare’s estimate.”

The UCLA antics soon became system-wide.

“In 2011, the Regents mandated that all UC campuses utilize either “holistic” or “comprehensive” review in undergraduate admissions—in other words, that they move away from objective criteria towards more subjective assessments of the overall appeal of individual candidates. Trends in racial admis-sions patterns consistently show that the adoption of the holistic process favored black and Hispanic admissions and disfavored Asian-Americans and, to a lesser extent, whites.”

The complaint gives a litany of examples with statistics from different campuses to illustrate this point.

“For example, in 2010, UC Berkeley’s admission rate for black, in-state freshman applicants was 13%, compared to an overall admissions rate of 21%. This disparity reflected the lower average academic preparation of black applicants. By 2023, the black admissions rate at Berkeley was 10%, compared to an overall admission rate of 12%. Over this period, in other words, Berkeley moved towards a practice of aiming for a similar admissions rate for all ethnic groups, regardless of qualifications.”

University of California law schools were even more brazen than the undergraduate campuses with the racial spoils system, the lawsuit says.

“University of California law schools have been even more overt in their violation of state and federal laws prohibiting racial preferences. In 2014, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper by Danny Yagan, an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Yagan found that racial preferences at UC Berkeley’s Law School declined after Proposition 209 became law, but still remained quite large. The black admissions rate of 31%, Yagan found, would have fallen to 8% had the school applied the same criteria that it applied to whites. Holding credentials of individual applicants constant, Yagan found that black applicants received an admissions preference as large as 61 percentage points.”

Sander says now that the lawsuit can move forward more information about how the racial preferences are operated can be obtained by discovery.

“The methods of discrimination vary widely across the nine UC undergraduate programs and five UC law schools,” he emailed. “Each school has considerable autonomy, so the strategies used to achieve racial diversity are distinct and complex, and we hope to learn much about this through the discovery process in the lawsuit.”

University of California spokesman Omar Rodriguez did not reply to emails today.

But shortly after the case was filed,  he told the College Fix that UC considers “this to be a meritless suit that seeks to distract” the system from its “mission to provide California students with a world class education.”

Rodriguez also insisted that “the UC undergraduate admissions application collects students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only. This information is not shared with application reviewers and is not used for admission.”