UCLA Medical School Sued for Racial Discrimination in Admissions

UCLA’s medical school is being sued for racial discrimination in admissions. The class action lawsuit was filed Thursday.

A federal class-action lawsuit accuses UCLA’s medical school and various university officials of using race as a factor in admissions, despite a state law and Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Central District federal court, was brought by the activist group Do No Harm, founded in 2022 to fight affirmative action in medicine; Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit that won its suit at the Supreme Court against Harvard’s affirmative action program; and Kelly Mahoney, a college graduate who was rejected from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

According to the lawsuit, the legal action was being taken to stop the medical school and UCLA officials from allegedly “engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in the admissions process.”

This story really began last year when the Washington Free Beacon reported that dean of admissions at the medical school, Jennifer Lucero, was putting race above merit in admissions decisions. She allegedly shouted at her own team when one of them questioned whether a black candidate with subpar test scores was qualified.

…when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting…Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

State law made affirmative action in admissions illegal in California since 1996, long before it was overturned nationwide by the Supreme Court. So this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. And yet it allegedly was under Lucero’s leadership which began in 2020. The results of setting aside merit standards were not good for the school.

Within three years of Lucero’s hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics…

One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients…

Led by Lucero, who also serves as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion of UCLA’s anesthesiology department, the admissions committee routinely gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics, four people who served on it said, while whites and Asians need near perfect scores to even be considered.

The bar for underrepresented minorities is “as low as you could possibly imagine,” one committee member told the Free Beacon. “It completely disregards grades and achievements.”

What UCLA’s medical school was doing should have been flatly illegal but the story went on to say that Lucero rarely referred directly to race and instead used proxies including zip codes to achieve the same results. 

That story was published last May. In March of this year, HHS announced it was launching an investigation.

HHS’s Office of Civil Rights will investigate whether the school’s admissions office, led by anesthesiologist Jennifer Lucero, holds black and Hispanic applicants to a lower academic standard than white and Asian applicants, according to a source familiar with the investigation. California law has banned racial preferences in university admissions for nearly three decades, and the Supreme Court followed suit in 2023…

“HHS will not tolerate informal admissions practices and institutional policies that promote racial discrimination at HHS-funded institutions,” the agency told the Free Beacon. “This investigation reflects the Administration’s commitment to honor the hard work, excellence, and individual achievement of all students and not just those of particular racial backgrounds.”

Earlier this week, just two days before the lawsuit was filed, the WFB published a follow-up suggesting racial discrimination was still taking place.

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…

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.”

This really is pretty clear cut. State and federal law both say this is illegal and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about what the school is doing. Hopefully the lawsuit will result in some changes including the firing of Lucero and a new commitment from the school to merit over race in admissions.