The Trump administration accused UCLA’s medical school of discriminating against white and Asian students by defying a Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in school admissions.
In a Wednesday motion to join a lawsuit against the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the Justice Department said that the institution was violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The original suit was filed by a woman who says she was denied admission into the school because she was white, alongside the groups Do No Harm and Students for Fair Admissions.
“Even after the Supreme Court banned race-balancing, the Geffen School kept discriminating by using illegal DEI preferences in admissions,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “As the Supreme Court stated more than 80 years ago, a free people, founded on the doctrine of equality, regard distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry as inherently odious.”
The complaint filed by the Justice Department argued that the school gathers racial data from its applicants and creates workarounds to factor race into the admissions process.
This includes a question the DOJ said was asked by UCLA as part of the 2024 admissions process on whether an applicant was a member of a “marginalized” group, and then asked the applicant to explain “how this inequity has impacted you or your community and how educational disparity, health disparity and/or marginalization has impacted you and your community.”
“On its face and by design, this question asks Black applicants to reveal their race so that UCLA Med can know and consider it,” the complaint said.
Data obtained by the Justice Department shows that white and Asian students are held to higher academic standards than black and Hispanic students. For the 2024 incoming class of students at the medical school, the median MCAT scores were widely different for black students (508), Hispanic students (506), white students (513), and Asian students (515). The MCAT is the test aspiring doctors and medical professionals take before going to medical school.
The Justice Department’s complaint identified three “disastrous consequences” of race-based admissions. These were the lowering of academic standards, the suspicion cast on minority doctors because of the lower standards, and the denial of equal treatment to people of all races.
“There is but one legal avenue for a public or publicly funded medical school to pursue diversity in medicine: admit the most qualified candidates regardless of race, and expect that those most qualified candidates will come from every race, because they do,” the complaint said.
The Justice Department asked a judge to declare the school’s admissions practices unconstitutional and to bar it from considering race in any fashion when considering prospective students.
A school spokesman told The Daily Wire that the school doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
“UCLA’s medical school is committed to fair processes in all of our programs and activities, including admissions, consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws,” the spokesman said.
Do No Harm welcomed the Justice Department’s involvement in the case.
“The United States was right in its move to join this case, which is of great public importance,” said Do No Harm Executive Director Kristina Rasmussen. “We look forward to the Justice Department’s additional efforts here to get to the bottom of what appears to be an effort by UCLA to continue a race-based medical school admissions process in contravention of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions.”
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, UCLA’s school of medicine makes first-year students learn about “colonialism” and “liberation” as part of their coursework. Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro obtained emails in 2024 documenting how med students have to take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” which teaches them about “Indigenous resistance” and “white colonialism.”
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