We previously discussed a disturbing account of how medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were subjected to a bizarre class where one of the university’s “activists-in-residence” showered them with anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. Now, the Justice Department has found that the university engaged in systemic racial discrimination in the admission of medical students. Given the university’s history, it is hardly surprising, but it remains unclear how the university will respond to the findings.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced that the medical school violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by giving preferential treatment to black and Hispanic applicants.
The investigation followed the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which barred race-based admissions.
In the DOJ’s “Findings” letter, black and Hispanic admits in some years averaged MCAT scores in the 66th to 72nd percentile, while Asian and white students averaged scores in the mid-to-high 80th percentiles.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon indicated that the Justice Department found that UCLA medical school leadership discussed how to achieve “diversity goals” and other strategies after the Supreme Court ruling.
After the historic ruling in the Harvard and North Carolina cases barring the use of racial criteria in admissions, administrators and academics admitted what they had long denied: that race was having a major role in admissions.
In anticipation of the rulings, many schools, including the California system, eliminated standardized testing. Without objective scores, there is less ability to identify the use of non-scholastic criteria for admissions. By eliminating or devaluing standardized testing, admissions offices can use the more subjective essays to achieve the same race-based results.
I wrote about how administrators were already preparing to use essays as an indirect way to achieve the same identifications and preferences in admissions.
The essay “prompts” encourage students to effectively self-identify by discussing incidents where they faced discrimination.
The shift to the essays would allow the removal of high-scoring students while elevating those with lower scores. That prediction was quickly confirmed, as top candidates were rejected based on their essays, while schools used essays to flag their backgrounds.
Faculty and administrators at UCLA and other schools remain adamant in using race-based admissions. They simply justify discrimination as equity and diversity.
This is the same school that required medical students to sit through a raving lecture from “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”
In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”
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