Students Against Racial Discrimination (SARD) has pursued legal action against the University of California (UC) system, claiming that its nine campuses use racial-based discrimination in their admissions processes.
On Monday, SARD officially filed the complaint, writing that the system “discriminates on account of race when admitting students by giving discriminatory preferences to non-Asian racial minorities.”
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As part of its mission, SARD believes “that UC admissions should be race-blind and based on individual merit.”
Campus Reform has reached out to a spokesperson at the University of California Office of the President, who noted that UC has “not been served with the filing.”
“The UC undergraduate admissions application collects students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only,” communications official Stett Holbrook said. “This information is not shared with application reviewers and is not used for admission.”
SARD argues that UC has violated the 14th Amendment as well as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The group also says that the policies used by UC schools run contrary to Proposition 209, a state law voters passed in 1996 that bans affirmative action at public institutions. SARD points toward seemingly ambiguous approaches in admissions, especially UC schools’ use of more “holistic” policies, which they claim are used to close the gaps in admissions between black and Hispanic applicants and those of other races.
One example used in the lawsuit is from 2006, when “UCLA’s then chancellor, Norm Abrams, met with the admissions committee and urged them … to move to a more subjective ‘holistic’ policy, to address concerns about low black admissions numbers.”
SARD also writes that “the actual number of blacks and Hispanics graduating from UC with bachelor’s degrees was far higher for 2006 matriculants than for pre-209 matriculants, and there was no campus for which the number was materially lower.”
The complaint references Robert Mare, a sociologist who is considered “sympathetic” toward the use racial preferences, who tested whether UCLA’s post-2006 “holistic” policy was making decisions partly based on the applicant’s race.
“Mare completed two exhaustive studies—one completed in 2012, a second completed in 2014,” the complaint reads. “Both reports showed unambiguously that UCLA had awarded many more undergraduate admissions to blacks and Hispanics, and many fewer admissions to Asian-Americans”
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Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA and founder of SARD, expressed enthusiasm about the prospects of the complaint in a statement provided to Campus Reform.
“[W]e are very confident that the schools we accuse of racial discrimination are, in fact, engaged in discrimination,” he said. “But any lawsuit against a major institution involves many hurdles, and we will have to see how this one evolves.”
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
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