A lawsuit filed Monday against the University of California campus system accused the schools of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.
The complaint brought by Students Against Racial Discrimination said the UC system broke civil rights laws by giving an advantage to black and Hispanic applicants on the basis of their race. In a move that violated “colorblind” and race-neutral laws, major California schools rejected white and Asian applicants who held better academic credentials than some of their black and Hispanic peers because of their skin color, the group of plaintiffs alleged.
“More lawsuits are coming,” said Jonathan Mitchell, an attorney for the Students Against Racial Discrimination. “Universities continue to defy the law by using race and sex preferences in student admissions and faculty hiring. We will keep suing them until they adopt colorblind admissions and rid themselves of every last vestige of these odious and discriminatory practices.”
According to court filings, the lawsuit seeks “to restore meritocracy in academia.” Plaintiffs argue that the UC system, which boasts prominent schools such as the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley, skirted both national and state bans on race-based admissions that violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
In 2023, the Supreme Court issued a ruling against affirmative action in the education system, stating that students must be treated as individuals, not on the basis of race.
Discriminating against students on the basis of race during school admissions has been illegal in the Golden State since 1996. At the time, voters approved Proposition 209, which was passed in response to the UC system’s affirmative action policies. The 1996 law prohibited UC from “discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Before the law was passed nearly three decades ago, a 1995 study by the Pacific Research Institute found that due to UC’s affirmative action programs, Japanese Americans were 13 times less likely to be accepted to UC Davis medical school than those benefiting from race preferences. Meanwhile, Korean Americans were 14 times less likely to be accepted than other applicants benefiting from affirmative action.
In their lawsuit Monday, plaintiffs said that after black and Hispanic enrollment fell at UC following the 1996 law, the school skirted the ban on racial preferences to increase enrollment for the two groups.
In 2010, the University of California, Berkeley admitted 13% of black, in-state applicants compared with an overall 21% admission rate, the new lawsuit said. By 2023, the school had closed the “gap” to bring the overall admission rate to 12% while the acceptance rate for black applicants stood at a relatively steady 10%, the complaint read. In another example cited by plaintiffs, a 2014 UCLA sociologist’s review of admissions records found that over five years, black and Hispanic applicants benefited from UC’s system of racial preferences at the expense of Asian and white students in more than 2,000 cases.
UC has denied accusations that it unfairly favored some students over others on the basis of race.
“Since the consideration of race in admissions was banned in California in 1996, the University of California has adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law,” a spokesman for UC told the Washington Post on Monday. “UC undergraduate admissions applications collect students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only and they are not used for admission.”
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The latest lawsuit comes after the University of California, Berkeley was hit with a federal civil rights complaint by the Equal Protection Project in September 2024 over a masters program geared toward Hispanic students.
“The Haas Thrive Fellows program openly discriminates on the basis of race and national origin. Haas clearly tells students the program is intended for ‘Latinx/Hispanic’ students, setting up a barrier that would deter other students from applying. Regardless of the purpose of the discrimination, it is wrong and unlawful,” Cornell Law professor William A. Jacobson, who founded the EPP, told Fox News Digital.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
