Lawsuit Challenges UC Admissions Practices Over Racial Preferences

A lawsuit filed Monday against the University of California launched a new salvo in the assault on affirmative action, charging one of the country's largest public university systems of illegal racial discrimination in admissions.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in California, alleges that the universities unfairly give admissions preference to Black and Hispanic applicants in violation of antidiscrimination laws.

The plaintiffs, a group called Students Against Racial Discrimination representing White and Asian would-be applicants, seeks to force a change in the admissions practices and ensure compliance with federal antidiscrimination law and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, according to the lawsuit. If successful, it would stop the schools from considering or asking about race during the admissions process.

The defendants -- regents of the UC system and chancellors of the nine universities -- could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.

Jonathan Mitchell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, has argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court, including a successful effort last year to allow Donald Trump, then a candidate, to remain on the ballot in Colorado.

Last summer, he and other lawyers sent a letter to more than 100 universities warning that a plaintiff group that had just filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University alleging that its law school hired less-qualified women and people of color over White men for faculty positions intended to seek other cases. That letter advised anyone presently -- or formerly -- affiliated with the university to keep records and communications related to faculty hiring and law-review decisions. They were, Mitchell said at the time, just getting started.

The nine UC schools -- including two of the most selective public universities in the country, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley -- have been barred from using racial preferences in admission since a state referendum was approved in 1996.

According to the complaint, the universities' discriminatory preferences allow applicants with inferior academic credentials to obtain admission at the expense of rejected candidates with better credentials. The practice discriminates against "large numbers" of Asian American and White applicants denied admission because of their race, the complaint contends, and harms Hispanic and Black students who are "often placed at a significant academic disadvantage, and thus experience worse outcomes, because of the university's use of racial preferences. Students of all races are harmed by the University of California's discriminatory behavior."

The lawsuit contends that after the implementation of race-blind admissions, there was a sharp drop in Black freshman enrollment at the two most selective universities, Berkeley and UCLA, and an increase at the less-selective schools in the system. It also claims that Black students at UC schools after the referendum "were generally closer to their peers in levels of academic preparation, grades, persistence in STEM fields, and graduation rates -- especially rates of graduation in four years."

Those patterns were also true for Hispanic students, the lawsuit claims, although to a lesser extent.

The UC system spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the years after the referendum, plaintiffs allege, to improve the pipeline from high school to college for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, with a resulting increase in Black and Hispanic applicants and enrollments. In 2006, admissions practices were altered at UCLA in a way that the lawsuit contends became a subterfuge for reinstating racial preferences.

The case comes days after Trump issued sweeping executive orders aimed at ending affirmative action, ordering the federal government's diversity, equity and inclusion offices to close and putting those employees on leave, among other actions. One directive required the Justice and Education departments to issue guidance within 120 days on compliance with a 2023 Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in college admissions.

That landmark decision upended decades of precedent by holding that the consideration of race in college admissions was unconstitutional. Students for Fair Admissions had challenged Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but the case changed the way schools across the country consider race when evaluating applicants, and touched off numerous legal challenges against diversity efforts at companies and other organizations.

Now activists are taking on the highly visible and sought-after UC system, seeking to compel the schools "to select applicants for admission in a color-blind and race-neutral manner."