In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment that banned preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in state hiring, contracting, and admissions.
Click Here to Subscribe to the California Political Review
But a California student group alleges that the state’s University of California system has systematically violated that state law, and the pain has hit Asian American applicants hardest.
In its Feb. 3 federal lawsuit, Santa Ana-based Students Against Racial Discrimination (SARD) says the University of California has been “using racial preferences in student admissions at all nine of its campuses — a practice that violates the clear and unequivocal text of Title VI and 42 U.S.C. purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fighting race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”
SARD asks the court to declare that the state universities violated the law in order to boost “non-Asian racial minorities in student admissions” and to permanently block the UCs “from considering race in student admissions.” It also makes a dramatic request for federal intervention – “a court monitor to oversee all decisions relating to the defendants’ admission of students to ensure that these decisions are free from racial discrimination of any sort.”
Representatives of the University of California unequivocally denied the allegations.
The suit details a number of incidents and faculty studies that, SARD claims, prove a pattern of discrimination, specifically against Asian-American applicants.
SARD filed its lawsuit just days before another suit hit the UC system. In Stanley Zhong and Nan Zhong v University of California, the plaintiffs allege that UC admissions officers last year rejected Stanley Zhong despite his 4.2 high school grade-point average, near-perfect SATs, and the fact that he founded a software company while still a high school sophomore. The Zhongs are representing themselves in that case.
The SARD suit notes that, until about 2006, the UC system generally followed state and federal law. The result astonished many: after Proposition 209, the University of California actually saw a rise in black and Hispanic admissions. That boom was likely the result of programs based on economic disadvantage but not race.
Then the shift came. SARD’s lawsuit notes that the UCs established “holistic” admissions as a way of working around the state ban on affirmative action. Beginning at UCLA and then adopted by every other UC campus, the nine-campus system gave admissions directors the right to consider proxies for race – including essays that prompt applicants and the people referring them to describe the racial, ethnic and gender barriers they’ve faced on the road to college.
SARD’s suit says holistic workarounds have even injured those it intends to help. Allowing “applicants with inferior academic credentials to obtain admission” on the basis of race and ethnicity places those students “at a significant academic disadvantage” in classrooms, the lawsuit claims. They “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,” SARD concludes.
The suit also contends that the problem of race-based admissions is not limited to undergraduate applicants. Graduate schools have also gotten in on the act. In its suit, SARD calls out multiple UC law schools for alleged discrimination. Medical schools may be added soon.
One possible target is UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, whose diversity efforts appear to be negatively affecting first-year students’ scores on “bench tests,” tests designed to assure that students are gaining basic knowledge that will determine future success. Geffen’s bench test scores have fallen dramatically in recent years.
Speak Your Mind