The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind a lawsuit against the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) over allegedly using race to choose its students.
Led by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. Department of Justice filed to intervene this week.
“After a long history of moving incrementally away from racial preferences in education, this Nation and its Supreme Court cast off this vestige of our troubled history surrounding race and set out to mandate colorblind admissions in all public (and publicly funded) universities,” the Justice Department’s intervening lawsuit states. “Nevertheless, UCLA Med’s Associate Dean for Admissions, Jennifer Lucero, boldly states on her official profile that ‘she takes a special interest in diversity issues in medicine.’”
“There is but one legal avenue for a public or publicly funded medical school to pursue diversity in medicine: admit the most qualified candidates regardless of race, and expect that those most qualified candidates will come from every race, because they do,” it added.
Do No Harm (DNH), a medical advocacy group, filed the lawsuit in May, as The Federalist reported, along with Students for Fair Admissions — the same group behind the U.S. Supreme Court Case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), where the high court overturned affirmative action and ruled race-based admissions schemes unconstitutional.
The lawsuit has massive implications for the medical profession, as schools are attempting to find every way to undermine the most qualified applicants to fulfill some kind of ideological fealty to race-consciousness. As the Justice Department pointed out, racialized admissions in medicine will invariably have the adverse effect of forcing patients to justifiably wonder if their non-white doctor “is really qualified to practice medicine and can give them the same quality care as a White or Asian doctor who did not receive preferential admission to medical school.”
The department said that ever-present question in a patient’s mind is a “shadow” that “follows [non-white] doctors throughout their careers,” even when a minority doctor may actually be fully qualified.
At UCLA, medical student applicants are asked if they “identify as being part of a group that has been marginalized,” according to the Justice Department, and are then asked to describe “how this inequity has impacted you or your community.”
Seemingly in direct contravention to the thrust of SFFA, “On its face and by design, this question asks Black applicants to reveal their race so that UCLA Med can know and consider it,” the filing states.
However, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in SFFA, effectively gave schools that loophole by writing, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Harvard immediately took that statement to mean that, while they may not be able to directly ask for an applicant’s race, they would indirectly encourage applicants to make race the subject of admissions essays. UCLA was also advertising its attempts to find loopholes to SFFA.
The case against the UCLA medical school may give the opportunity for the Supreme Court to double down on SFFA, and indicate it meant what it said in that case, which appears to be what DNH is seeking.
“We look forward to the Justice Department’s additional efforts here to get to the bottom of what appears to be an effort by UCLA to continue a race-based medical school admissions process in contravention of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions,” DNH executive director Kristina Rasmussen said in a press release.
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