A class action lawsuit from Do No Harm and Students for Fair Admissions alleges that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants by holding some applicants to a much lower admissions standard.
“(Jennifer) Lucero and the Admissions Committee routinely admit black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT scores — even significantly below-average scores — while requiring whites and Asians to have near-perfect scores to even be seriously considered,” wrote the plaintiffs in their class action complaint.
Jennifer Lucero was appointed associate dean of admissions of David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in 2020. She also serves as vice chair for inclusive excellence — formerly called diversity, equity and inclusion — for the Geffen Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine.
In 2020, UCLA was ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the sixth best medical school for research.
But UCLA fell to 18th by the time U.S. News and World Report stopped ordinal ranking of medical schools and eliminated reputational ranking of departments within medical schools after a large number of former top medical schools boycotted submitting data to USNWR over “equity” concerns.
The number of students failing exams has increased tenfold since 2020 for some subjects, according to reporting from the Free Beacon.
Under Proposition 209, passed by California voters in 1996, it is illegal for state entities to consider race in hiring, contracting and education. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-based affirmative action policies for college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The complaint details several notable incidents in which Lucero engaged in unusual behavior during admissions committee meetings.
“On one occasion when the Committee was deliberating on a black applicant with a significantly below-average GPA and MCAT score, Lucero stated: ‘Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everyone else? We need people like this in the medical school,’ ” said the complaint.
“Lucero regularly bullies and berates members of the Admissions Committee who voice concerns about admitting below-average black applicants by labeling them as ‘privileged’ and implying that they are racist,” continued the complaint. “Another time when the Committee rejected a Native American applicant, Lucero berated the Committee and made the members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native American history taught by Lucero’s sister.”
UCLA has refused to submit to public records requests for complete admissions data, which will likely be forced to be provided in discovery for the case. Based on data it does have, Do No Harm noted major differences in admissions rates between white, Asian and black Geffen applicants between 2020 and 2023.
In 2020, white, Asian, and black applicants were 36.71%, 37.83%, and 7.06% of the applicant pool, and 30.29%, 35.43%, and 8% of students, respectively.
By 2023, three years into Lucero’s tenure, white, Asian and black applicants were 32.83%, 40.79%, and 7.86% of the applicant pool, and 24%, 29.71% and 14.29% of students, respectively.
Do No Harm Chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb told The Center Square that UCLA’s reluctance to share its admissions data suggests it is likely guilty of the illegal, discriminatory admissions practices challenged in the complaint.
“UCLA seems to think they can get away with stonewalling and secrecy while hiding their discriminatory admissions practices,” said Goldfarb. “If they aren’t skirting federal law by weighing race in medical school admissions, they should have no problem turning over this data.”
Do No Harm, a political and medical advocacy group, also maintains an open case against California’s required implicit bias training for physicians that it says “promotes the belief that whites are naturally racist.”
