Federal lawsuit alleges UCLA medical school uses a race-based admissions process

A federal class-action lawsuit accuses UCLA’s medical school and various university officials of using race as a factor in admissions, despite a state law and Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Central District federal court, was brought by the activist group Do No Harm, founded in 2022 to fight affirmative action in medicine; Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit that won its suit at the Supreme Court against Harvard’s affirmative action program; and Kelly Mahoney, a college graduate who was rejected from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

According to the lawsuit, the legal action was being taken to stop the medical school and UCLA officials from allegedly “engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in the admissions process.”

UCLA’s medical school did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Citing unnamed “whistleblowers,” the lawsuit alleges that Jennifer Lucero, the associate dean for admissions, “requires applicants to submit responses that are intended to allow the Committee to glean the applicant’s race, which the medical school later confirms via interviews.”

It also alleges that Lucero and admissions committee members “routinely and openly” discussed race and used it as a factor to make admission decisions.

Lucero did not immediately respond to an emailed request to comment.

“Do No Harm is fighting for all the students who have been racially discriminated against by UCLA under the guise of political progress,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, said in a news release. “All medical schools must abide by the law of the land and prioritize merit, not immutable characteristics, in admissions.”

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The lawsuit comes as UCLA and other UC campuses are facing scrutiny by the Trump administration for potential “illegal DEI” in admissions practices.

The Department of Justice in late March said it would investigate UCLA, UC Irvine, Stanford and UC Berkeley, suggesting the schools flouted state law and U.S. Supreme Court precedent banning the use of race as a factor when evaluating college applicants.

A UC spokesperson said in a statement about the March investigation that UC stopped using race in admissions when Proposition 209 — which bans consideration of race in public education, hiring and contracting — went into effect in 1997. Since then, “UC has implemented admissions practices to comply with the law.”

Separately at the time, the Department of Health and Human Services said it was investigating an unnamed “major medical school in California to determine whether it discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national origin in its admissions. An HHS official previously told The Times that the investigation centered on the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

In response to that March announcement, UCLA said “we will be fully cooperating with their investigation.”

The lawsuit Thursday alleges that Lucero and the admissions committee routinely admit Black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT, or Medical College Admission Test scores, “while requiring whites and Asians to have near-perfect scores to even be seriously considered.”

According to the lawsuit, Do No Harm has at least one member who applied to Geffen, was rejected and “is able and ready to reapply if a court orders Defendants to stop discriminating and to undo the effects of its past discrimination.” Students for Fair Admissions has at least one member who will apply to the medical school.

“In this race-based system,” the lawsuit alleges, “all applicants are deprived of their right to equal treatment and the opportunity to pursue their lifelong dream of becoming a doctor because of utterly arbitrary criteria.”