The matter of having race as a
component part of the admissions process of a school in California university
in the U.S. came to the fore once again on May 6, 2026 when the U.S. Department
of Justice publicly announced its finding that the UCLA School of Medicine “illegally
used race as a selection criteria (sic) for candidates and admitted Black and
Latino students who had lower academic qualifications than their (W)hite and
Asian counterparts.”[1]
The racial discrimination was against White students and students from Asia who
had higher academic qualification. Accordingly, assistant Attorney General
Harmeet Dhillon wrote, “Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American,
and this Department will not allow it to continue.”[2]
In fact, it could be argued that the sheer existence of race in the criteria
for the admission of medical students is racist, taking that term to mean “pertaining
to race” without the pejorative connotations that racism has. To be sure, the
unique historical disadvantage of Black Americans, including when the institution
of slavery existed in the antebellum period of the South, arguably justified
making up for the legacy of continuing prejudice by preferential treatment in
college admissions. It is important to acknowledge that affirmative action
programs contained racial prejudice against another race, and in the twenty-first
century the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the racial harm over institutional
efforts to redress racial prejudice, perhaps because the latter had diminished
considerably especially since the 1960s. UCLA may not have caught up with this
recognition because ideology tends to lag changes in the world due to emotional
investment and the long-standing nature of values. So the justice department’s accusation
that the medical school (and thus the university) intentionally violating the
relevant court rulings can be viewed as a sort of recalibration as well as an
assertion that laws should not be violated.
The distorting effect of
ideology can be seen in the school’s erroneous claim that “Hispanic” is a race
rather than a culture to which more than one race, as well as multiracial people
identify. Neither does “Asian” refer to a race; rather, the term is
geographical in nature. So, a bunch of different things are being artificially treated
as though they all fall under the same category (i.e., race). Distending that
category can itself be thought of as racist in the literal meaning or that word
rather than in a pejorative sense (i.e., racial prejudice). If cultures are to
be given preferential treatment, how about my ethnicity as a Midwesterner? How well
as Midwesterners are represented at Harvard and Yale? In terms of geography,
how well are Europeans represented at public universities in the U.S. states?
The ideological substratum whose
hand has been overplayed at UCLA is that of group-identity politics. The group Do
No Harm, which together with Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit in
2025 alleging that the medical school “racially discriminated against
applicants by considering race in its admissions processes,” was focused on “keeping
identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice.”[3]
The school’s identity-based rationale demonstrates precisely the value in extirpating
group-identity ideology from medical education. It was believed that “patients
receive better care when treated by doctors of their race.”[4]
However, racial prejudices of patients could be responsible for the opinion
polls of patients, and the very existence of affirmative-action programs could
mean that even Black patients might correctly believe that being treated by a
Black physician is riskier because that doctor may have been accepted to medical
school with inferior academic marks. It is reasonable under a regime of
affirmative action, therefore, that Black patients really believe that
they would get better medical treatment from a Caucasian physician.
Therefore, UCLA’s medical
school’s incorporation of race among other criteria in admissions can be said
to be faulty. Furthermore, I contend that it is precisely the warping effect of
ideology that keeps such superficial beliefs as that of better treatment by
physicians of one’s own race from being deconstructed. Whereas prior academic
performance is rationally justified as being related to doing academically well
in medical school, the justification for incorporating race is spurious. By
implication, the school’s decision to violate not only the 1996 California law that
bans affirmative action programs in California public institutions, but also
the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bans consideration of race in college
decisions, is all the more reprehensible and thus blameworthy. Hence Bill
Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of
California, said in a press release: “Federal law and the Supreme Court
precedent are clear: Race discrimination has no place in our nation’s
institutions of higher learning. The pattern of illegal and odious conduct by
UCLA’s medical school is abhorrent to our Constitution and our nation’s
founding principles.”[5]
In short, feeling that one’s own ideology is important does not justify an
administrator in ignoring the rule of law as if it were less important. In
fact, whereas the rule of law staves off mob rule, ideology is partial,
distortive, and overreaching.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
