The Department of Justice on Wednesday joined a discrimination lawsuit against the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, unveiling new data that shows the extent of the school’s racial preferences. The filing is the latest setback for the elite medical school, which has endured an onslaught of scandals—largely due to the Washington Free Beacon’s reporting—since 2024.
“As the Supreme Court has made clear, admission into our nation’s educational institutions cannot be based on discriminatory racial policies,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a press release. “Today’s intervention is the Department of Justice’s latest effort to hold our universities accountable for unlawful policy — especially in the state of California.”
Filed by Students for Fair Admissions and Do No Harm, the underlying complaint was based on a Free Beacon report about UCLA medical school’s continued use of racial preferences. The Justice Department’s brief includes previously unreported data on the scale of those preferences.
In 2024, for example, after the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action went into effect, Hispanic students in the incoming class had a median MCAT score of just 506—the 66th percentile of all test-takers—whereas Asians had a median score of 515, the 90th percentile.
Previous years saw similar numbers, with black and and Hispanic students scoring well below their white and Asian peers.
The figures complement emails and whistleblower accounts published by the Free Beacon that indicate a pervasive pattern of race discrimination at one of the top medical schools in California, where affirmative action has been illegal since 1996.
Led by admissions dean Jennifer Lucero, who also serves as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion of UCLA’s anesthesiology department, the school implemented selection policies that insiders say have proven disastrous, driving down exam scores and forcing more students to retake classes. One professor told the Free Beacon that students on their clinical rotations “don’t know anything.”
The admissions scandal came as UCLA was reeling from a separate Free Beacon report on the school’s mandatory “health equity” class, in which students were forced to say a prayer for “mama earth,” encouraged to chant “Free Palestine,” and told that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo.” Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, called the curriculum “pedagogical malpractice.”
Around the same time, the Free Beacon published audio of a talk in which two UCLA psychiatry residents glorified self-immolation as a “revolutionary” act. The talk, “Depathologizing Resistance,” had been approved by UCLA’s Health Ethics Center.
The Justice Department is not the only agency that has taken an interest in the admissions scandal. Last year the Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation of UCLA, telling the Free Beacon that “HHS will not tolerate informal admissions practices and institutional policies that promote racial discrimination at HHS-funded institutions,”
