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Californians should consider a lawsuit for reparations — on behalf of victims of DEI.
Last week, the federal Department of Justice, led by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon, joined a lawsuit against UCLA medical school accusing it of admitting students on the basis of race, not academic qualifications.
As students and parents should know, race-based admissions violate California law.
Getty ImagesBack in 1978, UC Davis medical school rejected highly qualified student Allan Bakke, a person of pallor, on the basis of race. Bakke sued and won his case, but California continued to admit students on the basis of race and ethnicity.
During the 1990s, the people pushed back.
The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), known as Proposition 209, appeared on the November 1996 ballot. It was the project of California State University, Hayward (now Cal State East Bay) professors Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, backed by University of California regent Ward Connerly.
CCRI ended racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. California voters passed Prop. 209 by a margin of 54% to 46%. The disaster that opponents predicted never occurred.
As Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell showed in Intellectuals and Race, minority enrollment increased at other University of California campuses after Prop. 209.
In addition, the number of African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher.
Contrary to popular belief, CCRI did not end “affirmative action.” State universities could still cast the widest possible net, and help students on an economic basis.
Even so, critics of Prop. 209 claimed that it harmed “diversity.”
In bureaucratic parlance, “diversity” means that all institutions must reflect the racial or ethnic proportions of the population. If they don’t, the reason must be deliberate discrimination, and the only remedy is racial and ethnic preferences, enforced by the government.
Long after the voters approved Prop. 209, the University of California built a vast “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracy, with UCLA paying a vice chancellor for “equity, diversity, and inclusion” a salary of $440,000.
This was blatant defiance of California law. In 2020, state officials put up Proposition 16 to repeal Prop. 209 and remove the main obstacle to DEI.
Despite support by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Californians rejected Prop. 16 by a margin of 57% to 43%, greater than the margin of victory in 1996.
Still, the voice of the people had no effect on the state education establishment.
For example, in 2024, the University of California, Santa Barbara sought to fill the position of “Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” with a salary of $250,000 to $430,000.
The lawsuit against UCLA, first filed by the medical advocacy group Do No Harm (DNH), claims that medical school dean Jennifer Lucero and the admissions committee routinely admit black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT scores. Whites and Asians, on the other hand, are allegedly required to have near-perfect scores just to be considered for admission.
It is as though the people had never passed Prop. 209 and never defeated the government’s effort to repeal it in 2020.
As Dhillon notes, there’s more to it.
“Even after the Supreme Court banned race-balancing, the Geffen School kept discriminating by using illegal DEI preferences in admissions,” said Dhillon in a statement. “As the Supreme Court stated more than 80 years ago, a free people, founded on the doctrine of equality, regard distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry as inherently odious. This Civil Rights Division will not tolerate such conduct and welcomes the Court’s role in ensuring justice.”
As the case proceeds, Californians should consider suing the UC system for reparations for a bloated DEI establishment that perpetuates injustice, defrauds taxpayers, and serves no educational purpose.
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.
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