The Department of Justice just confirmed what every honest person already suspected — UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine was racially discriminating against white and Asian applicants in admissions, even after the Supreme Court explicitly told universities to knock it off. A year-long investigation by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division found that UCLA leadership "intentionally selected applicants based on their race," favoring less-qualified candidates over more-qualified ones based on skin color. In a medical school. Where the graduates cut people open for a living.
But sure, tell me more about how "diversity is our strength."
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division didn't leave any room for interpretation. "UCLA's admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence," she said. Merit. And. Excellence. Those are the things you'd think a medical school would prioritize, seeing as how the whole point is to produce doctors who can keep you alive. But apparently UCLA had other priorities.
The investigation found that admitted Black and Hispanic applicants had consistently lower academic qualifications than their white and Asian counterparts. We're talking about GPA and MCAT scores — the objective metrics that are supposed to determine whether someone is ready to practice medicine. UCLA was systematically passing over highly qualified white and Asian students in favor of applicants with weaker credentials, all in the name of racial engineering.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California was even more direct. "The pattern of illegal and odious conduct by UCLA's medical school is abhorrent to our Constitution," he said. He followed up with what should be obvious but apparently needs repeating for the people in the back: "Federal law and the Supreme Court precedent are clear: Race discrimination has no place in our nation's institutions of higher learning."
Odious. Abhorrent. Those aren't words prosecutors use lightly.
Here's what makes this especially infuriating. The Supreme Court banned race-based admissions in 2023 with its landmark ruling in the Students for Fair Admissions case. California — UCLA's own state — banned affirmative action for public institutions all the way back in 1996. That's thirty years. UCLA has been operating under a state-level ban for three decades, got slapped with a federal ban on top of it three years ago, and still kept doing it anyway.
They just didn't care.
The anti-affirmative action group Do No Harm had already filed a lawsuit against the medical school back in May 2025. By January 2026, the DOJ moved to join that lawsuit. The investigation that followed confirmed everything the plaintiffs alleged — UCLA was running a racial spoils system disguised as "holistic review."
And speaking of disguises, here's UCLA's official response, delivered with the kind of straight-faced audacity that only a university bureaucrat could muster. A spokesperson for the School of Medicine claimed their admissions process is "based on merit and grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant." That's a fascinating way to describe a system the DOJ just said was focused on "racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence." One of these statements is true. It's not UCLA's.
The Blaze reported that the finding now sets the stage for either a voluntary resolution — meaning UCLA cleans up its act on its own — or potential legal action that could include the loss of federal funding. For a school that receives substantial federal financial assistance, that's not a slap on the wrist. That's an existential threat.
Good.
Let's be clear about what was happening here. Highly qualified white and Asian students — kids who earned their grades, aced their MCATs, and dreamed of becoming doctors — were rejected so UCLA could hit its preferred racial quotas. The DOJ noted that the school operated on the belief that patients receive better care when treated by doctors of their own race. That's not progressive. That's segregationist thinking with a lab coat on.
We were told after the Supreme Court ruling that universities would comply. We were told the era of racial preferences was over. UCLA heard all of that and said, "Watch us." Well, the DOJ watched. And now the hammer is falling. The only question left is whether UCLA will fold or fight — and whether any other medical school in America is sweating right now, wondering if they're next.
