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UCLA’s medical school is in a hot mess, and it’s about time. A federal class-action lawsuit just dropped, accusing the school and its officials of thumbing their noses at both California law and a Supreme Court ruling by using race as a factor in admissions. Racism much?
That’s right—despite affirmative action being illegal in the Golden State since 1996 and getting the boot nationwide in 2023, UCLA’s allegedly been playing fast and loose with racial preferences. And the evidence is overwhelming.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Central District federal court, comes courtesy of Do No Harm, a group founded in 2022 to squash affirmative action in medicine. Students for Fair Admissions, the folks who took down Harvard’s race-based admissions at the Supreme Court, and Kelly Mahoney, a college grad who got the cold shoulder from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, worked to stop the medical school and UCLA officials from “engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in the admissions process.”
This mess kicked into high gear last year when the Washington Free Beacon blew the lid off UCLA’s admissions practices. The report zeroed in on Jennifer Lucero, the dean of admissions, who is accused of prioritizing race over merit. Things got spicy during a 2021 admissions meeting when a Black applicant with grades and test scores “far below the UCLA average” came up for review. Some committee members dared to question if this candidate was cut out for a top-tier medical school. Lucero’s response? She lost her excrement.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero reportedly snapped at an admissions officer. The candidate’s subpar scores were irrelevant to the discussion.
Naturally, it gets worse.
Lucero, who moonlights as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) in UCLA’s anesthesiology department, allegedly led the charge to lower the bar for Black and Latino applicants while demanding near-perfect scores from Whites and Asians. One admissions committee member put it bluntly: The bar for underrepresented minorities is “as low as you could possibly imagine.” After all, who needs competency and grades when you have diversity, yadda yadda.
Here’s the kicker: Lucero’s too slick to openly admit it’s about race. Instead, she reportedly used proxies like zip codes to achieve the same discriminatory results. Sneaky, but not sneaky enough. The Free Beacon’s bombshell last May sparked an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in March 2025.
But wait, there’s more. Just days before the lawsuit hit, The Free Beacon dropped another bombshell: UCLA is still doing it and thus is breaking the law.
Legal experts are floored. “Putting in writing, while under federal investigation for discrimination, that your faculty will ‘review’ the proposed slate of students included in a program ‘to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LBGTQ+’ is astonishingly brazen,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “You have to wonder how it’s possible for no one either in the administration or with its outside counsel to even roughly read either the law or the room.”
Let’s cut to the chase: This is as clear-cut as it gets. California law and federal law both say race-based admissions are illegal. UCLA’s medical school, led by Lucero, is allegedly flouting both while producing doctors who can’t pass basic tests or identify arteries and might even pass out at the sign of blood, for all we know.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in California’s Central District federal court, comes courtesy of Do No Harm, a group founded in 2022 to squash affirmative action in medicine. Students for Fair Admissions, the folks who took down Harvard’s race-based admissions at the Supreme Court, and Kelly Mahoney, a college grad who got the cold shoulder from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, worked to stop the medical school and UCLA officials from “engaging in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in the admissions process.”
Good luck finding a clearer case of alleged wrongdoing and what one might consider to be racism where one group of folks with immutable characteristics is favored over another group, usually White people, particularly White men.
This mess kicked into high gear last year when the Washington Free Beacon blew the lid off UCLA’s admissions practices. The report zeroed in on Jennifer Lucero, the dean of admissions, who is accused of prioritizing race over merit. Things got spicy during a 2021 admissions meeting when a Black applicant with grades and test scores “far below the UCLA average” came up for review. Some committee members dared to question if this candidate was cut out for a top-tier medical school. Lucero’s response? She lost her excrement.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero reportedly snapped at an admissions officer. The candidate’s subpar scores were irrelevant to the discussion.
“We need people like this in the medical school,” she insisted. Translation: Forget qualifications, it’s all about the agenda.
California banned affirmative action in admissions nearly three decades ago, and the Supreme Court doubled down in 2023. This kind of race-based decision-making is supposed to be dead and buried, but under Lucero's watch, starting in 2020, it’s allegedly been business as usual.
The results have been catastrophic.
UCLA’s medical school plummeted from 6th to 18th in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research within three years of Lucero’s hiring. In some cohorts she admitted, over 50 percent of students flunked standardized tests in emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics. We’re talking future doctors who can’t hack the basics in medical intervention.
Naturally, it gets worse.
One professor recounted a student in the operating room who couldn’t identify a major artery when asked, then had the gall to berate the professor for calling her out. Another said students finishing clinical rotations were clueless about basic lab tests and, in some cases, couldn’t even present patients properly. This is what happens when you ditch merit for quotas.
Lucero, who moonlights as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) in UCLA’s anesthesiology department, allegedly led the charge to lower the bar for Black and Latino applicants while demanding near-perfect scores from Whites and Asians. One admissions committee member put it bluntly: The bar for underrepresented minorities is “as low as you could possibly imagine.” After all, who needs competency and grades when you have diversity, yadda yadda.
Here’s the kicker: Lucero’s too slick to openly admit it’s about race. Instead, she reportedly used proxies like zip codes to achieve the same discriminatory results. Sneaky, but not sneaky enough. The Free Beacon’s bombshell last May sparked an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in March 2025.
HHS’s Office of Civil Rights is now digging into whether Lucero’s admissions office holds Black and Hispanic applicants to a lower standard than their White and Asian peers. “HHS will not tolerate informal admissions practices and institutional policies that promote racial discrimination at HHS-funded institutions,” the agency told the outlet. “This investigation reflects the Administration’s commitment to honor the hard work, excellence, and individual achievement of all students and not just those of particular racial backgrounds.”
By lowering requirements for any group of people clearly implies that they are considered to be inferior to those one expects the highest standards. This is what might be called 'quiet racism.'
But wait, there’s more. Just days before the lawsuit hit, The Free Beacon dropped another bombshell: UCLA is still doing it and thus is breaking the law.
On April 8, the medical school circulated a memo outlining “guiding principles for student representation on the admissions committee,” which includes third- and fourth-year medical students alongside faculty. The guidelines mandate considering race when picking student admissions officers. “The Chairs of the [admissions committee] will review all submitted recommendations to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LGBTQ+,” the memo reads, according to a screenshot obtained by The Free Beacon.
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Legal experts are floored. “Putting in writing, while under federal investigation for discrimination, that your faculty will ‘review’ the proposed slate of students included in a program ‘to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LBGTQ+’ is astonishingly brazen,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “You have to wonder how it’s possible for no one either in the administration or with its outside counsel to even roughly read either the law or the room.”
Let’s cut to the chase: This is as clear-cut as it gets. California law and federal law both say race-based admissions are illegal. UCLA’s medical school, led by Lucero, is allegedly flouting both while producing doctors who can’t pass basic tests or identify arteries and might even pass out at the sign of blood, for all we know.
The lawsuit needs to deliver a wake-up call—fire Lucero, recommit to merit, and stop this discriminatory nonsense. If not, UCLA’s not just failing its students; it’s failing every patient who’ll one day depend on them. Stay tuned, because this fight’s just getting started.
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