Education

Lawsuit Accuses University of California of Allowing Race to Factor in Admissions

Published

1 year ago

February 4, 2025

Lawsuit Accuses University of California of Allowing Race to Factor in Admissions

Over the last few months, University of California officials have boasted that they have admitted the most racially diverse class ever to their sprawling system.

They have managed to do this, they say, despite a 28-year-old state ban on considering race in college admissions, known as Proposition 209.

But a lawsuit filed on Monday by a newly formed group takes aim at the university’s efforts, accusing the California system of cheating by secretly restoring race-conscious admissions in defiance of the state law. The group, Students Against Racial Discrimination, was organized by a persistent critic of affirmative action.

The lawsuit accuses the California system of harming all students by gradually bringing back racial preferences in recent years to stem public outrage over the low number of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s top universities.

Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, said the university had not yet been served with the legal papers, so it could not reply directly to the lawsuit. But he said that after the ban, it had adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law, and it collected undergraduate students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only, not for admission.

Students Against Racial Discrimination was founded last fall by a group that includes researchers and Asian American anti-affirmative action activists. Among them is Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has made something of a crusade of fighting affirmative action.

The group’s approach emulates the strategy of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that defeated Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling that rejected affirmative action in college admissions nationwide.

The lawsuit accuses the University of California system of violating protections against racial discrimination in Title VI of federal civil rights law and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

It asks the court to order the U.C. system to select students “in a color-blind manner” and to appoint a court monitor to oversee admissions decisions, to “eliminate the corrupt and unlawful race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”

Last month, the U.C. system reported that Black undergraduate enrollment was up by 4.6 percent and Latino enrollment by 3.1 percent across the 10 campuses. It contrasted those increases with the many other universities that have struggled to maintain Black and Hispanic enrollment in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

Over nearly a decade, the data show a steady but small rise in African American freshman admissions systemwide — to 7,139, or 5 percent, for the fall of 2024 from 4,358, or 4 percent, in 2016. The percentage of Hispanic students has also risen slightly, from a much bigger base. (About 6 percent of Californians are Black and 40 percent are Latino.)

The university said it had increased undergraduate enrollment overall and the diversity of the incoming class last fall by capping out-of-state enrollment and through funding support from the state, especially at the most in-demand campuses. It also targeted recruitment and college preparatory courses at disadvantaged students and eliminated the SAT and ACT testing requirement.

John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, said that while he was not an insider on admissions practices, “my sense is that admissions is highly regulated and careful to stay clear of Prop 209 restrictions, and the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.”

Much of the increase in enrollment can be explained by the demographic pool of applicants, and their growing readiness for college as they take required courses and as their high school graduation rates increase, he added.

California voters adopted Proposition 209, which banned the use of race in admissions at public universities in the state in 1996, becoming the first of nine states to take similar action.

The first class at Berkeley’s law school after Proposition 209 was approved had only one Black student, and he had been admitted before the referendum. The situation at Berkeley was so dire that it became the topic of a “Doonesbury” cartoon, in which Joanie Caucus, a Berkeley law graduate, arrives at her reunion to be told that not much has changed except, “Well, we no longer admit Black people.”

Dr. Sander said in an interview that he believes that Berkeley reverted to race-conscious admissions almost immediately.

If so, the impact has been small. The number of African American freshmen admitted to Berkeley has risen to 683, or 5 percent, in the fall of 2024 from 464, or 3 percent, in 2016.

Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the system’s flagship, the University of California, Berkeley, said the institution was complying with the law.

“U.C. Berkeley is committed to admitting and enrolling the best and the brightest students and we do so in compliance with all state, federal and university policies and laws,” she said.

In the fall of 2006, after the passing of Proposition 209, only 96 of the 4,800 freshmen expected to enroll at U.C.L.A. were Black, the lowest figure since 1973. Twenty of those were athletes, according to a front-page article at the time in The Los Angeles Times. The Black students became known as “the infamous 96,” and administrators blamed the situation on the ballot measure. (Four more Black students were admitted on appeal.)

U.C.L.A. also buckled to public outrage, the complaint says. U.C.L.A. referred questions about the case and its admissions to the larger university system.

In the lawsuit filed on Monday, the complaint cites Tim Groseclose, a member of a faculty oversight committee for U.C.L.A. admissions during that period, who said U.C.L.A.’s chancellor had made admissions more subjective. Dr. Groseclose, now a professor of economics at George Mason University, believed that “this new policy became a subterfuge for reactivating racial preferences in admissions,” the complaint says.

Dr. Sander argues that affirmative action is detrimental to Black and Latino students who are less prepared and struggle academically. His theory, known as “mismatch,” argues that students will do better on measures like grades, persistence in science and math and graduation rates at a college that better matches their preparation. The complaint says that the system has become more and more guarded about such data, shutting down websites that provided it.

But many experts have disputed the mismatch theory, especially after Justice Antonin Scalia commented in 2015, during oral arguments in an affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, that Black students might be better off going to “slower-track” colleges where they could succeed.

Matthew Chingos, then a vice president of the Urban Institute, challenged Justice Scalia’s comments at the time. Research has shown that students with similar credentials who attend different colleges are more likely to graduate from the more selective colleges, Dr. Chingos noted.

And his analysis found that the mismatch conclusions were based on “at best very weak evidence for this claim and no evidence of any connection to affirmative action policies.”

The complaint filed on Monday allows that “the effects of Proposition 209 upon U.C. and its students were complex and are still debated by academics.” And the evidence it offers is sometimes contradictory.

To bolster the point that the system is cheating, the complaint says statistical analysis shows an improbable parity between the Black and Hispanic admission rates and the overall admission rate. And it says that Dr. Sander’s analysis of publicly available U.C. law school data shows that Black students with relatively low LSAT scores and grade point averages have 10 times as good a chance to be admitted as a white or Asian American student with similar credentials.

But the complaint also notes that Black and Latino graduation rates across the system were “much higher” in 2006 than in 1998. It argues that is because students “cascaded” down to lesser colleges where they could compete.

And it concedes that there were other factors at play that could explain the increase in Black and Hispanic students — not that they were being favored in the admissions office, but that more were applying and getting in as the university system responded to Proposition 209 by putting more resources into helping them.

Susan C. Beachy contributed reporting.

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Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

2 days ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

2 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.