Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon exposes inconvenient facts for a major West Coast university.
The University of California, Los Angeles, medical school has gone to extraordinary lengths for over five years to shield its admissions practices from internal scrutiny, stonewalling data requests from concerned professors and refusing to assure admissions officials that they would not face retaliation for cooperating with an internal probe of the school’s admissions office, according to threesources with firsthand knowledge of the situation and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Since at least 2018, the school has refused to provide members of its faculty oversight board data on the relationship between admitted students’ academic credentials and their performance in medical school, two former members of that board said.
It has also slow-walked, since November of last year, its response to a public records request for similar data, pushing back the estimated date of availability four times over the course of six months, according to emails from UCLA’s public records office.
The November data request was filed by a UCLA professor and came as whistleblowers were preparing to participate in an internal probe of the medical school’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, conducted by UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office. Faculty had observed a decline in student preparedness since she was hired in 2020, five professors told the Free Beacon, while admissions officers had seen their colleagues, led by Lucero, lower standards for minority applicants in violation of state law. After years of complaints to the Discrimination Prevention Office, UCLA was finally poised to investigate the admissions committee.
Four members of the committee had agreed to participate in that probe. But first, they wanted written assurances from UCLA that they would not be sanctioned for violating a nondisclosure agreement they had signed barring discussion of admissionsmeetings.
