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The president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center signed the agreement in February, 14 years after the department began investigating a complaint filed by an anti-affirmative action group. The agreement is the first of its kind for the Education Department under Secretary Betsy DeVos and comes as the Trump administration continues its hard turn against the use of race in admissions.
Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, which filed the original complaint, said Tuesday that the agreement could pave the way for similar actions at other schools.
“It shows that the Trump administration is serious about enforcing the civil rights laws in a way that protects the rights of all Americans to be free from discrimination,” Clegg said. “The more schools that stop using racial preferences, the harder it will be for other schools to continue using racial preferences.”
Affirmative action programs are under renewed scrutiny in courts and by federal authorities. Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are both facing court challenges to their admissions procedures that could reach the Supreme Court. The Trump administration is investigating allegations of discrimination against Asian-American applicants at Harvard and Yale.
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The administration has made clear its position on the use of race in admissions, abandoning Obama-era policies that argued for the “compelling interests” of diversity to college campuses and encouraging race-neutral admissions methods.
Jin Hee Lee, senior deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., said the Texas Tech agreement was part of a broader pattern of chipping away at affirmative action.
“In the larger context of this administration’s civil rights record, it’s clear that this is yet another attack on education equity,” Lee said. “We will continue to take steps to protect efforts aimed at improving education equity throughout the country.”
The complaint by the Center for Equal Opportunity, which describes itself as a conservative civil rights organization, came after a 2003 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger. In that decision, the court upheld the use of race as a factor in admission to the University of Michigan Law School, saying that the school had a compelling interest in achieving diversity.
Soon after, the Health Sciences Center School of Medicine and Texas Tech University, the undergraduate campus in the Texas Tech system, announced that they would begin considering race in admissions. Clegg challenged the decision on the ground that race should be used only as a last resort.
But for the fall 2014 class, the undergraduate campus removed any consideration of race in admissions. As a result, the Education Department dismissed the case.
The department continued to investigate the Health Sciences Center and found that the medical school was continuing to use race-conscious admissions, according to documents in the case.
The policies had a significant effect on the makeup of the medical school. Enrollment went from 9 percent Hispanic in the class that entered in 2004 to 16 percent in the class that entered in 2018. The university said that it was trying to recruit more Hispanic students in part to send more people to practice medicine in underserved communities in West Texas, according to documents in the case.
Clegg said the investigation, which had begun during the George W. Bush administration, had lasted through the Obama years, “which suggests that even under a liberal Democratic administration, there were problems” with admissions practices.
The medical school defended race-conscious admissions by saying it needed to recruit students who showed the “cultural sensitivity” that would allow them to serve racially diverse patients, according to a letter from the Education Department’s civil rights office. Federal officials were concerned that the medical school’s admissions process violated civil rights law.
Eric Bentley, vice chancellor and general counsel of the Texas Tech University System, said in a letter to the civil rights office that while the medical school believed it was in compliance with the law, it was agreeing to stop using race in admissions “in an effort to resolve this matter and focus on educating future health care providers.”
The decision was effective March 1, according to the agreement, and set a deadline of Sept. 1 to revise all admissions and recruitment materials to reflect the changes. It did not, the agreement said, constitute an admission that the university had run afoul of civil rights law.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.