Lawsuit Charges UC Admissions With Fraud : Courts: Law and medical schools deceive fee-paying applicants by failing to reveal the importance of race, Tarzana attorney claims.

For nearly three decades, the University of California law and medical schools have been committing consumer fraud by failing to acknowledge that some black and Latino applicants are given preferential treatment, a Tarzana attorney alleges in a recently filed lawsuit.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by Allan J. Favish, does not seek to eliminate racial consideration from the UC admissions process. But in a new twist in the expanding affirmative action debate, the suit contends the UC system violates state business codes by requiring a $40 application fee without divulging the importance of an applicant’s race.

“This is a truth-in-advertising suit,” Favish said. “Generally speaking, if you are a B or C student you are wasting your money applying to UC law and medical schools if you are white or Asian. While if you are black or Hispanic you have a realistic chance for admission. I want the University of California to tell prospective applicants the truth before it takes their money.”

The suit seeks to force the nine UC law and medical schools to print tables in their application materials that would show admissions statistics in categories of grades, test scores and race. It also asks the schools to reimburse the $40 fee plus interest to all applicants denied admission since 1967--about the time, Favish claims, that such racial considerations became policy.

Favish said he himself was denied admission to three UC law schools--at the Los Angeles, Berkeley and Davis campuses--in 1977. However, he said, he was accepted at the Hastings School of Law, part of UC San Francisco, and graduated in 1981.

He said his lawsuit, filed Monday with himself as the sole plaintiff, was not motivated by any bitterness but was sparked by an article on the subject he read last year in a legal trade journal. He began doing his own research, he said, and decided someone should file a legal challenge to current practices.

The suit preceded by three days a conservative think tank’s study of UC medical schools released Thursday asserts that these admissions policies amount to racial discrimination. The study, by the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco, similarly contends that race unfairly outweighs other criteria for admission.

Both come at a time when affirmative action policies around the state are being attacked by Gov. Pete Wilson, who last week signed an executive order eliminating about 150 programs he said cumulatively comprised a “vast system of preferential treatment” for minorities and women.

Favish’s suit includes a series of UC figures that he said show substantial differences in rates of acceptance, substantially due to race.

In 1994, he contends, the UCLA School of Law offered admission to 61% of black applicants who had a GPA of 2.5 to 3.49 and a Law School Assessment Test (LSAT) percentile score of between 60 and 89.9. Only 1% of white and Asian students in those same scoring ranges were offered admission.

Also included in the suit are portions of UC application materials that state the system does “not discriminate on the basis of race, color, [or] national origin” with regard to “admission, access, and treatment in University programs and activities.”

“When you say that we don’t discriminate on the basis of race, then that means race is irrelevant,” Favish said. “And it’s not. They can’t have it both ways.”

Terry Colvin, spokesman for the office of the UC president, said the system’s admissions process meets all federal and state laws, and that the lawsuit is myopically focused on a small portion of the criteria considered in weighing applicants.

“We’ve made no secret that race is part of the admissions process,” Colvin said. “Providing the kind of information Mr. Favish wants would imply that test scores, grade point average and ethnicity are the only criteria used in admission. Those are only three among a dozen or more.”

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In 1974, a white student named Allan Bakke filed suit contending he was denied admission to UC Davis Medical School because the school had a policy of reserving 16 of 100 admissions for minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case in 1978, striking down racial quotas but allowing schools to consider race as one factor in making admissions decisions.

Favish does not contend that a quota system exists at the university. But he says UC has “made a secret” of the weight that race carries during the admissions process.

“A once-great university that’s supposed to be engaged in a search for the truth,” Favish said, is “lying to consumers.”