Politically Unstable: College admission discrimination still exists

Video

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

OPINION:

Despite the Supreme Court ruling against race-based admission practices, colleges across America continue to practice illegal discrimination.

Reilly Stephens, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, sits down with Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss.

[SADLER] We’re discussing a pending case that you have against the University of New Mexico for discriminating against a White student who wants to become a doctor. He did not get into the admissions process. He got rejected twice because of their admissions standards. Can you take us through this case, your client and your argument?

[STEPHENS] We’re representing a plaintiff against the University of New Mexico Medical School and the officials there. We’re suing basically on the fact that we think there’s clear evidence that they are continuing to engage in exactly the sort of discriminatory admissions practices that the Supreme Court said, a couple of years ago, is illegal and unconstitutional. And New Mexico is both a public institution that has to adhere to the Constitution, and also takes federal funds. So under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, they also have to adhere to non-discrimination for that reason. My client is the son of Syrian immigrants. His dad’s a doctor. His academic record is exceptional and well above the University of New Mexico medical school’s usual numbers. He was wait-listed the first year and then completely rejected the second year he applied. Because they said that he hadn’t done well, no one liked him in his interviews and his essays didn’t impress them. They used these soft factors to decide that he wasn’t worth their time.

When I saw this, I noticed immediately that this is exactly what it turned up in the Harvard case, in the North Carolina case, that the Supreme Court heard was happening, that what they would do at Harvard was with the Asian students, they would get rid of them and keep them out by deciding that they didn’t have good personalities. Systematically, they were scoring them low in those factors. And so these are the kinds of games that universities are playing. We’ve seen them play around the country. It’s been very obvious in the past few years that university administrations are really dedicated to discrimination because they have these sort of ideological amendments in many cases. We’ve seen administrators around the country saying that they are absolutely going to try to dodge what the Supreme Court did and do this in other ways.

It’s incumbent on all of us to try and stand up for the principle of equality under the law and to say that we need to put a stop to this.

[SADLER] We interviewed Ian Kingsbury of Do No Harm a few weeks ago. And talking about the rankings that they do with medical universities, whether or not they’re adhering to the Supreme Court challenge and getting rid of the DEI admissions and doing it on merit-based only. And they rank the University of New Mexico among the five worst schools in the nation that are accepting federal funds and not implementing the Supreme Court standards, that they’re still incorporating race in their admissions process. With your client, where does this stand in this court system right now? How has the University of New Mexico responded?

[STEPHENS] We’re still at the early stages here. We have not actually gotten a formal response in any way from the University of New Mexico. So I’ll wait and see. So this is now going to take some time to go through the court system. We are excited and I am really proud of the case that we put together and I look forward to doing what we can for my client.

[SADLER] Your client, where does he stand right now? Has he been admitted elsewhere to other medical schools? You can’t delay your life in terms of waiting for this to be resolved.

[STEPHENS] He did. After being rejected multiple times, he did end up going out of state for school, which is going to cost him a bit more money in the end. But he was able to get into medical school because his actual credentials are actually quite impressive. He has a 4.0 GPA, 99th percentile in a lot of the MCAT sections, I think 96th percentile overall. Standard deviation above the University of New Mexico’s average. He has publications from his undergraduate days. He has volunteer experience working in the medical field. And so he was able to get into medical school. Apparently, New Mexico just didn’t think he was the right for them. But this also meant that as a resident of New Mexico, the in-state tuition and the benefits that are supposed to come from being a resident and taxpayer, he was not able to take advantage of those.

[SADLER] That’s unbelievable to me. It’s a medical school. And he was rejected because of essays?

[STEPHENS] They said personal statements and interview scores.

[SADLER] Personal statements and interview scores, which are subjective at best.