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The University of California was recently forced to hand over a massive data dump to the group suing the system over alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian students in admissions.
“It’s 900 megabytes of data, and I can’t tell you much more than that, because of a protective order,” said UCLA Law School Professor Richard Sander, one of the founders of Students Against Racial Discrimination, the coalition suing the system.
Sander made the comments Saturday during a talk at the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation’s annual summit in Irvine. The professor said obtaining the data was hard fought.
First, he said, the group had to survive attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed, which it did.
“Once you get past motions to dismiss, then you’re in the discovery stage, and discovery means that the two sides try to find out information about each other,” he said. “Of course, what we want is the UC admissions data, data that I’ve been trying to get in various ways for 20 years.”
Sander said the two sides spent several months negotiating a protective order of how the data would be safeguarded if it was released to SARD.
“Well, three and a half hours ago, I got the first tranche of UC data,” Sander told the audience, prompting a round of applause.
“In the coming months, we’ll be writing expert reports, and we’ll be submitting those to the judge, and that is going to become part of the public record,” Sander said. “And we’re all going to know just what UC has been doing for the last 20 years.”
Students Against Racial Discrimination is a group of students, parents and academics “concerned about the University of California’s unwillingness to abide by state and federal laws that prohibit racial discrimination,” its website states.
It filed a lawsuit in February 2025 against the system over its alleged use of racial preferences in admissions practices.
The complaint argues many Asian-American and white applicants are denied admission to UC schools because of their race, and that this “also harms Hispanic and black students who are often placed at a significant academic disadvantage, and thus experience worse outcomes, because of the university’s use of racial preferences.”
Sander is the pioneer of the “mismatch” theory, in which students of color with lower credentials than their peers who are accepted into more challenging universities then suffer academically as a result.
In a statement Tuesday to The College Fix, a system spokesperson, Stett Holbrook, said the University of California “stands by our record of expanding access for all qualified students and will continue to vigorously defend against this lawsuit.”
“The complaint recounts a distorted history of UC’s admissions practices and relies on a scattershot collection of outdated and selected data. We believe this to be a meritless suit that seeks to distract from our mission to provide California students with a world-class education,” the statement read.
Sander, in an interview Saturday with The College Fix, said as the lawsuit moves into the depositions phase, SARD is seeking even more admissions data from earlier years, as well as data from the California Bar, to review outcomes.
“We want to sort of show how things have evolved,” he said.
Students Against Racial Discrimination member Tim Groseclose, a former UCLA professor who now teaches economics at George Mason University, said Sander is “like a steamroller.”
“He just keeps chugging along, maybe slowly, but nothing stops him. I’m sure he’ll expose what the UC people have been doing. And I think the UC people are starting to realize that,” Groseclose said in an email Tuesday to The College Fix.
Groseclose has long been suspicious of UC schools’ admissions tactics, and is author of the 2014 book “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.”
“They — the UC people involved with admissions — have been granting racial preferences for a long time. And for a long time they’ve been lying about doing that,” he told The Fix.
MORE: New lawsuit targets U. California system, alleges illegal race-based admissions practices
