California voters have said, again and again, that universities and colleges in California should not be able to use race in admissions. So why do these institutions continue to discriminate?

And will our education system ever focus on education again — and leave wokeness behind?

The latest allegations have hit the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) claims is looking for ways to use race on the sly.

As The California Post has reported, UC Berkeley dean Edwin Chemerinsky has said himself that schools might try to find “proxies for race” — with “strong race neutral justifications.”

The DOJ leans heavily on Chemerinsky’s own public statements as evidence in a six-page letter explaining its findings. Chemerinsky repeatedly suggested that universities could use “diversity” in hiring and admissions, but would have to keep quiet in public about doing so.

The letter also says that UC Berkeley Law used the essay portion of its application to push students to explain how they would “contribute diversity” to campus, essentially telling them to signal their race. It also asked them to check an identity box, with “decline to state” as one of the options. The DOJ also said that black students were much more likely to be accepted at UC Berkeley Law than Asian or white students with the same test scores and qualifications.

Chemerinsky issued a statement defending the university, but just dug Berkeley a deeper hole, saying that “pursuing diversity” is legal as long as there are “no preferences based on race.”

Perhaps a Berkeley professor can explain how those two things are different in practice. Common sense says that they are exactly the same.

Berkeley Law is just the latest California university to be accused of using race — in defiance of Proposition 209, Proposition 16, and the Supreme Court decision in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard.

Harmeet Dhillon and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division are going after California’s public universities and private universities alike.

And they make easy targets.

When a school like UCLA hosts an event on 9/11 featuring a lawyer for the al-Qaeda terrorist who murdered the son of one of its own professors, you know that wokeness is out of hand.

UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk condemned that event. But it was just one more instance of standards — whether in admissions, or academic integrity — being cast aside.

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