Texas Tech Health Sciences Center agrees to stop considering race in admissions, ending federal inquiry

“Texas Tech Health Sciences Center agrees to stop considering race in admissions, ending federal inquiry” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has agreed to stop considering race in its admissions decisions, part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that may be a bellwether for how the agency approaches colleges’ affirmative action practices going forward.

The voluntary agreement, entered into in February, concludes a 14-year investigation into the Lubbock-based school, which operates independently of Texas Tech University within the Texas Tech University System. The center includes a pharmacy, nursing and medical school, the last of which was the focus of the investigation.

The case was initiated by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2005, following two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and Grutter v. Bollinger, that found universities could use race as a factor in their admissions processes, under certain circumstances.

The Tech System’s governing board announced around that time that the five-system school would begin considering race and ethnicity as part of a holistic review of its applicants. The decision appears to have prompted Roger Clegg, from the anti-affirmative action group Center for Equal Opportunity, to file a complaint.

In a February 2019 letter sent to the Education Department, a Tech System official said the federal investigation had been triggered by a complainant who never tried to gain entrance to the medical school and would not have been “impacted in any way” by its admissions process.

The Tech official, Vice Chancellor and General Counsel Eric Bentley, said in his letter that the system believes it can show its admissions process complies with the standard laid out in the Fisher court case. But Tech officials, he wrote, were “willing to sign the Resolution Agreement in an effort to resolve this matter and focus on educating future health care providers.”

The agreement, which is not an admission of wrongdoing, comes as the Education Department has opened investigations into the admissions policies in place at Yale and Harvard. Under Secretary Betsy Devos, the agency has also rescinded Obama-era guidance encouraging the use of affirmative action at higher education institutions.

Still, Bentley, the Tech official, wrote that the medical school is “committed to exploring race-neutral alternatives to enhancing diversity,” and would monitor whether they yielded results that meet the school’s “diversity and educational goals.”

“If a determination is made in the future that using race as a factor in admissions is necessary to achieve this compelling interest,” he wrote, the system will notify the Education Department, in accordance with the agreement.

Disclosure: The Texas Tech University System and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.