Documents Suggest UC Berkeley Law Using Personal Statements to Get Around Affirmative Action Ban
“For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table”
The academic left just can’t let go of identity politics.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Inside Cal Berkeley Law Review’s Admissions Team, Where ‘Diverse Life Experience’ Matters More Than ‘Editing Abilities’
When Maya Parthasarathy, a student editor at the University of California, Berkeley’s law journal, the California Law Review, applied for the journal’s admissions committee in 2025, she knew exactly what her colleagues wanted to hear.
A former deputy at Politico, where she oversaw the hiring of entry-level journalists, Parthasarathy explained how her experience in media would help her promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at the University of California, Berkeley’s flagship law journal, which selects eight editors each year to evaluate candidates for the law review.
“When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content,” Parthasarathy wrote in her application to the admissions committee. To fix the problem, she said, her team at Politico “did not consider grades,” instead creating a “holistic” review process that included, among other things, an editing test.
“For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table,” Parthasarathy said. “At the end of my tenure at Politico, our team had grown from just one person of color — me — to fifty percent hires from underrepresented backgrounds.”
Parthasarathy’s boasts were probably a legal liability for Politico, which did not respond to a request for comment, insofar as they described how the company sought to change the racial composition of its employees by de-emphasizing objective factors. But they were catnip for the California Law Review, which elected Parthasarathy to serve on the admissions committee in a journal-wide vote.
The committee grades the personal statement of every applicant who passes an initial editing test. The prompt for the statement, which accounts for 30 percent of an applicant’s score, asks “how your background, life or work experiences, culture, or perspectives would contribute to the diversity” of the journal.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
They’re liberals. “Getting around” – or outright violating – the law is what they do.
“When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content”
Yeah. Because, as we all know, the big problem at Politico was that they were a quart LOW on lefties.