A professor’s book reveals that the University of California, Los Angeles, was illegally using affirmative action to admit students.

Tim Groseclose wrote in “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race Admissions in UCLA” that he became suspicious of the school’s admission practices when he was a member of the faculty oversight committee.

After Proposition 209 was passed in 1996 to ban affirmative action in California, UCLA experienced a decline in African-American admissions, which Groseclose says caused a crisis on campus in 2006.

“There were protests at the chancellor’s office,” Groseclose told The College Fix. “And the chancellor showed up at my committee – and this was remarkable, I never heard of this before – and he lobbied us to change the admissions system.”

Groseclose also said that the chancellor was being pressured by several constituencies, including black alumni groups and the state legislature.

“He certainly implied that our funding was going to be cut if we didn’t increase diversity,” Groseclose said.

The following year, enrollment of black students almost doubled, according to Fox News, which caused Groseclose to become suspicious.

He asked for application records in 2008, only to be denied by the university, Townhall reports. Groseclose left his position on the committee and told the press about his hunch that UCLA was using race-based preferences.

In response, UCLA set up a commission led by a so-called “independent researcher,” who happened to be a sociology professor at UCLA.

The university released the study’s findings four years later, even though they said the study would be published in one year. UCLA stated in a press release that the study showed that they were not using a race-based admissions process, even though the researcher’s statistical tests showed otherwise.

In order to gain access to the admissions data, Groseclose had to file a Public Records Act request. Groseclose posted the data to his website, claiming that the research is proof that UCLA accepted more black students than if they had followed the law, which negatively impacted white and Asian applicants.

He claims that the racial preferences were used when the university would review applications that were marked for further consideration. In those instances, black applicants with incomes over $100,000 were around twice as likely to be accepted than white and Asian applicants with incomes of $30,000 with similar test scores.

UCLA did this by using a “holistic” system. Applicants’ test scores were “fuzzed” to make them appear as if they were higher.

“It was clear there was cheating going on,” Groseclose told The College Fix.

He thinks that a legitimate lawsuit against UCLA could be filed, but believes this practice is commonplace among academia.

“I think this is common – not just the racial preferences, but also the lying,” Groseclose told Fox News.

UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vazquez declined to comment on the allegations.

“UCLA believes its admissions process to be fair, transparent and consistent with state law,” Vazquez said to Fox News.

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