Gavin Newsom wants to run for President in 2028.
But Newsom’s own allies set a trap.
And Gavin Newsom got caught flat-footed when asked one question he clearly did not want to answer.
What the Open Letter Actually Said
A group of University of California faculty members recently published an open letter taking direct aim at the UC system’s decision to drop SAT and ACT scores from its admissions process.
The letter’s core demand was blunt: show the data.
Faculty wanted to know whether eliminating standardized test scores had actually improved educational outcomes or whether the change had quietly lowered the academic bar across the system in the name of DEI-driven admissions engineering.
That’s a reasonable question from people who actually teach in the classrooms where these students eventually show up.
And it’s the kind of question that tends to make administrators and politicians very uncomfortable, because the honest answer often exposes what everyone already suspects — that dropping the SAT was never really about finding overlooked talent.
It was about changing who gets in based on race.
Newsom Ducks the Question on Camera
Fox News recently put the question directly to California Governor Gavin Newsom: should the UC system bring back SAT scores?
Newsom did not answer it.
He pivoted, deflected, and ran out the clock the way politicians do when they know the honest answer will cost them something politically.
The governor who never misses a chance to lecture the rest of the country about data-driven policy apparently had no data to offer when the data might point in the wrong direction.
That’s worth sitting with for a moment.
California eliminated SAT requirements under enormous pressure from activists and administrators who argued the tests were racially biased. The University of California system made the change permanent in 2021, becoming one of the most prominent institutions in the country to go fully test-blind for admissions.
But the faculty who signed that open letter aren’t ideological opponents of diversity. These are professors, researchers, people embedded in the institution, asking a basic accountability question: what did we actually get from this policy change?
Newsom’s non-answer tells you something.
What Dropping the SAT Was Always Really About
Standardized tests are imperfect. No serious person argues otherwise. But they measure something real, and they measure it consistently across applicants from wildly different backgrounds and schools.
That consistency is exactly what DEI administrators hate about them.
When every applicant takes the same test under the same conditions, the results don’t always match the racial distribution that diversity offices are trying to engineer. So the test has to go.
The UC system dressed this up in the language of access and holistic review. But the faculty open letter suggests at least some people inside the institution aren’t buying it anymore.
They want to see whether students admitted without test scores are succeeding academically at the same rate. They want to know whether the change actually helped the students it was supposed to help, or whether it simply lowered the floor for everyone and called it equity.
Those are not radical questions. They’re the questions any honest institution should be asking about any major policy change.
The fact that Newsom won’t engage with them is its own kind of answer.
Dropping standardized testing requirements to hit racial targets is race-based discrimination against white students and Asian students who would have earned their spots under a color-blind merit system. It doesn’t matter how many times administrators call it holistic review. The effect is the same: qualified students get passed over because of their race, and the students who replace them are admitted under a lower standard that the institution then refuses to publicly defend with data.
And the people running these institutions know it. That’s why Newsom won’t answer the question.
California’s governor has spent years positioning himself as the responsible adult alternative to the populist Right. He gives press conferences about evidence and science and expertise. He lectures other governors about following the data.
But when faculty at his own flagship university system publish an open letter asking to see the data on a major admissions overhaul, he goes quiet.
That’s not a governor who follows the science. That’s a politician who follows the politics, and right now the politics of the California Left do not allow for any honest reckoning with what test-optional admissions has actually produced.
Because if the data showed that going test-blind improved outcomes, Newsom would have cited it immediately. Politicians always cite the data that helps them.
The silence means the data doesn’t help him.
The UC faculty deserve a real answer. So do the students who lost spots in that system to applicants admitted under a lower standard because of their skin color. So do California taxpayers funding a university system that may be quietly eroding its own academic standards while refusing to produce the evidence that would prove otherwise.
Newsom can dodge Fox News cameras. He can’t dodge the eventual outcomes.
When a generation of UC graduates enters the workforce and the professional schools and the research labs, the data will be there whether anyone wants to look at it or not.
And the faculty who wrote that letter already seem to have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to show.
Source: Fox News, “Gavin Newsom avoids question about bringing back SAT scores after UC open letter asks ‘show me data'”