A prominent conservative advocacy group is demanding, under open-records laws, that the University of California at Los Angeles produce applicant data that might show whether it is illegally considering race in admissions.

In a public-records request mailed to the university’s admissions director on October 24, the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation said it had been contacted by “students, parents, professors, and others” who suspect that UCLA might be violating Proposition 209, a 1996 amendment to California’s Constitution that prohibits public colleges and other state and local agencies from using various affirmative-action preferences.

Among the documents that the group requests in its letter are undergraduate applications (with all personally identifying information removed) from students seeking admission to the Classes of 2005 through 2008; records giving the identities of all applications readers, the scores they gave each application, and their reasons for deciding to admit or reject each candidate; and all handbooks and other documents designed to guide applications readers. The letter says the group is willing to work with the university to protect the identities of individual students to comply with state and federal privacy laws.

In a written statement announcing the records request, Joshua Thompson, a lawyer for the foundation, said the group was seeking applicants’ personal essays “to make sure that admissions officials aren’t using these subjective evaluations as a way to bias the process.”

The records request comes two months after a UCLA political-science professor’s widely publicized resignation from a university admissions committee over the institution’s refusal to give him data he had requested to investigate its Proposition 209 compliance. —Peter Schmidt