The U.S. federal government is giving $3 million to the University of California at Davis despite a recent record of waste, incompetence and corruption at the campus. UC Davis has pepper-sprayed students and abused taxpayers by handing out most of the $1 million federal lawsuit settlement to lawyers, politically correct outside organizations, campus cops, and even UC staff.

UC Davis anesthesiology professor Ebenezer Yamoah is under investigation for serious violations involving research subjects. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are investigating doctors Paul Muizelaar and Rudolph J. Schrot, neurosurgeons in the UCD medical school. They stand accused of introducing bacteria into the skulls of three brain-tumor patients, all of whom died within months.

For 16 years Jennifer Beeman, headed the UCD Campus Violence Prevention Program which from 1999 to 2005 received four federal grants totaling $3,168,923. Beeman falsified the statistics on sex offences by more than 100 percent and was finally busted not for statistical fraud but embezzlement.

Despite this irresponsible record, the federal National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is giving UC Davis a five-year $3 million federal grant “to establish a research center to study aging Latinos.” This is supposedly necessary because “the Latino population faces health disparities including a lack of money and health care” and “the burden is particularly acute for women in the families.”

UCD’s new Latino Aging Research Resource Center will launch “a study that looks at the benefits of community volunteerism, which has been found to improve cognitive health among other ethnic groups,” and a “study of caregiver experiences, patient health outcomes and Latina caregiver well-being.” How’s that for hard science at an allegedly world-class university with research funding of more than $684 million, most of it federal money.

As Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution points out, disparities among ethnic groups are the rule rather than the exception. In reality, “Latino” is not an ethnic group at all but a form of identity theft. But in the lexicon of political correctness adopted by the federal government, Latinos are an accredited victim group and politicians need to give them everything they want. The timing of the $3 million federal grant suggests an eleventh-hour attempt to buy Latino votes.