A commenter to another post writes, pointing to what he sees as an improper double standard:
Just like there is allowed to be a Black Law Students Association at UCLA that doesn’t admit white students, but there’s not allowed to be a Christian Law Students Association that doesn’t admit non-Christians.
I’m happy to acknowledge there are double standards out there. But my sense is that at UCLA — and at most other schools — the university policies formally prohibit discrimination based on race, religion, and so on by all groups. (That’s what the UCLA School of Law policy says, for instance.) And if a violation is called to the university’s attention, my sense is that the group would be required to remove any discriminatory provisions, regardless of whether they were the black students’ group or the Christian students’ group.
This having been said, I suspect both the Black Law Students Association and the Christian Law Students Association could and do maintain their racial and religious identities, simply because most students don’t take the time to join groups in which they aren’t terribly interested, and where they suspect they won’t be wanted. It might well be that some BLSA groups include some members who aren’t black, but I highly doubt that there is more than a smattering of such students in any group. And if there was a sense from fellow members that such students weren’t wanted — even expressed subtly and indirectly — they’d be pretty likely to leave, even if the group did not forbid their presence.
In theory, one could imagine hostile students swamping the group in order to take it over; but my sense is that this is a vanishingly rare event. There’s just very little payoff compared to the time and effort that the intruders would have to exert, and the possibility of social sanctions from other students (including people who aren’t members of the group). This doesn’t mean that the broad antidiscrimination policies for student groups are necessarily a good idea, only that they are in practice much more likely to be symbolic than practical.
So if you want to look for double standards in this field, I think you can find them in many contexts — but I’m not sure that the enforcement of student group antidiscrimination policies would be such a context.