The state is poised to become the third to restrict affirmative action at public colleges
Jennifer Gratz is at it again. As a lead plaintiff in one of two legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, Ms. Gratz failed in her effort to persuade the court to completely strike down such policies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Now Ms. Gratz is trying to accomplish at the polls what she could not in the courts. She is leading a campaign to get Michigan voters to amend their state’s Constitution to prohibit all state agencies, including public colleges, from operating affirmative-action programs that grant preferences based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or gender.
Known as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative and appearing on the ballot as Proposal 2, the proposed amendment is the first such preference ban on a state ballot in eight years. Its impact on Michigan’s public colleges would stretch well beyond admissions, and affect recruitment, outreach, scholarship programs, and student-support services.
Its passage in November could inspire similar campaigns in other states, reviving a political movement that has been dormant since the late 1990s, when it became apparent that the Supreme Court would soon take up the question of whether such preferences violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause.
The Michigan measure is being resisted by a long list of labor, business, religious, minority-advocacy, and higher-education groups. Those who have come out against Proposal 2 include a council made up of the state’s university presidents, several colleges’ student governments, and the Michigan affiliate of the American Association of University Professors.
Despite such opposition — and with little organized support beyond some College Republican chapters and the campaign group Ms. Gratz helped set up — the referendum appears to stand a good chance being approved.
A survey of 608 voters conducted October 10-12 by the Lansing polling firm EPIC-MRA found that 50 percent supported Proposal 2 and 41 percent opposed it, with the remaining 9 percent undecided. The EPIC-MRA poll had a margin of error of 4 percentage points, but other surveys have shown voters in the Great Lakes State to be leaning toward approving the measure or to be fairly evenly split.
When similar measures were passed in California and Washington State in the 1990s, they received substantially more support than pollsters had found, suggesting that some opponents of affirmative action are hesitant to make their views known outside the voting booth.
Although many Michiganders are reluctant to discuss Proposal 2, supporters of the preference ban are not hard to find, even on the campuses of colleges that have fought hard to preserve affirmative action and aggressively promoted the idea that their race-conscious admissions policies have educational benefits.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Kaitlin M. Kuipers, a senior from the city of Holland, on the west side of the state, reflects the views of many on the campus when she says that every time her university admits a student based partly on race, another applicant “is getting the short end of the stick.”
Students on Michigan’s campus seem fairly evenly split on Proposal 2, even though at least 20 student groups have declared their opposition to the measure. Among those who are bothered by the prospect of the amendment’s passing are Tanu Chaturvedi, a senior from the Detroit suburb of Oak Park. “If they were to get rid of any form of affirmative action,” she says, “the outlook for society would be dire.”
Michigan’s president, Mary Sue Coleman, has repeatedly spoken out against the proposed amendment, calling it “wrongheaded” and a clear attempt to roll back civil-rights gains and limit access to higher education.
An analysis of Proposal 2’s potential impact published by the university said it could result in the elimination of scholarships that consider race and programs and positions focused on diversity, and could hinder the university’s efforts to draw more women and minority members into fields such as medicine and engineering.
Seeing Things in Black and White
The chief strategies of the campaigns for and against Proposal 2 were evident this month at a breakfast forum pitting Ms. Gratz, executive director of the campaign for Proposal 2, against Deborah Insley Dingell, a chairwoman of One United Michigan, an umbrella organization formed to oppose it. About 120 people, most of them businesswomen from southeast Michigan, had gathered for the event at a hotel in Troy, one of the many prosperous Oakland County communities settled primarily by white families who had abandoned the nearby Motor City.
Michigan consistently ranks as one of the nation’s most racially segregated states, with the gulf between its black and white residents especially vast in the metropolitan Detroit area. Although it is politically regarded as a swing state, what moves the pendulum is which political party does a better job getting people to the polls — the Democrats who dominate Detroit and many of the state’s industrial and college towns, or the Republicans who rule the west side of the state and Detroit’s blue-collar suburbs.
Many experts on Michigan politics believe that the only way Proposal 2 will be stopped is if white women are persuaded to come out strongly against it. Considering that the state is about 81 percent white and 14 percent black, the proposed amendment could be in for smoother cruising than a Cadillac if the voting results fall along racial lines.
Speaking at the Troy gathering, Ms. Gratz emphasized her humble origins as the daughter of a police officer and the product of a public high school in the working-class suburb of Southgate. She recounted the same story she told the federal courts that handled her lawsuit, of being spurned by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1995 and deciding to challenge its admissions policies after concluding that she had lost out to minority applicants who were much less qualified.
Ms. Gratz repeatedly mentioned how the fire department of the nearby city of Pontiac had reserved one of every three hires or promotions for a minority member until this year, when the U.S. Justice Department stepped in and ordered it to stop the practice as discriminatory. Noting that women now substantially outnumber men at many colleges, she warned those in the room that their daughters run an increasing risk of being rejected based on their gender by higher-education institutions worried about maintaining a balanced male-female ratio.
Calling Michigan “the race-preference capital of the nation,” Ms. Gratz said, “Our government should not be engineering outcomes.” If any preferences are given, she said, they should be given to people of any race who have been shown to overcome socioeconomic disadvantage.
“Let the doors be open,” Ms. Gratz said, “and let the chips fall where they may.”
A Threat to Women?
As the umbrella organization for opponents of Proposal 2, One United Michigan has worked hard to convey to voters that a wide array of Michigan’s leaders believe the measure would be bad for the state.
Among the more than 200 groups that have signed on are the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the American Jewish Committee, the Detroit Urban League, the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Michigan Democratic Party, and the United Auto Workers.
Few people are more tied into Michigan’s power structure than Ms. Dingell of the One United Michigan campaign. She is the scion of one of the Detroit auto industry’s founding families, a former top Washington lobbyist for General Motors, a member of the boards of several Michigan nonprofit organizations, and the wife of one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. House of Representatives, John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat.
When her turn came to speak to the Troy breakfast forum, Ms. Dingell noted how the Great Lakes State is dealing with the effects of both severe racial segregation and a badly sagging economy, and said the amendment’s adoption would be “a self-inflicted wound at a time Michigan can least afford it” and “would kill hope.”
She told the crowd that the measure would be especially harmful to professional women, hindering efforts to help them up the corporate ladder. “We have had to work twice as hard as a man to ever get credit for anything we do,” she said.
Ms. Dingell repeated two themes that One United Michigan had been emphasizing in its advertisements and news releases. She alleged that Ms. Gratz could have gotten into the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor if she had only been willing to put herself on a waiting list. And she warned that California’s passage of a similar measure had led to legal challenges against state programs that helped battered women and provided breast-cancer screening.
(The rejection letter that Ms. Gratz received from Michigan in 1995 told her of the waiting-list option but encouraged her to look elsewhere because “we expect to take very few students.” So far, the lawsuits challenging programs for women in California have been thrown out for technical reasons related to the plaintiffs’ failure to show they had suffered any harm.)
Several prominent figures in Michigan politics expressed views similar to Ms. Dingell’s three days later at a “Leadership Summit on Race” sponsored by New Detroit, a civic organization formed to help rebuild that city in the wake of its devastating 1967 riot.
In interviews, Shirley R. Stancato, president of New Detroit, said if Proposal 2 passed “the bridges we have built are going to go away.” Detroit’s mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, said the amendment’s adoption would hinder Michigan’s efforts to become more competitive in a global economy.
A Tough Fight
In its June 2003 ruling on the case Gratz v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the point-based admissions system used by the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts was unconstitutional because it placed too much emphasis on race by automatically awarding large bonuses to black, Hispanic, and American Indian students.
The victory for Ms. Gratz, one of two named plaintiffs, was only partial, however; in that case and another involving the university’s law school, the Supreme Court said colleges could continue to consider applicants’ race and ethnicity, so long as institutions looked at applicants as individuals.
Ms. Gratz says that within days of the rulings, she called Ward Connerly, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents who helped lead the campaigns to ban preferences in California and Washington State, and said, “We need to do something about this.”
Ms. Gratz continues to be advised by Mr. Connerly, founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a California-based organization that opposes racial preferences. He has been traveling to Michigan to speak on behalf of the measure about two or three times a month, and says the staunch resistance he has encountered there has made the effort so “politically taxing” that he personally has no plans to mount similar efforts in other states in the near future, even if Proposal 2 prevails.
“It is a campaign that I don’t want to do again soon,” Mr. Connerly said last week. “It is draining in every way possible.”
The biggest challenge that Proposal 2’s sponsors have faced has been litigation brought against them by a group called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (and commonly referred to as BAMN).
Established in the mid-1990s by the Revolutionary Workers League — a Detroit-based Socialist organization — BAMN was one of the key groups that organized protests against Mr. Connerly’s efforts to curtail affirmative action in California.
The group later mounted a successful effort to intervene in the case involving admissions policies at Michigan’s law school, in which it argued that the university needed to have race-conscious admissions policies as a remedy for its own discriminatory practices. It is perhaps best known in Michigan, however, for staging raucous pro-affirmative-action protests involving large numbers of high-school and middle-school students.
Lawyers for the group have fought mightily to keep Proposal 2 from going before voters, arguing in court and before state elections officials that many people who signed petitions to put it on the ballot were deceived about its intent and thought it would actually expand the state’s affirmative-action efforts.
The group persuaded Mayor Kilpatrick of Detroit and two local labor unions to sign on to a federal lawsuit seeking to block a vote on Proposal 2. Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, submitted a separate brief supporting that litigation.
In August, U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Tarnow agreed with the allegation that backers of Proposal 2 misled some of those who signed petitions to put it on the ballot. But he refused to keep the measure off the November 7 ballot as a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act because, he said, people of all races had been deceived. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declined last month to take up a request that it block the election until the district court’s decision can be appealed.
A Question of Tactics
Shanta Driver, a national chairwoman of BAMN, said her group had publicized allegations that Proposal 2 was placed on the ballot through deception because it believed that no other argument would persuade enough white voters to reject the measure.
If voters approve Proposal 2, Ms. Driver says, her group will continue its challenge of the district court’s decision, to try to block the measure’s enforcement and have it invalidated. And if the measure withstands such legal challenges, Ms. Driver says her group “will do everything we can try to prevent a drop in minority enrollments at universities and colleges across the State of Michigan.”
The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative campaign organization has clearly reached the conclusion that it can build support for Proposal 2 by drawing attention to the militant tactics of BAMN and trying to associate One United Michigan with that group. The Web site of Ms. Gratz’s group features video clips showing black teenagers and children mobilized by BAMN overturning a table at a meeting of state elections officials, harassing Proposal 2 supporters, and shouting obscenities at the camera.
William S. Ballenger, editor of the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Michigan Politics, says he believes that BAMN is “killing” the campaign against Proposal 2 by alienating white voters.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, nearly all of the student groups that support affirmative action have been trying for several years to distance themselves from the militant organization. Staci D. Daniels, a senior from Bloomfield Hills who is involved with the umbrella group Students Supporting Affirmative Action, echoes many students on Michigan’s campus when she calls the tactics of BAMN “very inappropriate.”
Maricruz Lopez, a Mexican-born sophomore who is a chairwoman of the campus chapter of BAMN, is dismissive of such criticism. “The tactics we use,” she says, “are the tactics that have been shown to win.”
The Campaign on Campus
As the University of Michigan Wolverines and Michigan State University Spartans geared up this month for their annual gridiron clash, student organizations on both campuses were drawing up plans to promote their views on Proposal 2 to the game crowd. They intended to hang banners, pass out leaflets and bumper stickers — whatever it might take to sway football fans to their side.
Among the University of Michigan students who expressed hope that Proposal 2 would fail was Stephanie J. Swanson, a senior from Ishpeming, in the state’s sparsely populated Upper Peninsula. She said that as a result of her institution’s race-conscious admissions she has been exposed to the kind of racial and ethnic diversity she would not encounter back home.
“Affirmative action, I believe, is still necessary in our very unequal society,” Ms. Swanson said.
About 60 miles away, in East Lansing, Kathleen A. Miller, a Michigan State senior and leading member of the group Defend Affirmative Action Michigan, said “passing Proposal 2 would only create more division, more conflict” among students of different races on that campus.
DeMarco A. Clark, a Michigan State sophomore who is helping lead efforts by the Hispanic student group Culturas de las Razas Unidas to oppose Proposal 2, said his views on the issue were shaped by his upbringing in Detroit. “You see how affirmative action helps a lot of people there,” he said.
At both the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, the chief groups supporting Proposal 2 are the campus chapters of the College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative group. To the disappointment of the College Republicans, the state Republican Party has settled on a neutral position on Proposal 2 — after initially coming out against it — and the Republican candidate trying to unseat Jennifer M. Granholm as governor, Richard DeVos Jr., continues to oppose the measure.
Joanna N. Varnavas, a senior who is a leading member of the Michigan State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, says she is not worried about the prospect of Proposal 2’s defeat as a result of opposition from women. “When was the last time you saw women burning their bras in the streets of East Lansing?” she asks. “Feminism, and the feminist movement, is over.”
Ryan J.L. Fantuzzi, a University of Michigan senior who is a chairman of the campaign on behalf of Proposal 2 in surrounding Washtenaw County, says he sometimes gets discouraged by the amount of resistance to the measure on the campus. But, he says, when he goes back home to the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, “my morale goes way up.”
At Macomb Community College, in Warren, another predominantly white and working-class Detroit suburb, many students have not heard of Proposal 2, but most seem to oppose affirmative action and say they would happily vote to ban it. A few students say their view is influenced by having seen a father or brother lose a promotion to a woman or a minority member.
Megan Wilson, of Shelby Township, who was a senior in high school as the University of Michigan cases were being decided, says it angered her to hear about the cases and learn that being white might count against her in college admissions. “I worked hard for my grades,” she says.
Chris J. Bullock, a 26-year-old from St. Clair Shores, notes that it has been well over a century since the United States allowed slavery. “Enough has been done that everyone should get an equal shot now,” he says. “You’ve got to draw the line at some point.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 53, Issue 10, Page A21
