Coleman retirement: A chance to advance colorblind U-M admissions

Posted by hpayne on April 24, 2013

U-M racial preferences challenger Jennifer Gratz (right) and (left) U-M President Mary Sue Coleman, outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, in 2003.

Replacing retiring President Mary Sue Coleman offers the University of Michigan a historic opportunity to reboot with an administrator who embraces a 21st century, colorblind admissions policy that is succeeding in states like California. The university’s board could signal the new era by including Jennifer Gratz on its presidential search committee.

Gratz is the courageous civil rights activist who took on Coleman, and her predecessor Lee Bollinger, in exposing U-M’s discriminatory admissions system. Gratz, who graduated from University of Michigan-Dearbon after race quotas denied her admission to U-M, spearheaded the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) ballot proposal in 2006, which banned the use of race in public university admissions and state employment.

Despite MCRI’s overwhelming support by Michigan voters, Coleman continued to fight the state law in court, clouding the university’s reputation as one of America’s elite academic schools with politically correct, racial politics. Worse, Coleman’s policies worked against the very minorities she claimed to advance. During her (and Bollinger’s) reign, blacks and Hispanics graduated at 20 percent lower rates than their white, Indian and Asian peers. Hailed for her determination in building an elite academic university — a $3 billion “Michigan Difference” fundraising campaign and world-class facilities — Coleman paradoxically patronized minorities with a lesser standard of admission in the name of “diversity.” The result doomed underqualified minority students to failure, casting them degreeless into the working world.

Meanwhile in California, where courts upheld that state’s similar Prop 209 civil rights initiative, black and Hispanic grad rates have bloomed as students have found admission to California state schools where they are best suited (as the Reason Foundation’s Shikha Dalmia and I first reported in a series of articles in 2006).

“Black and Hispanic students improved their academic performance and graduated at stunningly improved rates,” write UCLA scholar Rick Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor in their brilliant book, “Mismatch.” After Prop 209 passed, “the number of UC blacks and Hispanic freshman who went on the graduate in four years rose 55 percent.”

The remarkable success of California civil rights initiative is recognition that not all students are suited for elite colleges like Cal-Berkeley and UCLA (the UC system equivalents of U-M). With colorblind admissions, minority students thrived among their academic peers at colleges like Cal-Riverside and Cal-Irvine. The result was more minority students with degrees, on par with whites and ripe for employment. Meanwhile, Sander finds that U-M has doubled down on race preferences since MCRI, at a cost of fewer minority degrees.

“I think I am more prepared in terms of graduate school than I would have been if I had gone to UCLA,” a black UC-Riverside student told The New York Times.

Old Left academics like Coleman built a self-serving, bean-counting culture of diversity to the detriment of student success. One Michigan administrator admitted to me that most minority students didn’t come from Detroit but from affluent suburbs in Okemos and Bloomfield Hills to meet race quotas, denying needier, more-academically qualified white and Asian students admission.

One of those students was Gratz, who has spent her life advocating that Michigan follow California’s example. Gratz was the first person in her blue-collar family to attend college, a measure of diversity U-M’s cramped, racial definition did not recognize.

“The people of Michigan spoke loud and clear in 2006 when it voted to make preferences unconstitutional,” said Gratz in the wake of Coleman’s retirement. “We will see if U-M values true diversity or if they continue to see diversity as something that is simply skin deep.”

Embracing Gratz in its presidential search would re-establish Michigan’s university system as a meritocracy focused on graduating every student with a degree. And U-M would finally catch up with the state’s colorblind constitution.

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