Affirmative Action's Alamo

By Jack E. White

Many civil rights lawyers agree that the University of Michigan could be the Alamo of affirmative action, the place where they make their last stand. Michigan's affirmative-action programs, especially at its prestigious law school, are among the best in the country--designed not only to produce diverse student bodies but also to withstand the sort of right-wing onslaughts, in the courts or at the polls, that have outlawed the use of racial preferences in California, Washington and other states. That's why so much is riding on two lawsuits filed by whites who claim that they were denied admission to Michigan because of their race, pointing out that some black applicants with lower test scores and grade-point averages were admitted. If affirmative action at Michigan can't survive these assaults, it's probably doomed at every other state campus in the nation.

Enter Davy Crockett...er...I mean, former President Gerald Ford, a Michigan alumnus who last week wrote an extraordinary opinion piece for the New York Times, defending the race-conscious admission policies that are at the core of the Michigan cases. Ford warned that if the courts forbid Michigan to use race, along with other factors that the school employs to select its student body--including economic standing, geographic origin, athletic and artistic achievement--they would turn back the clock to an era when minorities "were isolated and penalized for the color of their skin...or national ancestry." He recounted a revolting incident in 1934 when his black teammate, Willis Ward, voluntarily benched himself because the visiting Georgia Tech football team objected to competing against an African American. Ward's sacrifice, Ford wrote, "led me to question how educational administrators could capitulate to raw prejudice."

Ford's surprise declaration was part of a strategy by Michigan's president, Lee Bollinger, to recapture the moral high ground that affirmative-action supporters have lost to the likes of California's Ward Connerly. Bollinger insists that for a university, racial diversity is "as vital as teaching Shakespeare or mathematics." Under a color-blind admissions system, Bollinger fears, the proportion of black undergrads would nose-dive from 9% to just 1% or 2%.

A few weeks ago, Bollinger and William Bowen, co-author of The Shape of the River, an influential book about affirmative action on campus, briefed Ford about Michigan's affirmative-action procedures, which have been reviewed to ensure that they comply with Supreme Court rulings. For example, Michigan's law school does not set numerical targets for minority students. Instead, in addition to grades and test scores, it relies heavily on letters of recommendation, the applicant's essay and evidence of leadership ability. The number of minority students who enter the law school varies greatly from year to year. Surveys show there is no significant difference in job satisfaction or the passage of bar exams between minority graduates and their white counterparts. The minorities have become part of the mainstream. That kind of inclusion is precisely what affirmative action is supposed to accomplish. If enough folks like Gerald Ford can be convinced that Michigan's way of achieving it is not only effective but fair, the Alamo of affirmative action might result in victory--for the defenders.