AS IT WAS though, by the time I arrived as a freshman at the University of Michigan, Gratz and Hamacher, along with another woman who was denied admission by Michigan’s law school, had turned their rejections into lawsuits. The three claimed they lost their spots at Ann Arbor to minority applicants who weren’t as qualified. Their lawyers said the system needed to be changed-and in the years since, plenty of plans like it have been. Legal fights in Georgia, Texas, Washington and California made our homegrown debate just another in a string of suits challenging the sort of racial preference systems that schools had used for years.
But now, just one case remains.
The issue that took center stage virtually overnight last week has been simmering in Ann Arbor for six years. Bush’s stand against the Michigan system and the subsequent response from Democratic presidential candidates may have galvanized the debate over how educational opportunity is dolled out, but from the campus the strong words were simply the latest in a chorus with which Michigan is all too familiar.
Michigan has never disputed that its system gives a leg up to underrepresented minorities–an advantage that the high court greenlighted in its 1978 Bakke decision. But for Michigan, the devil might not be in the details, but rather in the descriptors. Bush’s broad denunciation of “quotas” last week marked the first time that the term had been used about Michigan policies. Campus officials decried it as “simply incorrect.” Those who turned out to support the college’s policies at a chilly rally on Friday led by Michigan Democratic Rep. John Dingell agreed that Bush may have succeeded in bringing the debate to a national stage, but as a host of local Democrats claimed, he also managed to crowd out the real questions the court will decide in March.
Even so, when Bush announced his stand against the Michigan system, the reaction on campus wasn’t a frenzied meet-me-at-the-barricades response. Instead the now-media-savvy usual players took their cues, smiled for the cameras and then spit venom and accusations for the klieg lights and the reporters. By now, they know the drill. These days the campus’ most vocal activists–some of whom were in high school when the cases started and are now in grad school at Michigan–have grown comfortable with the press. So comfortable in fact that rather than call for rallies and marches, they convene press conferences like the one they held the day after Bush’s statement last week. There, supporters of the Michigan policies decried Bush as a “resegregationist” while opponents of the policies spent the day predicting the end of the university’s admissions system.
That university, of course is situated in a sort of world of its own, a cultural and academic bubble, made to feel as if it sits a million miles from both the blue-collar auto factories outside Detroit and the conservative enclaves of western and northern Michigan. But in reality the campus is a not-so-distant 35 miles or so from the urban blight that scars inner city Detroit–where the embodiment of racial questions are left like burned-out buildings from race riots only a generation old.
While Bush, last week drew connections to unpopular and illegal quota systems, affirmative-action supporters on campus drew connections to that real world just beyond Ann Arbor–a place comprised, they say, of inner-city kids who would be shut out of schools like Michigan should the court fail to uphold the university’s policies. Student activists even bussed high schoolers from Detroit to rallies and marches in Ann Arbor and to appearances at circuit court in Cincinnati last year in hopes of selling the notion that access to schools in danger for urban students.
While the cases seemed, at times hung up in a sea of motions and rulings, the discussion itself gained incredible volume on campus in the past six years. The student political parties from which campus leaders were elected began to take sides and craft planks in their platforms on affirmative action not long after the lawsuits were announced. An entire party was established to support candidates for student posts who advanced the cause of racial preferences. And later the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit allowed many of these same students to organize an intervening defense to support the admissions policies on grounds that the Michigan lawyers chose not to pursue-that the school’s policies were constitutional because they answered past wrongs.
But campus opinion has never rested completely on the side of the university’s policies-far from it in fact. Conservative student groups, often outnumbered, outmarched, and outheard by more organized activists supporting the university have nonetheless led a vocal charge to oppose what they termed again last week as “reverse discrimination.”
It’s the same claim Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher first made six years ago when they argued for their day in class. Instead, in March, they’ll get the same thing an embattled campus will–a final day in court.
