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Home > Cases > Michigan Cases
Diversity and race
neutral admissions
Legal changes to admissions
In the decade leading up to Gratz and Grutter, hundreds of schools in five states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, California, and Washington) did away with racial preferences altogether. Significantly, in 2003, no school in any of those states had under -represented minority enrollment (including all black, Hispanic and Native American students) less than ten percent. This is the percentage that the University of Michigan contends is the minimum necessary to achieve the educational benefits of diversity. The actions in these states was the result, partly, of CIR's 1996 victory in Hopwood v. Texas, which did away with racial double standards in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and Johnson v. Georgia, which did away with preferences in that state. Partly, too, it was the result of citizen ballot initiatives in California and Washington as well as executive action in Florida, which eliminated racial double standards in that state.
Color blind success: Texas A&M
Among the success stories in ending the use of race preferences is Texas A&M University. Like all universities, A&M recognizes the value of many kinds of diversity: social, economic, political, geographic, and racial. Almost alone among Texas universities, A&M, decided in 2003 not to return to the use of race in admissions, following the Supreme Court's ruling in Grutter. Instead, A&M decided to evaluate each applicant on the basis of his or her achievements regardless of race. To ensure sufficient applications from students of all backgrounds, A&M instituted an aggressive recruiting system. It created and staffed field offices for admissions recruiters all over the state. In addition, it commissioned its alumni and students to actively recruit applicants from all backgrounds. Since A&M partly is a military school, it created a special recruiting program for applicants enrolled in high school Junior ROTC programs. Together these efforts boosted the number- and the diversity -- of the applications. The good news is that A&M's extra effort paid off. The number of black freshmen at A&M jumped 35% in fall 2004 while the number of Hispanic freshmen rose 26%. A&M's experience shows that racial preferences are not necessary to maintaining - or even increasing - racial and all other kinds of diversity.
Read a more detailed summary of A&M's diversity efforts excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
True diversity
Assembling a diverse class means looking at each of the things that make a person unique. That means admitting an individual because he has an artist's eye, a musician's ear, a comic's wit or a philosopher's wonder. It surely does not mean reducing an individual to his skin color. A person's racial heritage neither qualifies nor disqualifies him from academic discussion. UC Berkeley Professor John McWhorter among others is a forceful advocate for authentic diversity.
Click here to read one of Prof. McWhorter's articles on the real nature of diversity. Click here to read more of Prof. McWhorter's writings
A report on diversity The decisions in the Michigan cases prompted the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to publish a series of reports on color blind admissions practices, and other non-discriminatory ways of achieving racial diversity.
Click here to read OCR's latest report.
Click here to return to the Michigan information page
 Last
revised:
23-Jul-2013
 
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