If you forgot that civil rights refer to the rights of all citizens (not the preferred few) then it is you, not MCRI that misleads people.

Perhaps your (misleading) column should come with a warning label: misleadingly named columns can be detrimental to your civil rights.

Of course racial discrimination still exists. Your column is living proof.

I’m afraid something happened to the facts in transit from Michigan to California.

The MCRI is simply a restatement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Senator Hubert Humphrey, one of the last great Democrat statesmen, was one of the key authors of the act. When asked if the act would promote what later became known as “affirmative action”, Humphrey said that if it did, he would eat the entire act, cover-to-cover.

When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the University of Michigan to continue to admit less qualified minority students a major portion of Michigan taxpayers were incensed at the ruling. Ward Connerly simply helped opponents of affirmative action to organize their efforts toward correcting this injustice.

You say you wonder if the voters actually knew what the proposal meant. Yes, we did. Every political candidate, major corporation and major newspaper urged voting against the measure fearing boycotts, violence and harassment.

Perhaps with minorities attending Michigan universities for which they are fully qualified, their graduation rate will approach that of whites as it has in California since the passage of Proposal 209.

By the way, while we sometimes seem almost universally reviled, white, conservative men have civil rights, too.

Sigh. This news made me extremely disappointed too and moreso because the U of M had fought so hard (with the support of major corporations, numerous higher education associations, and the US military) to keep the right to consider race as ONE of many factors in admission. Colorblind measures in a society that is still rife with racial inequality and numerous examples of racism are just not going to work.

The California CRI (prop 209) was approved by voters in 1996. There are studies that show that voters were deceived by the ballot measure language. Since 209 the number of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans attending flagship public land-grant institutions has fallen drastically. It’s a shame that our institutions don’t come close to reflecting the diversity of the state and that UCLA has 103 black students in a freshman class of ~4,800 students.

The rulings in the Gratz and Grutter reaffirmed the value of allowing universities to choose students based on a number of factors. Researchers have shown that students learn best in a diverse environment, and shouldn’t our postsecondary institutions be providing students with the best learning environments?

I was glad to see Ward Connerly end his term on the UC Board of Regents… too bad he had to take his agenda to Michigan.

Reg Vallin,
All students who were admitted were fully qualified based on the admissions criteria considered for admissions to the U of M. Even those on the losing end of the Grutter and Gratz cases will concede that.

Latitud32,
What persistence rate data are you referring to? Four and five-year graduation rates have increased (at least at my UC campus). However, students are also coming in with higher GPA’s and test scores and the school has implemented new policies to speed up graduation.