Word: michigan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...next to impossible, but technology has essentially eliminated natural selection as well. During prehistory, only the fittest individuals and species survived to reproduce. Now strong and weak alike have access to medicine, food and shelter of unprecedented quality and abundance. "Poor peasants in the Third World," says University of Michigan anthropologist Milford Wolpoff, "are better off than the Emperor of China was 1,000 years...
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...
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...
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...
...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...