Revealing Admissions From Michigan Preference Supporters

From Bloomberg News:

Michigan Law School’s admissions director, Sarah Zearfoss, sighs when asked in her office what steps she has taken to bring in more black students in the aftermath of Proposal 2.

“So many things, so many things, and — spoiler alert — none of it really has helped,” Zearfoss said.

She pointed to a list of efforts to recruit more black applicants and persuade more admitted students to enroll. The school has enlisted black students, professors and alumni to help — all to no avail.

Part of the problem is that virtually every accepted black student also has offers from a half-dozen or more other top-flight law schools, guaranteeing that Michigan will enroll only a fraction of them.

“These are all people who anyone would want to admit,” Zearfoss said. Unable to consider race, she said she can no longer bolster minority enrollment with “hidden gems” who escaped the attention of other schools.

In other words, in order to provide more “diversity” Michigan believes it needs racial preferences in order to admit and attract black students who do not meet the standards required by other top rank law schools. And people wonder why (and others wonder why some deny) there is a stigma attached to “affirmative action admits.”

Not everyone at Michigan agrees that ending preferential admissions was bad.

Carl Cohen, a University of Michigan philosophy professor opposed to racial preferences, says the ban on them freed minority students from suspicion that they gained admissions by reason of race, rather than merit.

“When you don’t have preferences, the atmosphere is healthier,” said Cohen, whose Freedom of Information Act requests in the 1990s forced the university to reveal it considered race in admissions. “You just don’t hear any expressions of resentment that you did hear from time to time in the old days.”

Many others, however, prefer the “old days” of racial preferences.

Kevin Gaines, a Michigan professor who specializes in U.S. and African-American history, questioned that assessment, saying the fight against affirmative action “poisoned” the climate on campus.

Gaines said he noticed the impact of Proposal 2 in his own classrooms. Shortly after the initiative passed, his 15-student freshman seminar on the Civil Rights movement had only two black students out of 15 in the class — not enough to sustain a productive dialogue, he said.

Such low numbers leave black students feeling as though they have to serve as representatives of their race, he said. “You really need a group of five or even a half-dozen African-American students,” Gaines said.

Whether or not the people of Michigan had the right, and were in fact right, to bar discrimination against Asians, Arabs, whites, and others so that Prof. Gaines could have more than 13% blacks in his freshman seminar is a question for another day, and one that I have discussed on many days. But why does he — why does anyone — believe the three or four missing blacks that would have been admitted under lower affirmative action standards precisely and only because of the race-based “diversity” they could provide to others would not feel as though they were expected to be “representatives of their race”?

Does Prof. Gaines really believe that the Asians and whites in his class are so dumb that they must be exposed to five or six blacks rather than only two in order to realize that all blacks aren’t alike? Can’t they tell that by, say, reading opinions by Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas?

If Michigan admissions officers didn’t believe that blacks were in fact all alike in some important, racially based “diversity”-providing ways, why would admitting more blacks be so important that it was necessary to lower the admissions standards for them?