Catch 22. One student is denied admission because she doesn’t meet admission “standards” and wants to be admitted based on her skin color, another student meets admission standards but is denied admission based on her skin color.
Via Detroit FREEP
Brooke Kimbrough and Jennifer Gratz share this much in common: They both have been rejected for entrance to the University of Michigan and they both, at different times, have challenged the university’s admissions policies.
From there, the similarities turn into big differences.
Kimbrough, who is black and a senior at University Preparatory Academy in Detroit, says U-M admission policies should be flexible in admitting more minority students even if they don’t quite measure up to the school’s high standards on test scores and grade point averages.
Backed by the civil rights advocacy group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the teen went public this week with her fight to be admitted to U-M with a news conference and rally on the Ann Arbor campus.
Gratz, who is white and graduated from Southgate Anderson High School, blames the use of affirmative-action policies for her rejection in 1995 for admission to U-M. She was put on a wait list while minority students with lower GPAs and test scores were admitted.
Since then, Gratz has become the public face of the battle against affirmative action in college admissions in Michigan — first winning a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2003 that threw out the use of racial quotas at U-M and then pushing a 2006 statewide ballot initiative that banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
In many ways, the two women personify the opposing arguments in the debate over the use of affirmative action to boost minority enrollment at the state’s leading university.
Kimbrough is trying to get her denial of admission reversed and to draw attention to the decline in the number of black students at the university. She and her supporters think the current minority enrollment numbers — just over 4% of the current student body is black — are way low.
Gratz thinks admissions should be color-blind and the best candidates should get in, no matter what race they are.
They have never met, but that could soon change. On Thursday, Gratz issued a challenge to Kimbrough to publicly debate the use of affirmative action.
“Ms. Kimbrough has publicly demanded that the university should discriminate against other applicants in order to accommodate her demand for preferential treatment based on her skin color,” Gratz said in a news release. “Her very public position contrasts with that of voters who adopted a ban on racial policies in 2006. I hope Ms. Kimbrough is willing to let Michiganders consider her position on this issue in a debate.”