Anti-Affirmative Action Ballot Initiatives

In November 2006, Michigan passed Proposal 2, an anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment, becoming the latest state to ban affirmative action based on race, gender, ethnicity, color or national origin in public employment, public education and government contracting. California passed a similar amendment in 1996, and Washington adopted a law in 1998. Now, Californian Ward Connerly and other supporters of such initiatives are organizing campaigns in Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri and South Dakota for 2008 elections.

Prop. 209, the California constitutional amendment, has had extensive, well-documented, negative consequences for women, African Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans and, therefore, for the state as a whole. Since it is virtually identical to Proposal 2 in Michigan, we can expect similar results here, unless we are creative, vigilant, and determined to learn from previous experience. See CEW research papers The Gender Impact of the Proposed Michigan Civil Rights Initiative and The Potential Impact of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative on Employment, Education and Contracting, as well as the UM website about Proposal 2 for more information.

Maintaining Access and Opportunity

While the anti-affirmative action initiatives have taken away an important tool for achieving diversity, other tools are left. States, institutions, and citizens have acted to preserve access and opportunity in a number of ways. Washington and Michigan declared that targeted outreach remains legal. Colleges and universities have redesigned their admissions and scholarship or fellowship criteria to emphasize such factors as socioeconomic status, whether a student is the first in her or his family to attend college, geographic region, overcoming adversity, leadership, special talents, distance traveled (student achievement in the context of available resources), direction headed (what the student intends to do with the degree), and contribution to diversity, broadly construed. Private entities, which are not governed by the initiatives, have stepped forward to provide scholarships designed to promote diversity. The state of Washington created a program to support small businesses and continues outreach and education programs for women- and minority-owned enterprises.

At the University of Michigan, the Diversity Blueprints Task Force, comprising faculty, staff, students and community members, has issued an extensive set of recommendations. The Center for the Education of Women will continue to do all we can to ensure access, equity and excellence at the University of Michigan and throughout the state.

Post-Initiative Updates:

The University has created two new scholarships to replace others that took race into account. Michigan Tradition Awards are for students from underrepresented schools and neighborhoods—areas that may be disadvantaged and traditionally do not send many students to the University of Michigan. Students must be either the first in their family to attend college, raised in a single-parent home or from a family earning an income of less than $50,000. Michigan Experience Awards are for students who have participated in state or federal early-awareness or college-readiness programs typically based on socioeconomic status, like Upward Bound, Talent Search and Gear-Up.

Challenged by an offer from UM President Mary Sue Coleman to match their gifts, University donors greatly accelerated their rate of scholarship giving in order to fund these new programs.

After ten years of declining African American enrollments following passage of Prop. 209 in California, UCLA—which is located in the county with the second largest African American population in the country—has doubled its African American enrollment from 2.2% in 2006-2007 to an anticipated 4.5% in 2007-2008. The campus’s 2006-2007 numbers had been the lowest since 1973.

In April 2007, the California Court of Appeals ruled that, in light of an extensively documented history of discrimination, a San Francisco ordinance requiring outreach to women- and minority-owned contractors may be required by federal equal protection law, opening the door to reinstatement of some forms of affirmative action.

Read more about the Center’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.

Additional links:
Equal Justice Society www.equaljusticesociety.org
Leadership Conference for Civil Rights www.civilrights.org