A Dream Denied Leads Woman to Center of Suit
Gratz's Rejection by U-Mich. Led Her to Fight Against Race-Conscious
Admissions
washingtonpost.com
By Anne Hull Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 23, 2003; Page A01
OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- Jennifer Gratz has heard it all. That she's a pawn of the right. That she's hijacked the language of the civil rights era. That her lawsuit against the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy cloaks a deeper agenda about race. "Totally crazy," says the 25-year-old, shaking her head.
The facts. In 1995, Gratz was a high school student with a 3.8 GPA, the golden face of her yearbook when she applied to the University of Michigan and was rejected. Two years later, she helped lead a class action lawsuit against the university, alleging that the school's admissions policies gave an unfair edge to minority applicants. With her case now at the Supreme Court, Gratz has become the central figure in a sprawling ideological debate over affirmative action. It is her story that will challenge the fairness of race-conscious admissions programs: Gratz represents the white working-class striver passed over in the name of diversity.
"I can't tell you exactly how my life would be different, because I wasn't given the opportunity," says Gratz, who left Michigan two years ago and now lives in the rugged hills north of San Diego. She is not the forensic scientist she thought she'd become; she is a software trainer for a vending machine company called SupplyPro. Newly married, Gratz is sitting in the kitchen of her light-filled stucco house in a planned community. It's the morning after Valentine's Day, when her husband surprised her with homemade ravioli and a chocolate soufflŽ.
A pair of Betty Crocker cookbooks rest on the kitchen counter. Relaxed and polished, Gratz is a benefactor of innate intelligence and careful coaching by those whose cause she is championing. After six years as a plaintiff, she is still handled with care: Her lawyers in Washington allow a sit-down interview with a reporter, but the conversation is monitored via speaker phone, with occasional interjections. To some degree, Gratz was snapped into machinery that was churning before she received her rejection letter.
The battle began in 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that race could be used as a factor in admitting students but that quotas were forbidden. In 1996, a federal appeals court in Texas barred the consideration of race in admissions and financial aid. In 1995, events were taking hold in Michigan. A cache of documents forced into public view revealed Michigan's admissions process. The group of lawyers who won the Texas case was looking for another. From this confluence emerged Gratz. Gratz wasn't an activist or grass-roots warrior. She was a teenager whose rejection by her dream school shook her confidence and sense of fairness.
She had spent years polishing her credentials for the University of Michigan, working hard, volunteering, studying, even chairing blood drives. Then the dream was snatched away. A minority student with the same GPA and test scores as Gratz would have likely been accepted under Michigan's policy. Michigan acknowledges that it weighs race when considering applicants. To process the more than 25,000 undergraduate applications that flood in each year for the 5,000 coveted spots, the school uses a point system to score each prospective student. Black, Latino and Native American applicants are awarded extra points because they belong to groups the university says are underrepresented on campus. In the 2002 class, blacks made up almost 9 percent of Michigan's freshman class, Latinos 6 percent and Native Americans almost 2 percent.
"We want to have a class that thinks about issues from different backgrounds," says Mary Sue Coleman, the university's president. The notion galls Gratz. Atmospheres can't be "engineered," she says. Points for being a minority? "That would be like me deciding, 'Hey, I want to feed the hungry but I don't have any means to do that, so I'm going to go rob a grocery store,' " she says. "It's still illegal, even though my intentions are good." The University of Michigan is one of the most idyllic campuses in America. On fall Saturdays, when 107,000 fans jam into Michigan Stadium and shatter NCAA attendance records, a sonic halo lifts over Ann Arbor. The splendor is secondary to academics:
Michigan is one of two public institutions consistently ranked among the nation's top 10 universities. Gratz grew up 45 minutes away in Southgate, a working-class suburb of Detroit where many in her neighborhood pulled shift work at the auto assembly plants. Her dad was a police sergeant who worked $10-an-hour moonlighting jobs as a security guard; her mom was a secretary. Neither parent finished college. On Saturday afternoons in the Gratz house, Michigan football ruled the TV. Gratz attended St. Pius Catholic School through the eighth grade and then set her sights on studying forensic medicine at Michigan. At Southgate Anderson High, she did it all: student government, National Honor Society, science club, spirit club, cheerleader. In Michigan, cheerleading is a sanctioned sport involving stunts and occasional calls for an ambulance.
Gratz was so competitive that she used visualization techniques to enhance her performance. "I definitely loved the physical aspects of cheering, of knowing that I could hold a girl above my head," she says. Race was almost a nonissue at Southgate, because 94 percent of its students were white. The prom was held at the Grecian Center next to the Greek Orthodox church. Gratz would arrive home after a 12-hour day packed with school and extracurricular activities, her dinner waiting on a plate in the kitchen. Southgate didn't offer Advanced Placement courses, but as a senior Gratz took precalculus and three honors courses. Her GPA was 3.8, and she scored a 25 out of 36 on her ACT college entrance exam. "Jennifer did everything we asked her to do, and more," says a former assistant principal, Ron Dittmer. "I wouldn't ask any more of my own daughter." Gratz was so confident that she'd make the cut at Michigan that she applied to no other colleges. The wait-list letter was the first bad sign.
Then in April of her senior year, after weeks of running home from school to check the mail, came the thin letter of rejection. Through her tears, Gratz uttered her now-famous rejoinder: "Dad, can we sue?" It was an odd reaction for a 17-year-old. But Gratz said she suspected something amiss, if not precisely that she'd been passed over because she was white. "Everyone knew bits and pieces," she says, about the premium Michigan placed on diversity. Gratz was in a state of shock. She was so embarrassed by the rejection that she told no one, not even her boyfriend of three years. She hurriedly applied to the University of Notre Dame but didn't get in. She was accepted into the honors program at the University of Michigan's campus in Dearborn.
Dearborn: "You've got four or five buildings where you take your classes," Gratz says, with none of the luminosity she reserves to describe Ann Arbor. "No dorms, the U-Mall with 40 or 50 tables where you could sit around waiting for your next class to start. It wasn't college." Ann Arbor: "They bring in recruiters from across the country and from around the world." Dearborn: "They bring in recruiters from metro Detroit." She began her freshman year, commuting the 15-minute drive from her parents' home.
Around the same time, a University of Michigan philosophy professor named Carl Cohen read in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that acceptance rates for blacks at top-tier universities were higher than for whites. Suspicious of his own university's admissions system, Cohen filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents showed that Michigan used a grid to evaluate applicants, in part based on race. The grid launched everything: Cohen's testimony before the Michigan legislature sparked four Republican lawmakers to take up the cause. One of the politicians was then-state Rep. Deborah Whyman, who called the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative Washington law firm that was hot off its 1996 victory in the Texas affirmative action case. "We laid out a game plan," says Whyman.
"When it came down to finding plaintiffs, I did it." She did talk radio shows and gave news interviews about a possible lawsuit against Michigan. Gratz's parents saw a newspaper article and clipped it for their daughter, who was working at a summer cheerleading camp but still living at home. Immediately, Gratz knew she wanted to be part of some effort against Michigan. She pictured herself stuffing envelopes. She called Whyman's office and gave her vital statistics: her high school GPA, test scores and extracurricular activities.
Whyman says she forwarded 200 names to CIR; the law firm's Curt Levey says that only "six or seven" were ever seriously considered. One was Gratz, who met with CIR attorneys at a Courtyard Marriott near the Detroit airport. A plaintiff was born. The lawsuit was filed in October 1997 on behalf of Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, another student wait-listed from Michigan's undergraduate program. A separate lawsuit was filed against the University of Michigan Law School. Oral arguments in both cases are scheduled for April 1 before the Supreme Court. Gratz absorbed most of the heat. Walking out of the courthouse after her case had been sent to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, a protester screamed at Gratz, "racist bitch!" "I'm exactly the opposite," she would later say.
"I'm standing up and saying people should not be treated differently because of their skin color." After Cohen's documents were made public, Michigan changed its admissions process, replacing the grid with the point system that is being challenged. On this "Selection Index Worksheet," a perfect GPA is worth 80 points. Having a parent who attended Michigan is worth up to four points. Scholarship athletes are awarded 20 points. A perfect SAT score brings 12 points and an excellent essay gets one point. Being an underrepresented minority brings 20 points.
"To assume a minority can't go to the University of Michigan without that 20 points is crazy," says Gratz. "There are plenty of kids who could stand on their own." Gratz has been confronted with every angle of the argument. Aren't legacy points also a form of preference? "Four points," she says, not 20. Besides, minorities can also be legacies. In a classroom setting, could a black student's viewpoints enrich a discussion about racial profiling? "Everyone in the country views racial profiling as wrong," Gratz says.
"That's exactly what the University of Michigan is doing: racial profiling. There are race-neutral ways to run an admissions process." What about affirmative action acting as a remedy for society's past discriminatory practices? Her lawyer won't allow her to answer. "That's a policy question," says Levey. As for her own life, Gratz says she decided not to transfer to Ann Arbor after her sophomore year at Dearborn; too many of her core courses wouldn't have carried over. She received her math degree in 1999.
She took a job with a credit union in Michigan, continuing to live at home. She then switched to a Los Angeles-based company, which brought her to California. When Gratz first contemplated joining the lawsuit, friends cautioned her that prospective employers might not look favorably on her stance against affirmative action. But as time passed, she says, "I found just the opposite." Gratz says she was sidetracked by a system that works against whites, but she has made the best of her life.
"I'm not an angry or bitter person," she says, gently picking up one of her
cats, Bandit. Gratz and her husband, Rob Whyte, a 31-year-old software developer,
recently honeymooned in Jamaica and are decorating their new house. "I'm proud
of her," Whyte says, taking a break from installing a satellite dish on their
roof on a Saturday morning. "She's standing up for something that a lot of us
believe is the right thing." Far from living in racial exile, Gratz says she
is surrounded by diversity. "I have co-workers from all over the place, from
England, from Japan," she says of her job at her San Diego company.
"We have a friend from South Africa. The head coach at Wayne State University where my dad coaches baseball is African American." Hanging in Gratz's closet is a University of Michigan sweat shirt. It is a rich and painful irony, this love for the school that spurned her. Gratz was in an airport recently when she noticed that standing nearby was University of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr.
A major celebrity sighting. "I want you to know my wife is very excited to be standing next to the Michigan football coach," Gratz's husband told Carr. Introductions were made, and Gratz explained how she was such a die-hard fan that she watched last season's games on her computer. Asked if it's hard to think about minority students who walk the grounds of the Ann Arbor campus, Gratz says with the slightest bit of edge, "They've been given an opportunity to go to an excellent school. Good for them."
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