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The University of Michigan announced Wednesday it will comply with a new voter-approved ban on affirmative action and immediately stop considering race and gender in admissions. ADVERTISEMENT The move came in the middle of the admissions process for next fall's freshman class. The university has already begun sending out acceptance and rejection letters. The state constitutional amendment approved by the voters in November bans the use of race and gender preferences in public university admissions and government hiring and contracting. After it passed, the university put its admission process on hold and asked the courts that it be given until...

Ward Connerly has done it again: A striking 58% of Michigan voters gave the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative a thumbs up; only three counties voted against it. The language of the MCRI closely tracks California's 1996 Proposition 209, also led by Mr. Connerly. It amends the Michigan Constitution to "ban public institutions from using affirmative-action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes." The political and business establishments, pressure groups like the AARP, labor-union leaders, religious spokesmen, the professoriat, the major Detroit...

Read about how and why the GOP is proclaiming the diversity mantra and siding with those promoting racial preferences. Warning to Caucasians and Asians - you don't really take the U.S.Constitution seriously, do you?

University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman pledged Wednesday to continue the fight for diversity, vowing that the University will “consider every legal option available.” Here is the text of Coleman's address to the University community on the U-M Diag, one day after Michigan voters approved Proposal 2: Diversity matters at Michigan, today more than any day in our history. It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow. It will always matter because it is what makes us the great university we are. I am deeply disappointed that the voters of our state have rejected affirmative action as a way...

DETROIT (AP) — Courts could play a major role in figuring out the effects of Michigan's Proposal 2, a voter-approved measure to end race and gender preferences in some government and public university affirmative action programs. With 98 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday, 58 percent, or 2,090,066 people voted "yes" on Proposal 2, and 42 percent, or 1,519,942 voters, were opposed. The University of Michigan, the most high-profile public institution affected by the constitutional amendment, scheduled a Wednesday news conference to discuss the proposal's ramifications. The university might again have to alter how it includes race in determining which...

The radical fringe group known as BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) sent two busloads of Detroit school kids to Lansing Wednesday, ostensibly because their futures depended on the actions at a meeting of the State Board of Canvassers that they attended. While skipping a chance to learn in a classroom, and perhaps improve their grades so they might get accepted at a major college, the students were drawn into a raucous, verbal assault on public officials. Two officials shriveled in cowardice at the sight -- and refused to uphold state laws. The issue is the effort by a group called...

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- Police officers had to be called Wednesday to a meeting of the state elections board after a student protest delayed a vote on whether to put a proposal that would ban some affirmative action programs in Michigan on the November 2006 ballot. The police came to the Board of State Canvassers meeting after high school students from the Detroit area knocked over an empty table where witnesses give testimony. The table was knocked over as students chanted "They say Jim Crow, we say hell no!" and moving toward the front of the room when the board...

The debate over race and gender preferences is always an intense one. Proponents of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) believe that all people should be treated as equal individuals. We believe that any time a preference is given to an individual of one "race" over an individual of another "race," or to one gender over the other, treatment cannot be equal. We believe that all people should be judged based on character, merit, and accomplishments — not skin color or gender. I, for one, do not want to be given a preference over my brother solely because I am...

Liberals have been beating their collective breast in recent years over the Bush administration's post-9/11 assault on civil liberties. But Michigan Democrats-- from Gov. Jennifer Granholm to the State Board of Canvassers-- have joined ranks with a radical, 1960s-style Trotskyite group to deny state residents the most basic of all rights: the right to vote. The group, which... calls itself By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), has been engaged in a long guerilla campaign to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) from getting on the state ballot. This initiative, backed by Ward Connerly, ...seeks to end, once and for all,...

The Board of State Canvassers met yesterday to consider approval for a ballot measure that would end affirmative action in Michigan. The meeting was clearly one of the most cantankerous to have occurred in Lansing in years as protesters gather outside the House Office Building to defend affirmative action. In the end, the Board was deadlocked on the issue even though its sponsor, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), submitted 65% more signatures than were needed to put the question on the ballot. A court challenge is expected. We will defer analysis of the legal merits to the legal challenge...

Complaints continue in affirmative action petition campaigns 6/9/2005, 8:16 p.m. ET The Associated Press LANSING, Mich. (AP) — The group behind an anti-affirmative action ballot proposal said Thursday it is filing a campaign finance complaint against one of its political opponents. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative complaint says the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (BAMN) intentionally underreported its campaign contributions. That allowed BAMN to avoid a trigger that would require it to open up its donor and expenditure records, according to the complaint, which MCRI spokesman Chetly Zarko...

A majority of small and midsize business owners and managers surveyed in a Crain’s poll support a state constitutional amendment banning racial, gender and ethnic preferences in state government and universities.The findings mirror another poll by John Bailey & Associates, which was commissioned by the Detroit Regional Chamber. Crain’s poll, conducted by EPIC-MRA, had a larger sample size. (See box, Page 88.) ... Ward Connerly — a former University of California regent and a nationally known opponent of racial preferences — is backing the Michigan initiative. A group called the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative circulated petitions in the state. Jennifer...

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — A group seeking to end affirmative action in Michigan says it is in the final stages of a petition drive aimed at putting a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2006 ballot. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative must turn in at least 317,757 valid signatures of voters to qualify for the ballot. The group must collect all those signatures within 180 days, which would bring a January deadline for an effort that began last summer. Chetly Zarko, a spokesman for the group, declined to say how many signatures had been collected or exactly when they would be...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version April 07, 2004, 8:20 a.m. Blocking the VoteDefenders of racial preferences twist the law in Michigan. By Ward Connerly Whatever we do, we can't let the people vote. That seems to be the attitude of the elites in the state of Michigan. They will do anything to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) — a proposition to end racial preferences in the public arena — from getting on the ballot. My organization, the American Civil Rights Coalition, and I are working with the brave folks in...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 26, 2004, CONTACT: Tim O’Brien 313.550.9000, SOUTHGATE, MIJUDGE REJECTS REQUEST TO HALT MICHIGAN CIVIL RIGHTS PETITION DRIVEIn a sharply worded opinion, Wayne County Circuit Judge Susan Borman, denied a request by two attorneys to halt the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative petition drive to amend the state constitution by prohibiting race and gender preferences by state and local government.Two attorneys brought the motion claiming that the circulation of the petitions should be barred because the effect of the amendment would be to undo the recent Grutter v. Bollinger decision by the US Supreme Court that permitted government...