Reverse the Drop in Underrepresented Minority Student Enrollment at UofM

The four-year drop in black, Latina/o, and Native American student enrollment at the University of Michigan is a scandal and makes clear the urgent necessity of restoring affirmative action.  From 2005 to 2009, the number of black students in the freshman class fell from 443 to 290, Latina/o students from 312 to 224, and Native American student from 57 to 21.  The UM Law School suffered a 31% drop in minority student enrollment.  Wayne State University Medical School, which once proudly produced the largest number of black doctors of any public university in the nation, has had a devastating 64% drop in minority students.

The ban on affirmative action not only denies many of the best and brightest students access to Michigan's top universities; the decline in numbers of minority students on our campus contributes to an increasingly hostile campus climate for minority students who are here. This increase in racism perpetuates the drop in numbers of minority students both in terms of enrollment and retention. The ability of black, Latina/o and other minority students to just be themselves, learn, think, benefit from and contribute to the intellectual and social life of our campus is being sharply curtailed by the loss of a critical mass of underrepresented minority students at the university. It is unacceptable that minority students should have to accept isolation and degradation in order to be on the campus.

It is the obligation of every student on this campus to contribute to a welcoming campus climate, and to defend the right of minority students to speak the plain truth about racism on our campus and in the nation. Only an independent student movement can provide the leadership needed to stop the resegregation of our campus and realize the vision of an integrated, inclusive, diverse, and affordable University of Michigan where critical thinking is encouraged and valued.

We the undersigned...

Demand that the University of Michigan use every legal means to reverse the drop in underrepresented minority student enrollment;

Pledge to defend the right of minority and anti-racist students to speak the plain truth about racism on our campus and in the nation;

Support the constitutional challenge to Proposal 2 filed by BAMN, UEAALDF, the ACLU, and NAACP.