Terry Pell, for the National Association of Scholars, reports that the lawsuit (now dismissed) over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative has brought out some very interesting pre-trial discovery. (Via the Corner.) Michigan’s claims in court that affirmative action admits were doing fine appear to have been false:
Last fall, [UCLA Law Professor Richard] Sander had submitted his preliminary findings to the court, including the revelation that minority students at the UM Law School failed the bar at more than eight times the rate of white students during the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.
According to Sander, this data contradicted sworn testimony by UM experts during the trial in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court case challenging the use of race-based admissions at the UM law school. . . UM Professor Richard Lempert testified that, “not to put too fine a point on it, Michigan graduates pass the bar. . . I think there might of have been a statistically significant difference favoring whites, but it was substantively sort of completely trivial.”
Sanders was also able to analyze the performance of minorities before and after the MCRI:
Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% — higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%.
When faced with the data that Sanders was uncovering, Michigan stopped cooperating. No wonder, Sanders’s evidence could have undermined their partial victory at the Supreme Court, and possibly could have even exposed Michigan’s witnesses to perjury charges.
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