Michigan and beyond: Ward Connerly keeps after race preferences.

GERALD FORD had been dead for just a day when the University of Michigan issued its official statement of mourning. President Mary Sue Coleman used the occasion not only to lament the loss of the man who is her school's best-known alumnus, but also to score an ideological point: "In recent years, and perhaps most importantly, President Ford was outspoken in his support for our diversity programs through our defense of affirmative action to the Supreme Court."

Perhaps most importantly? The University of Michigan is home to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. But, in the mind of Coleman, these permanent presences pale in comparison with Ford's endorsement of racial preferences. Or perhaps she simply wanted to exploit the news of Ford's death to continue fighting what suddenly has become a losing battle for Ann Arbor's bean counters.

The university's defeat, coming at the hands of voters who overwhelmingly approved the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in November, represents an astonishing victory for conservatives. It's a success story that upends the conventional wisdom of just three years ago, when it looked like racial preferences would survive far into the future. Today they are in jeopardy as never before.

By the end of the 1990s, opponents of racial preferences were on a roll. Inspired by Ward Connerly, voters in California and Washington passed ballot initiatives banning the consideration of race in public contracting, employment, and education. Judges were increasingly inclined to restrict the government's use of preferences, and federal rulings essentially eliminated them at the University of Texas and the University of Georgia. When the Supreme Court agreed to consider a pair of cases involving the University of Michigan, conservatives were hopeful that the justices would deliver a death blow.

Instead, they tossed out a lifeline. Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion: "The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." In other words, color-coded admissions had the high court's seal of approval for another generation. "That ruling alarmed me," says Connerly. "There were moments when I really thought about packing it in."

There had been other setbacks as well. In 2000, a Connerly-led referendum in Florida failed to qualify for the ballot. (Yet it may have succeeded in prompting Gov. Jeb Bush to phase out preferences in state universities.) Three years later, Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, which sought to ban all racial classifications by the California government, lost badly at the polls. The drive to enact colorblind public policies seemed to have run out of gas. When Connerly announced his intention to launch the MCRI, some of his allies harbored strong doubts: "I didn't think he could win, and I knew we couldn't afford another defeat," says Abigail Thernstrom of the Manhattan Institute.

A victory in Michigan promised to bring with it enormous symbolic value because of the Supreme Court cases, but it was also a risky move: The state leans blue and national trends suggested that conservative turnout would be down in 2006. What's more, virtually every member of the state establishment denounced the effort: Democratic and Republican officeholders, business leaders, labor bosses, pastors, and so on. "They claimed that breast-cancer-screening centers would be shut down and domestic-violence shelters would be challenged. They even had a radio ad that compared passage of the MCRI to the tragedies of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina," says Jennifer Gratz, the campaign's executive director (and a plaintiff in one of the Supreme Court's Michigan cases). These opponents outspent Connerly, Gratz, and their allies by a factor of at least three. A state election board altered the ballot language in an unhelpful way. By the summer, polls suggested that support for the initiative had slipped beneath the all-important 50-percent threshold. A day before the election, the Evans-Novak Political Report predicted that it would "fail by a large margin."

Instead it won big: 58 percent to 42. The next day, Michigan president Coleman spoke at a campus rally. "There are serious questions as to whether this initiative is lawful," she said. Perhaps she should have checked in with the professors at her own top-ranked law school: Although liberal civil-rights groups have filed suit against the new law, there's really no serious question about its constitutionality. Indeed, when the University of Michigan sought to delay the implementation of the MCRI until this summer so that it could use a consistent standard for admitting next year's class of students--a request that even some MCRI supporters considered reasonable--a federal appeals panel objected.

Bureaucrats in Ann Arbor aren't the only ones trying to resist the new law. The state government in Lansing, under reelected Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, has ordered a review of programs but doesn't appear to be in any hurry to comply. The City of Detroit says it won't even do that much: It continues to insist that blacks, who compose more than 80 percent of the population, would suffer from racism if they didn't have set-asides and other preferences. Elsewhere, however, the MCRI has started to have an impact. At Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, for example, administrators are abolishing a minority-only scholarship.

Before the passage of the MCRI, the struggle against racial preferences had not screeched to a complete halt. Since 2002, the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) has helped eliminate racial exclusivity in more than 150 programs at colleges and universities around the country, including Princeton, MIT, and the University of Colorado. Last year, at the urging of CEO, the Department of Justice cracked down on a graduate-student program at Southern Illinois University that excluded whites. The Center for Individual Rights, which has defended the MCRI in court, is also suing Virginia Commonwealth University for holding a no-whites-allowed summer journalism program.

Far more important than any of these individual advances, however, are a pair of cases now before the Supreme Court involving K-12 education. The public school systems in Louisville and Seattle are defending their use of race-based policies--not, they claim, because they want to compensate for past discrimination, but because "diversity" is such an important goal that governments must be allowed to sort children by their skin color. This is essentially what the University of Michigan said in defense of its admissions policies three years ago, and the Supreme Court bought it. Yet with Samuel Alito replacing O'Connor on the bench, there is good reason to believe that this time the outcome will be different.

Looking forward, the role of the federal government in the fight against racial preferences is uncertain. Last year in the House, Republican congressman Steve King of Iowa proposed a "sunshine" bill that would have required schools to report on how they use preferences. The bill didn't fare well in the GOP-controlled Congress and won't do any better in the new Democratic one. The Bush administration could still apply pressure through the Departments of Education, Justice, and Labor, and there is likely to be considerable internal debate on this in the next two years.

One early sign isn't encouraging: In December, the Senate confirmed Sara Martinez Tucker as undersecretary of education in charge of higher education. She wasted no time in attacking the MCRI as a tool of social Darwinism. "If we stay with Connerly, it's survival of the fittest," she warned in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, an online publication. Tucker went on to claim that "the Connerly approach" would cut minority enrollment in universities by half. Since California eliminated preferences a decade ago, however, minority enrollment in the UC system has actually increased.

The primary battleground over preferences is likely to remain in the states. "The 25-year aspiration of Sandra Day O'Connor is going to be abbreviated considerably," says Connerly. "We just moved the ball from our own 30-yard line to our opponents' 20-yard line." Connerly is now talking about sponsoring what he calls a "Super Tuesday for Equality"--simultaneous ballot initiatives in several states, all on November 4, 2008. Since the MCRI's victory, Connerly has traveled to Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming to meet with local activists. He also plans to look at Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Utah. "We are more likely than not to prevail anywhere we go," he says. "The last chapter in the story of racial preferences is being written right now."

May they rest in peace.