An anti-diversity organization is suing the University of Michigan and its student-run legal journal, the Michigan Law Review, for allegedly discriminating against straight white cisgender men.
As the Detroit Free Press reports, Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP), which describes itself as a non-profit “formed for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia,” filed the suit in federal court in Detroit in June. FASORP claims in its complaint that the Michigan Law Review discriminates against straight white men by “using race and sex preferences to select its members and articles” in violation of both Title VI and Title IX.
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The group alleges that because “left-wing students and affirmative-action devotees at the University of Michigan Law School were unhappy with the demographic makeup produced by merit-based selection … the Michigan Law Review, with the approval and acquiescence of the University of Michigan general counsel’s office, has implemented a corrupt and illegal scheme of race and sex preferences to select its student members.”
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According to the complaint, only 40 percent of Law Review staffers are chosen based on the raw scores student editors give their application materials. The remaining 60 percent are chosen by a “Holistic Review Committee,” which may take into account a 750-word personal statement that applicants may submit and on which they are allegedly “encouraged to identify their race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” according to FASORP’s complaint.
“The members of the Holistic Review Committee rig the holistic-review process to ensure that the eventual makeup of the incoming Law Review members contains what the committee members regard as a sufficiently ‘diverse’ number of women, non-Asian racial minorities, and homosexual or transgender students,” FASORP claims.
As the Free Press notes, FASORP’s focus in its suit on the consideration of applicants’ personal essays echoes a letter sent to the University of Michigan and other schools by the Department of Education acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor in February. In that letter, Trainor threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that take race into account in their admissions processes, and specifically noted that schools “may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students.”
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan told the Free Press that “the University remains steadfast in its commitment to following the law,” and that it would “vigorously” defend itself against FASORP’s allegations.
According to its complaint, FASORP is suing on behalf of four of its members, who are all white straight cisgender men. Three of them are tenured or tenure-tracked law professors at accredited schools who claim articles they submitted to the Michigan Law Review were rejected. The fourth individual is a student who has applied to the Law Review.
However, the complaint neither identifies these individuals nor names them as plaintiffs. According to the Free Press, in 2019, a judge dismissed a similar case brought by FASORP against the Harvard Law Review, ruling that by refusing to name the individual members on whose behalf it was suing, the organization had failed to establish standing.
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