Across the state, activists on both sides of the debate are revving up for an all-out war this fall to settle the fate of affirmative action. Both sides will court Michigan voters, who will decide whether to support the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal that seeks to ban some affirmative action programs in the state.

Meanwhile, Tyrone Winfrey, director of the University's Detroit Admissions Office, visits Lewis Cass Technical High School, Detroit's largest magnet school. In his hundreds of visits to the school, Winfrey, a Cass Tech graduate and Detroit School Board member, is anxious to convince those final few admitted students who have not yet decided to come to the University next fall to commit.

It is uncertain how the proposal - which proponents argue would remove unfair racial preferences used in university admissions, government employment and public contracting - would change the relationship between schools like Cass Tech and the University.

Cass Tech's student body is 95 percent black. The school usually sends more than 40 underrepresented minority students to the University each year. This is largely due to the school's high academic standards as well as intensive recruiting efforts by Winfrey and his staff. The school offers 11 advanced placement courses and requires students to maintain a 2.5 grade point average to stay enrolled.

Affirmative action in action

Because many of Cass Tech's seniors are academically qualified to attend the University, quantifying just how much of an impact affirmative action admissions policies have on the number of Technicians admitted is nearly impossible, said Chris Lucier, associate director of admissions. He added that this is especially true given that the University's holistic admissions review process considers a variety of factors other than race.

"I think that's a misunderstanding of the process to say that (admissions officials) say, 'Because of this factor, this student is admitted,' " he said.

He explained that application reviewers look not only at race and academic scores but at whether applicants are from a single-parent home, have overcome a significant obstacle in their lives or are the first generation of their families to attend college.

Out of the 25,000 applications submitted to the University each year, about 23,500 are from high school seniors that are academically qualified to attend, said Lucier. The challenge is selecting about 5,000 of those applicants who will best contribute to the campus community.

Once reviewers establish that a candidate is able to succeed academically at the University, they then consider what a student could bring to a diverse campus community based on their life experiences. This, Lucier said, is where affirmative action comes into play.

Lucier said that a misunderstanding of the admissions process, coupled with fallout from the 2003 lawsuits in which the Supreme Court upheld the University's use of racial preference in admissions, led to the stereotype that all black students were admitted because of affirmative action policies.

Black students admitted to the University "have academic records that are as strong, if not stronger, than the person next to them in their classroom or their residence hall room," he said.

Still, it is undeniable that some students are chosen over others based partly on their racial identity.

University Spokeswoman Julie Peterson said part of the rationale behind race-conscious policies is that considering race in admissions helps the relatively few underrepresented minority applicants from drowning in a sea of white applicants.

"If we didn't have a race-conscious process, the sheer mathematics of it would mean that the applications from minority students would be drowned out by those from majority students, and therefore very few minority students would be admitted," she said.

Opponents of the ballot measure say affirmative action is necessary because it extends equal opportunities to minorities who otherwise would not have adequate access to public higher education and employment. But MCRI supporters say practices like the University's admissions policies constitute a violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all citizens regardless of race.

What all this means for some University recruitment programs that focus on underrepresented minorities - the programs that allow Winfrey and other recruiters to maintain an almost daily presence in schools like Cass Tech - is still up in the air. According to Peterson, exactly which recruitment programs would have to be terminated could only be determined via the inevitable lawsuits that would occur if Michigan voters approve MCRI on Nov. 7.

"We can predict a fair amount of litigation," she said.