Happy New Year!
Wolverine Nation relocated to southern California this past holiday season, as supporters of the Maize and Blue flocked to see Michigan play in the Rose Bowl football game (the less said about the game, the better).
I'm from Los Angeles and was back home visiting family. I did not go to the game, but my family and I attended a pep rally for the team at the Santa Monica Pier, Sunday, December 31, the day before the game.
I would say there were at least a few thousand Wolverine fans there. Because we were a bit late in arriving, we had to stand off to one side of the stage, behind a huge sea of humanity. Afterwards, however, a couple family members and I walked around the main area where the stage was.
UM President Mary Sue Coleman was in the area, and what looked like a dozen or so students were reacting to her as if she were a rock star, requesting to take photos with her. I waited my turn and got to take a picture with her, too (shown above). There were two points I wanted to convey to her, and did during my brief opportunity:
(1) After introducing myself as a Michigan Ph.D. recipient and current faculty member at Texas Tech University, I noted to her that my president at Texas Tech is her former provost when she was president at the University of Iowa, Jon Whitmore.
(2) In reaction to a statewide ballot proposition passed in November 2006 barring consideration of race/ethnicity (and some other demographic characteristics) in decision-making by Michigan governmental entities, President Coleman had vowed to use all legally available means to maintain a diverse student body at the university. (Many of you will recall that the U.S. Supreme Court had said in 2003 that race-sensitive admissions policies, if properly designed, were constitutional. The Court's opinion only said, however, that such policies were allowable, not required.)
In that context, I told President Coleman that, through my experiences as a social psychology graduate student, I had gotten to know some of the faculty members who would go on to play roles in defending the university's admissions policies at the Supreme Court. I then finished with my encouragement to her to, "keep fighting the good fight on educational diversity."
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In addition to former football coach Bo Schembechler, about whom I wrote a couple entries ago, the University of Michigan lost another icon recently, former U.S. president Gerald R. Ford. Not only was Ford a UM alunmus; he also played football for the Wolverines. Also, the UM's School of Public Policy was named after Ford a few years ago.