Be careful where you put 

your Zingerman’s sandwich this 
summer — you might just watch 
it get carried away by a group of 
children and their human-sized 
ant leader.

Tuesday, 
the 
Ann 
Arbor 

Summer Festival announced the 
2018 month-long event would 

include performances by eVenti 
Verticali’s 2-D and 3-D show 
“Wanted,” as well as Australia’s 
Polyglot Theatre production of 
Ants.

EVenti Verticali is an Italian 

multimedia 
aerial 
theater 

company that involves visual 
comedy projected onto a large 
outdoor screen. The group travels 
the world showcasing their art 
and will be in Ann Arbor for the 
Top of the Park festival on June 
19 and 20.

Polyglot Theatre’s Ants will 

also be in Ann Arbor this June. 
Their 
show 
includes 
actors 

dressed as giant ants leading 
children through an activity 
of placing breadcrumbs into 
artistic designs. The Polyglot 
Theatre, based in Australia, is 
internationally 
regarded 
for 

their “interactive spectacle for 
children.”

“Faced with hundreds of giant 

bread crumbs and three big 
insects, children are irresistibly 

drawn in to discover what the 
ants want them to do,” the AASF’s 
website 
states. 
“Gradually 
a 

world 
of 
meaning 
unfolds, 

illustrating the human desire for 
order by transforming any public 
space with wavering lines and 
patterns, crossing adult lines and 
disrupting the everyday.”

The AASF will take place 

June 8 through July 1, with Ants 
making a special appearance 
June 26 through June 28.

WASHINGTON - Six years 

ago, Barbara Grutter was 
looking over a letter of rejec-
tion from the Law School. 
Today, she will look over nine 
Supreme Court justices as 
they hear her lawyers argue 
that she was denied admission 
because of an illegal system of 
racial preference.

The hearing today is the 

result of a lawsuit she filed to 
challenge the school’s use of 
race in its admissions policies.

“We all feel very much a 

sense of ‘We need to be, here, 
and it’s time for us to be here,”’ 
Grutter said at a press confer-
ence yesterday with Jennifer 
Gratz and’ Patrick Hamacher, 
the two plaintiffs suing the 
College of Literature, Science 
and the Arts for its race-con-
scious admissions policies.

All three applicants said 

they were feeling a wide range 
of emotions in the hours 
preceding the start of the oral 
arguments that the court will 
hear at 10 a.m. today. They 
added that these cases are 
more about discrimination by 
the University on the basis 
of their skin color than the 
methods or actual policies of 
the Law School or LSA.

“We are taught in our 

schools and in our homes 
and in our churches that you 

should never judge another 
person based on her skin 
color,” Gratz said at the con-
ference, which was organized 
by the Center for Individual 
Rights, the law firm represent-
ing the plaintiffs.

“Patrick, Barbara and I are 

asking only that everyone be 
judged according to the same 
standard, regardless of race. 
That’s what the Constitution 
requires, and that’s what we’ll 
ask the Supreme Court to reaf-
firm tomorrow.”

Hamacher said his 3.3 grade 

point average, a score of 28 on 
the ACT and numerous extra-
curricular activities merited 
acceptance into the University. 

“Like Jennifer Gratz, and 

many hundreds of other white 
and Asian applicants, I wasn’t 
treated fairly by the Univer-
sity of Michigan because they 
explicitly considered our race 
to be a negative factor,” Ham-
acher said.

Although they said the Uni-

versity’s policies discriminated 
against them, all three appli-
cants said they want to pursue 
graduate-level education and 
would still consider attending 
the Uni-

versity. Grutter, a 49-year-

old mother of two and health 
care information technology 
consultant in Michigan, said 

she plans to reapply 
to the Law School if 
the court requires it 
to use a race-neutral 
policy.

“I have not relin-

quished the desire to 
combine the practice 
of law with health 
care information 
system management,” 
she said.

Hamacher, a 

24-year-old ac-
countant from Flint, 
said he hopes to 
apply to the Gerald 
R. Ford School of 
Public Policy if the 
court rules in his 
favor. Gratz, who is 
25 years old and a 
software trainer in 
Oceanside, Calif., said 
she would consider 
attending a Univer-
sity graduate school 
but may choose a 
school closer to her 
current home.

CIR President Terence Pell 

also spoke at the conference, 
saying he believes the Univer-
sity has “operated blatantly 
segregated, two-track admis-
sions systems designed to 
boost the number of minori-
ties.”

Although he refused to pre-

dict the court’s ruling, which 
is expected to be announced 
in June, Pell said he considers 
a clear, sweeping ban on race-
conscious admissions policies 
a victory.

If the court upholds both 

policies, “there will be no end 
to (the University’s) type of 
racial engineering,” Pell said. 

2A — Wednesday, April 4, 2018
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ON THE DAILY: ANTS IN ANN ARBOR 

the School of Information, 
which does not have a Race and 
Ethnicity course requirement, 
he said he still views the 
requirement as problematic.

“Race and Ethnicity is not 

the forefront purpose of the 
course,” Rasheed said. “Right 
now, Race and Ethnicity, it’s 
like the second addition, or 
the add-on. It’s a bonus. You 
don’t take Race and Ethnicity 
courses with the intention of 
thinking deeply about race and 
ethnicity. You take it for the 
subject, and it just so happens 
that it gets qualified as being 
a Race and Ethnicity course.”

Rasheed 
is 
not 
alone. 

Many students, particularly 
students 
of 
color, 
have 

expressed 
they 
take 
issue 

with the requirement. Most 

cite the watering down of 
what 
constitutes 
a 
Race 

and 
Ethnicity 
course, 
as 

well 
as 
the 
inconsistency 

regarding which colleges at 
the University require it, as 
a problem. Currently, LSA, 
the Ford School of Public 
Policy and the Stamps School 
of Art and Design require 
Race and Ethnicity credit for 
undergraduates.

The Race and Ethnicity 

requirement 
was 
formed 

after student activists lobbied 
the University to institute a 
requirement following racial 
tensions on campus. Public 
Policy junior Allie Brown, 
a contributor to The Daily, 
helped LSA Associate Dean 
Angela Dillard complete a 
public history project on the 
requirement, 
and 
believes 

the requirement has been 
“watered down” and does not 
live up to its mission.

“The purpose of the Race 

and Ethnicity requirement is 
to get white people to be a little 
less racist, for people to be a 
little bit more knowledgeable 
about the world they live in,” 
Brown said. “That’s really 
what it came about after the 
activism. Not just, ‘Oh, learn 
about race and ethnicity in 
general.’ That’s not really the 
purpose behind it. A lot of 
the courses that are counted 
as R&E today don’t require 
cultural competency, that’s 
the problem. It’s just like, ‘Oh, 
we mention race and ethnicity, 
thus we should be counted as 
Race and Ethnicity.’ ”

Like Brown, Rasheed thinks 

the requirement should focus 
on cultural competency and 
on 
helping 
students 
make 

present-day 
connections 

to material learned in the 
classroom.

“I didn’t learn from (The 

History of Islam in South 
Asia) what the intention of 
R&E is meant to be, which is 
empathizing 
with 
others,” 

Rasheed 
said. 
“I 
simply 

interpreted it as a history 
course, not as an R&E course, 
which is supposed to help 
me grow as a person. I’m 
not familiar with how a 
course qualifies as an R&E 
course, but I would say that 
it wasn’t a course that made 
me think deeply about race 
and ethnicity as a whole and 
how we’re supposed to take 
lessons from then and apply it 
to right now, which I think is 
the intention of the race and 
ethnicity course.”

Public Policy junior Kyra 

Hudson agrees and thinks 
it’s important for students to 
realize that race and ethnicity 
issues occur in “real-time.”

“The Race and Ethnicity 

requirement was born out 
of student activist demands 
in response to racism and a 
turbulent racial climate on 
campus and also in society and 
the world,” Hudson said. “And 
so the fact that somebody can 
take the class that doesn’t ever 

touch on the current racial 
climate, your place within 
it, it doesn’t ever mention 
how its affecting students 
real-time. I don’t think it’s 
acceptable to call it something 
that will fulfill your Race and 
Ethnicity requirement if it 
doesn’t engage with race and 
ethnicity in a real capacity. I 
think it needs to do more to 
teach people how to engage in 
those difficult conversations.”

Hudson said as a Black 

student at the Public Policy 
School, she often finds it 
difficult to separate her racial 
identity from her political 
beliefs. This is something she 
said her more privileged peers 
do not have to do.

“For me particularly, when 

I got to the policy school, it 
became really challenging to 
know when it was appropriate 
to bring my personal racial 
identities up when talking 
about 
policy 
and 
politics, 

because my outlook on life, 
my perspective on issues and 
policies that are enacted in 
our nation and the world, 
I look at those through the 
lens of my racial identity,” 
Hudson 
said. 
“Sometimes 

we’re encouraged to not mix 
the personal with political and 
it’s hard for me to be able to do 
that for myself, but also to be 
in classes where other people 
do have the privilege of being 
able to separate their personal 
from their political or policy 
beliefs.”

However, 
both 
Hudson 

and Brown cite Intergroup 
Relations 
Dialogues 
as 

“definitely 
comprehensive” 

in 
discussing 
problems 

surrounding 
race 
and 

ethnicity.

“It really required us to 

engage in very intentional 
conversations about race, and 
to look a little deeper than just 
racial climate, but systems and 
structures that created the 
racial climate and how your 

R&E
From Page 1A

See R&E, Page 3A

