She tried. Oh, she tried.
Jennifer Gratz skittered onto the corporate career track. But, nah.
She fiddled around with a political accountability project, trying to make candidates keep their promises once they got elected. But it didn’t really move her.
Gratz, 35, kept coming back to the defining spark of her life: her role as the plaintiff in a 2003 Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action in college admissions. It was the ruling in her case — combined with another ruling issued the same day — that cleared the way for colleges to continue using affirmative action in admissions.
And that’s what she could never accept. “I have a one-track mind,” she says in an interview.
And that’s what she could never accept. “I have a one-track mind,” she says in an interview.
Her marquee turn stands out in bas-relief on moments such as Monday morning, when the Supreme Court once again delved into affirmative action in college applications, ordering a lower court to take a tougher look at how the University of Texas uses race in admissions decisions. The high court’s anti-climactic decision was issued in the case of Abigail Fisher, a white student who challenged the University of Texas policy that allows administrators to consider race as one of the factors in deciding who is admitted. Fisher says she was discriminated against when her 2008 application was rejected.
Gratz called the court’s decision merely “a slap on the hand” for the University of Texas, which had asked the justices to uphold its admissions policy. “The battle goes on,” Gratz said in an interview moments after the decision.
This is what happens when an American life meets an American legal precedent.
A name becomes more than just a name. Gratz becomes synonymous with an idea. Not Jen Gratz, the girl from the Detroit suburbs. But Gratz, of Gratz v. Bollinger, the student against the school president, Lee Bollinger. And even Monday, as the court revisited affirmative action, there was her name again, mentioned in the very first paragraph of the headnote of the court’s ruling in the Fisher case.
For Gratz, it all started one day in the summer of 1997, when she came home to the Detroit suburbs from the Michigan summer camp where she’d been working. Her father had spotted a newspaper article about the use of affirmative action in University of Michigan admissions. He brought it up casually, Gratz recalls. He thought his daughter, who is white, had moved on from the pain of being rejected by the university two years earlier.
Wow, was he wrong.
Gratz, then 18, chased down the author of the article. She dug up contact numbers. She called lawyers and state representatives. She had to do something.
She fell in with attorneys who had been challenging affirmative action policies. “I thought I’d end up stuffing envelopes,” she recalls. She ended up becoming their star plaintiff.
While Gratz worked on a math degree at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, her real passions were directed toward her lawsuit. On campus, all her professors knew that she was at the center of a major legal fight — the camera crews that trailed her around the school might have been a tip-off.
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