Cranbrook Kingswood is an elite boarding school that sprawls out across several acres in the lush outskirts of Detroit, its students hailing from all corners of the globe. It boasts an award winning, LED-lit natatorium, a wood-paneled basketball court, dorms that could easily rival Brown’s – and now, a presidential candidate.
Mitt Romney’s alma mater, which he attended while his father was Michigan’s governor, is a place I know all too well. In addition to being a rival high school to my own, it’s where I took the ACT’s and got trained to be a lifeguard back in the eleventh grade. I thought it might benefit BPR to connect with some Cranbrook Kingswood friends to see how Mitt’s cache has played out at the school today.
Cranbrook is upfront about its relationship to the GOP candidate, and has included a paragraph on Romney in its “About Cranbrook” web page. “Despite Cranbrook boasting many long-serving faculty and staff, no one at Cranbrook Schools today was affiliated with the school when Romney was a student (1959-1965),” the site assures, adding that requests to conduct on-campus interviews regarding Romney’s high school career will be denied.
Cranbrook, like many private schools in the Detroit area, has changed immensely since the Romney days. A survey of old friends indicates that the school’s student body is politically pretty liberal, with a “sprinkling of conservatives” that tout their preferred candidate’s alumnus-swag proudly. One student who attended the school during the 2008 presidential election indicated that when polled, the student body reported an “eighty-ish percent” rate of support for President Obama – about as high as that rate of support indicated by a Brown Daily Herald survey of Brown students for years ago.
That said, Romney’s legacy lives on in a variety of ways at Cranbrook. His dad has given two commencement speeches in the last thirty years, and his name appears on a few of the cross-country team trophies that line the athletic complex corridors. Romney has also been cited in instigating a hazing incident in which he and several boys force-sheared another students long hair; the student, who is now openly gay, has leveraged this story to paint Romney as a bully, thought Mitt expresses that he doesn’t recall the incident.
The area surrounding Cranbrook is a politically diverse but largely upper-crust enclave, populated by auto-industry big-shots vying to sway the election with white-tablecloth fundraisers. Both Romney an Obama have campaigned in Oakland County, which is the Midwest’s wealthiest and home to Aretha Franklin (Obama-donor), Kid Rock (Romney-donor), and a host of less visible but equally endowed supporters.