Affirmative action was never forced on the University of Michigan. The pressure that led to the university’s first undergraduate affirmative action admissions program came from a federal bureaucrat and the president of the United States, who were both responding to black activism for workplace justice. Yet this pressure never threatened UM with the loss of lucrative federal contracts or potential court cases. University officials risked little if they chose to reject affirmative action admissions policies. UM adopted affirmative action in 1964 because people at the top of the institution wanted the university to change.

This environment of weak federal coercion created a perfect recipe for co-optation. After the initial dose of federal pressure, UM officials took control of the purpose and character of affirmative action, creating a program that preserved the university’s long-established priorities and values. It’s no surprise, then, that between 1964 and 1967, black enrollment rose from only 0.5 to 1.65 percent of the student body. Still, tripling black students’ representation on campus was nothing to scoff at. But given that African Americans constituted more than 10 percent of the state population, affirmative action made a small dent in the racial disparities at the University of Michigan.¹

It’s unlikely that the black activists fighting for workplace justice in the early 1960s ever thought their protests would impact the admissions office at the University of Michigan. These activists were tired of ineffectual federal, state, and local fair employment laws. Take Philadelphia as an example. The city hosted a fair practices employment law, and the State of Pennsylvania had a similar law on the books. African Americans initially saw potential in these antidiscrimination laws. They brought complaints of discrimination to the proper government agencies, but little came of most investigations. African Americans continued to suffer from high unemployment rates, and employers faced few repercussions for discriminating.²

Federal executive orders were supposed to add another layer of protection for black workers. Executive orders banning discrimination among federal contractors had become standard since President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 during World War II, which stated that there “shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origins.” Roosevelt signed the order reluctantly, only after A. Philip Randolph threatened to bring 100,000 demonstrators to Washington, D.C., to march for fair employment practices. When Congress refused to make the Fair Employment Practices Committee—the agency that enforced Roosevelt’s executive order—permanent after the war, President Harry Truman and then President Dwight Eisenhower signed executive orders prohibiting discrimination among federal contractors and created their own agencies to enforce the orders.³

The problem with these executive orders was that they gave enforcement agencies little power to force businesses to change their hiring practices. The agencies had small budgets and staff for investigations, and no authority to cancel contracts. But that didn’t stop bureaucrats from experimenting with new investigative methods and concepts of racial justice. Early enforcement agencies relied on an individual-complaint model. In other words, they waited for a worker to file a discrimination complaint and then looked for evidence of discrimination. The initial goal was to make sure that race played no role in hiring practices. By the end of Eisenhower’s term, though, officials in his President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC) were already moving beyond the individual-complaint model, judging employers’ compliance based on whether the racial composition of their workforces matched the racial composition of the surrounding community. PCGC officials also began using their limited power to pressure some businesses to practice racially attentive hiring policies. Still, with little authority to force companies to comply, the agency didn’t produce the wide-scale transformation required to change African Americans’ confidence in federal antidiscrimination measures. Civil rights groups were vocal critics of the program and demanded stronger enforcement.⁴

These lackluster antidiscrimination laws led to a grassroots campaign for affirmative action in 1960. Activists like Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia believed that change would come only from pressuring businesses directly. Sullivan and his organization, the 400 Ministers, leaned on a popular tactic of the 1930s known as “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” The slogan said it all. Sullivan called for boycotts of businesses that discriminated against black workers. He started with Tastykake, a Philadelphia company whose products were popular within the black community. Sullivan didn’t want the company to reaffirm its antidiscrimination policies; he wanted the company to hire black workers immediately. When Tastykake refused, the group led a six-month boycott of the company’s products. At the end of the campaign, Tastykake hired two black truck drivers, two black clerical workers, and four black female production workers. The group went on to successfully boycott twenty-nine other companies operating in Philadelphia, including Pepsi-Cola and Sunoco. When asked why he supported using race as a positive factor in hiring black employees, Sullivan argued that it was a means of redress for past discrimination: “Black men have been waiting for a hundred years, white men can wait for a few months.” Similar campaigns in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Seattle signaled a new period of black activism.⁵

The fact that a new wave of activism was unfolding in an election year was significant. The more aggressive and confrontational civil rights movement that emerged in 1960, which included workplace activism and the famous sit-ins, pushed the Democratic Party in an uncomfortable direction. Party officials faced the difficult challenge of courting black voters, who expected more from the federal government, while hanging on to the party’s control of the South. John F. Kennedy moved cautiously through his campaign, often trying to court the support of civil rights leaders through closed door meetings rather than through strong public statements. But Kennedy’s party took a stronger stand. The Democratic Party Platform of 1960 reflected the new surge of civil rights activism, especially activism for jobs. The document reassured black voters that a “Democratic Administration will use its full executive powers to assure equal employment opportunities.” Throughout the platform’s civil rights section, jobs claimed equal footing with other civil rights issues, such as education, fair housing, voting, and access to public facilities.⁶

When Kennedy won the nomination and then the general election, he faced the difficult task of responding to calls for stronger equal opportunity employment policies. Those policies eventually landed at the University of Michigan.

A black University of Michigan alumnus brought the grassroots movement for workplace justice to campus. In the early 1960s, Hobart Taylor Jr. wasn’t a nationally known civil rights figure poised to push UM to adopt affirmative action admissions. Taylor joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s but wasn’t an active member. Taylor preferred to advance civil rights outside the spotlight. In his hometown of Detroit, he was the president of a mortgage company set up specifically to help African Americans who struggled to get loans for homes outside predominantly black neighborhoods. As a lawyer, he was also involved in court cases that tackled racial segregation in housing and restaurants. These were all important initiatives, but they didn’t put Taylor on the national map of prominent civil rights activists.⁷

If Taylor wasn’t the son of a wealthy donor, he would never have been an important figure in the rise of affirmative action. Taylor found a role in federal affirmative action policies because he was one of the well-connected people that Lyndon Johnson leaned on during his campaign for the presidency and then vice presidency in 1960. Taylor grew up in Houston, born into a family with strong political connections. His father was a multimillionaire businessman who provided key financial backing for Lyndon Johnson’s Senate run in 1948 and found himself as a delegate at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. By the early 1960s, Hobart Taylor Jr. had graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and, having grown out of his father’s shadow, was practicing as an attorney in Detroit. While the young attorney didn’t follow in his father’s entrepreneur footsteps, he continued the family tradition of supporting Johnson. So when Johnson was campaigning and wanted to meet with Michigan’s liberal leaders, he asked Taylor to organize the meetings. And when Johnson needed advice on civil rights issues, Taylor was one of the people he called on.⁸

The road that led Taylor to UM’s doorstep began in 1961. After Kennedy’s presidential victory, Johnson, as vice president, oversaw Kennedy’s first attempt to address employment discrimination among federal government contractors—what would become Executive Order 10925. Johnson called on Taylor for help. When the young lawyer arrived in D.C., Johnson handed him an early draft of the executive order, secured him a room at the Willard hotel, and told Taylor to start revising.⁹

Taylor’s most famous contribution to the executive order came in the form of a single concept. The order included a provision that stated, “Each employer shall take action” to ensure it doesn’t discriminate. But what did that mean? Taylor thought that the executive order needed a concept that people could give meaning to, courts could interpret, and could evolve over time. Something like the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, he thought. Sitting there, typing up a draft of the executive order, Taylor inserted a term that would soon gain resonance across the country and endure for many decades. He first considered “positive action,” then finally settled on a term he considered more alliterative: “affirmative action.” In explaining a federal contractor’s responsibilities, the final version read, “The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”¹⁰

After Kennedy signed the order in March, Taylor continued to consult on new policies and regulations for the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO)—the agency set up to enforce the executive order. Taylor’s role might have ended there if black workers were satisfied with the order’s implementation. Instead, the PCEEO quickly came under attack from civil rights advocates. Especially distasteful to black activists was the Plans for Progress (PfP) program. PfP was the brainchild of Robert Troutman, a Georgia lawyer and friend of the Kennedy administration. Participation in PfP gave companies an opportunity to create their own voluntary inclusion plans and sidestep some of the PCEEO’s oversight powers. The NAACP, just one of the many critics of the program, called PfP “virtually useless.” Johnson called on his longtime political ally for help, hoping a change in management would temper criticism. In August 1962, Hobart Taylor became executive vice chair of the PCEEO.¹¹

This is where the story of hiring and university admissions began to come together. Taylor was well aware of the calls from civil rights groups to exert more pressure on companies to reform hiring practices, but he was also worried that focusing too narrowly on hiring practices might limit the outcomes of the executive order. In light of deindustrialization, he was especially concerned about the prospects of employment for the large pool of unemployed and underemployed young African Americans in urban America. If there was a place to learn about the consequences of deindustrialization, it was Taylor’s hometown of Detroit. Between 1948 and 1967, the city lost 130,000 manufacturing jobs. Just forty-five miles from the University of Michigan, African Americans suffered the brunt of deindustrialization in the Motor City, experiencing unemployment rates almost three times as high as whites during the early 1960s.¹²

Taylor thought he knew what needed to happen. If manufacturing jobs were dwindling, black workers needed better access to jobs in the growing white-collar sector. The problem was that Taylor believed the PCEEO could do only so much to advance blacks’ access to this sector. Unless more African Americans gained college degrees—increasingly a qualification for these jobs—the PCEEO’s intervention would have little impact. Taylor spent the early 1960s giving speeches highlighting the constricting market for manufacturing jobs and the growing need for black students to be trained for professional positions. Taylor, of course, wasn’t the first to point to the importance of blacks’ access to the white-collar sector; civil rights groups had long promoted the importance of access to higher education and white-collar positions. But Taylor was now acting on this idea from a position of power within the federal government.¹³

Taylor’s emphasis on training also reflected a strategy of the Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s early policies followed a school of economists that promoted “manpower development,” which stressed that providing African Americans the skills to compete in the workplace was the key to lifting them out of poverty. As much as Taylor’s ideas complemented manpower development thinking, he was quietly critiquing one aspect of Kennedy’s program by focusing on the need for postsecondary training. When Kennedy thought about manpower development, he usually had in mind training for blue-collar jobs. By focusing on deindustrialization and the need for higher education, Taylor pointed out one of the flaws in Kennedy’s assumption that providing training and access to manufacturing jobs would offer the solution to black unemployment rates.¹⁴

When Taylor finally decided to use his power to advance African Americans’ access to postsecondary institutions, black enrollment in historically white institutions was bleak. About 70 percent of black college students were enrolled in HBCUs. Even though African Americans made up about 6 percent of American college students, few enrolled in universities that white-led businesses would consider elite. In fact, black enrollment at the University of Michigan looked remarkably similar to that of some of the public flagship universities in the South that had only recently opened their doors to black students. In the early 1960s, black students accounted for about 0.5 percent of the University of Michigan’s enrollment, which matched black students’ share of the student body at Louisiana State University–Baton Rouge. At the University of Texas, black students actually represented a larger share (0.7 percent) of the student population.¹⁵

Still, using Executive Order 10925 to reform admissions practices was a complicated process, since the order said nothing about admissions. Taylor started by focusing on universities he knew well. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan’s law school, UM was on his radar. The University of Michigan was also a convenient target for an agency set up to oversee federal contractors, as UM was one of the largest recipients of federal defense contracts among postsecondary institutions (only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University received more money). To intervene at UM, Taylor began by using the executive order’s compliance reporting system, which gave the PCEEO the authority to demand information from federal contractors on the racial identity of their employees. In March 1962, Taylor came calling for a demographic breakdown of the University of Michigan’s workforce.¹⁶

UM’s board of regents initially refused to fully cooperate with the PCEEO. The very collection of racial data, they thought, violated the color-blind principles they had implemented since World War II. The major assumption behind these policies was that by removing race as a relevant institutional category, a university could take away opportunities for racial prejudice to influence institutional practices. In light of these changes, regent Donald M. D. Thurber of Detroit lamented that “it would be regrettable if we were forced to take this type of census,” since it “would only focus attention on something on which we’ve lost consciousness.” The university’s vice president for business and finance, Wilbur Pierpont, proposed a response to the PCEEO. He suggested that UM document the number of university employees (approximately 10,253) but explain that racial statistics were not available. Pierpont recommended that UM attach a copy of its nondiscrimination policy and an explanation that the “maintenance of such records is inconsistent with the bylaw and the long-standing philosophy which indicates that these [racial] distinctions have no place at the University.” All the regents approved Pierpont’s proposal. The university’s response read like a lecture to the PCEEO. Regent Allan Sorenson stated that “philosophically this answer is ahead of federal action”—meaning that the federal government had not yet entered the progressive world of color blindness.¹⁷

Taylor responded quickly to the University of Michigan’s initial attempt to avoid providing racial statistics. He didn’t care that the university chose not to keep records of its employees’ racial identity. Taylor suggested that UM “turn in a count based on a visual check” and told administrators that they could keep this information separate from the university’s regular personnel data. In December 1962, only after continued pressure from Taylor, the university agreed to provide the PCEEO with a racial census.¹⁸

The University of Michigan completed the study in February 1963. To the public, the university reported that black employees made up 10.4 percent of UM’s workforce. The reality, however, was more complex. At the time, the bulk of UM’s black employees worked in service and manual labor positions. The university employed only eight black faculty members at or above the rank of instructor. Employment data like this, which showed racial disparities in workforces, gave the PCEEO a tool to justify intervention at work sites. Rather than relying on individual complaints of discrimination, the PCEEO used workforce data as prima facie evidence of discrimination. To the PCEEO, the data suggested that there was something clearly wrong with the university’s hiring practices.¹⁹

Following the release of workforce data, Taylor organized conferences with UM and Wayne State University (WSU) of Detroit—which had recently gone through a similar struggle with the PCEEO over racial data—to clarify the universities’ responsibilities in complying with Kennedy’s executive order. It’s doubtful that UM or WSU officials ever expected to discuss admissions practices at these conferences. After all, they agreed to a meeting to talk about employment data with the head of an agency that oversaw hiring practices. The first of their Detroit meetings with Taylor did just that, focusing on the universities’ compliance reports submitted to the PCEEO. The second conference, however, must have surprised university officials. There, Taylor focused on both hiring practices concerning black faculty members and educational opportunities for black students.²⁰

Of course, the process of using the executive order to reform admissions practices required more than a discussion about educational opportunities for African Americans at a compliance meeting. Taylor didn’t have the coercive tools to force universities to change their admissions practices. The PCEEO did have the authority to revoke contracts, but it was unlikely that Taylor could cancel a contract because a university chose not to modify admissions practices—something well outside the language of the executive order. But even if admissions practices had been part of the executive order, Taylor preferred not to revoke contracts. Taylor believed that the success of affirmative action programs hinged on making institutional officials feel like “participants and innovators” in government policymaking. Despite the fact that Johnson brought him onto the PCEEO because of black activists’ criticism of Plans for Progress, Taylor still liked PfP’s voluntary formula of institutional change. In Taylor’s mind, institutional change worked best when managers were able to carry out affirmative action “as part of their program rather than because they were compelled to do it by law.” Force from above wasn’t as effective, Taylor surmised, because to get a real institutional commitment to implement affirmative action, “you have to change a man’s mind from being negative and doing what he’s doing under force to do something he’s doing.”²¹

Taylor’s emphasis on voluntary compliance highlights the fact that affirmative action admissions was never forced on University of Michigan officials. The poor record of PfP in effecting widespread change is a testament to just how easily institutional leaders could meet compliance standards without making any significant reforms. For weak government coercion to give black students unprecedented access to UM, the interests of Taylor and at least one well-placed executive administrator at UM needed to align. Luckily for Taylor, he found a powerful ally sympathetic to his goals in Roger Heyns, UM’s vice president for academic affairs—the person who oversaw the university’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions.²²

Unlike board of regent members, Heyns was more comfortable with affirmative action. By the time the PCEEO entered into the fray at UM, Heyns had already taken steps to modify admissions policies. In 1962, he met separately with Francis Kornegay of the National Urban League and representatives from the local NAACP chapter about implementing new methods to increase black enrollment. Neither of these groups threatened to protest if Heyns didn’t implement affirmative action, but the meetings marked an important turning point. Not much is known about Heyns’s views on affirmative action before 1963. Perhaps Heyns was already sympathetic to racially attentive solutions to inequality or perhaps the arguments of activists convinced him that affirmative action was necessary. Whatever he thought about racial equity before these meetings, though, Heyns would spend the rest of his administrative career supporting efforts to expand opportunities for black students in higher education, beginning at UM and then as chancellor at the University of California–Berkeley. By February 1963, Heyns began discussions with UM’s admissions and public relations offices about the possibilities of increasing access for black students. In proposing that the university take proactive steps to make itself more inclusive, he was suggesting that color-blind policies were not enough.²³

But if a powerful administrator already supported affirmative action, why was Taylor’s intervention necessary to spark reform? Answering this is important in understanding the relationship between coercion—even weak coercion—and institutional change. Before Taylor’s intervention, Heyns’s meetings had not led to any firm plans for new admissions policies or any committees to study the feasibility of an affirmative action program. It’s not clear why Heyns didn’t pursue affirmative action admissions more aggressively after his early meetings with civil rights groups. Perhaps he worried that he wouldn’t be able to cultivate enough institutional support at that time. What is clear is that Heyns used PCEEO pressure to advance a program that he already supported. In UM’s case, federal pressure didn’t force a recalcitrant administrator to implement a program he disagreed with; instead, federal intervention created an opportunity for a well-placed administrator to advance his own goals. As historian Timothy Minchin found in his work on the southern textile industry, blaming institutional reform on outside coercive pressure represented an important tactic in institutional officials’ toolbox that could temper internal resistance. In other words, internal opponents were less likely to challenge institutional reforms if they thought those reforms were being forced on an institution rather than simply recommended as an administrative innovation. In UM’s case, the ability to frame admissions reform as a federal compliance measure likely gave Heyns a moment of opportunity to create an affirmative action admissions program.²⁴

As Heyns began to figure out how to advance affirmative action admissions at UM during the summer, he gained an important ally in University of Michigan president Harlan Hatcher. Hatcher came to support Heyns’s efforts after receiving his own dose of federal pressure, this time from President Kennedy. Like the pressure from Taylor, Kennedy never threatened to cut off federal contracts or grants. In June 1963, Kennedy invited 175 education leaders, including Hatcher, to hear his desperate plea for assistance. The president wanted education leaders to help solve the high dropout rates of urban school districts and create educational opportunities for black high school graduates left with few job prospects. Without their aid, Kennedy feared that the nation would face urban rebellions.²⁵

The White House meeting occurred during an especially difficult time in Kennedy’s tenure as president. The previous month, Americans watched the violent resistance to civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, on their televisions—demonstrations that included demands for equal opportunity hiring in downtown businesses. At the same time, African Americans’ protests against workplace discrimination outside the South didn’t end after Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925. By 1963, construction sites funded with government money became places of protest around the country. In Philadelphia, for example, protesters occupied the mayor’s office for twenty-one hours, demanding that the mayor guarantee black workers access to jobs on city-funded construction sites. These jobs were typically controlled by trade unions that excluded black workers or relegated them to the lowest-paying positions. Similar protests rocked Harlem, Brooklyn, and Newark. In the midst of these uprisings, Kennedy received reports from Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and other advisers expressing their concerns about “danger spots” around the country, or places of potential violence in America’s cities. One memo came from G. Mennen Williams, the former governor of Michigan, who advised Kennedy that “large segments of the Negro population are losing confidence in interracial approaches to the problems of gaining full civil rights.”²⁶

Thus in June 1963, Kennedy was trying to prevent urban uprisings and gain black activists’ confidence in the federal government as an ally. One of Kennedy’s solutions has been well documented. Just three days after his meeting with Hatcher, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11114, which amended Executive Order 10925 to include racial discrimination on federally contracted construction projects. Less well known are Kennedy’s efforts to convince higher education officials to reform admissions policies. By summer 1963, Kennedy had come to the same conclusion that Taylor had come to years earlier: skills-based training for blue-collar jobs coupled with antidiscrimination enforcement, even if successful, was still going to leave a lot of African Americans without employment opportunities. Given warnings about potential unrest in urban areas, Kennedy was particularly concerned about the consequences of large populations of young African Americans, despite vocational training, not finding jobs after leaving high school. This was why Harlan Hatcher was at the White House in June 1963.²⁷

The White House meeting gave Heyns a powerful ally within the institution. Historical records don’t show whether Hatcher was already sympathetic to affirmative action or if his meeting with Kennedy pushed him to reform his views. What is clear is that when students and faculty returned from the summer recess in September 1963, Hatcher delivered his State of the University speech, in which he outlined the university’s new commitment to tackle the problems Kennedy discussed at the White House. Hatcher unveiled an initiative to “re-examine [UM’s] responsibilities to high schools in which there are a substantial number of Negro pupils” and where the “urgent problems” are “high dropout rate or lack of motivation.” Months before the university ever outlined the details of an affirmative action admissions program, he suggested that the university might have to create different admissions criteria for “students from deprived backgrounds.” Hatcher threw his support behind Heyns to address these issues.²⁸

The University of Michigan was about to change because two of UM’s most powerful leaders were willing to make those changes. Activists for racial justice who forced the federal government into action had yet to threaten UM directly, and the federal bureaucrats and politicians who responded to protest never forced an affirmative action admissions program on UM. The weak coercive power of the federal government also meant that federal officials had handed over the implementation of affirmative action to UM’s leaders. Administrators went to work crafting affirmative action in their own vision.

What happened next shows the limitations of weak government pressure. Voluntary compliance created the perfect environment for co-optation. Administrators took control of the purpose, scope, and character of affirmative action admissions. From the start, UM officials never imagined affirmative action as a disruptive tool; rather, they envisioned affirmative action as a tool to align UM’s more expansive racial inclusion commitment with the university’s existing priorities and values. Not surprisingly, black enrollment rose slowly in the 1960s.

UM already had an established set of rules for special admissions programs to ensure that inclusion initiatives didn’t disrupt the university’s core values. Recall from chapter 1 that these rules created a two-part rationale that most special admissions programs followed. First, proponents needed to explain the social need that the university had an obligation to address. Second, proponents had to prove that the program wouldn’t undermine the university’s elite status.

President Hatcher offered the first piece of the rationale when he introduced plans for a new affirmative action initiative to the university community in September 1963. Hatcher reminded his audience of UM’s long history of addressing social problems, stating that racial inequality was just the next social problem that the university would help solve. Still, he preserved the university’s racial innocence in justifying affirmative action: the problem wasn’t that the university discriminated against black students; rather, the problem of racial discrimination and inequality operated outside the university’s walls.²⁹

Rationales that directly challenged the university’s racial innocence never gained traction among UM leaders. In October 1963, Leonard Sain, a black assistant principal in Detroit, filled a new position at UM to develop the university’s new affirmative action program. Sain offered a critical view of the university, claiming that UM’s policies were at least partly responsible for the racial disparities on campus. While he did not accuse the university of overt discrimination, he suggested that the university was guilty of “sins of omission.” That meant that the university didn’t use race as a factor to consciously exclude black students but rather constructed color-blind policies that, when put into practice, effectively identified and supported only talented middle-class white students. Sain pointed out that the university’s admissions criteria, for example, relied on standardized test scores and put a lot of weight on whether students took a college preparatory curriculum. These policies gave no thought to identifying talented black students who were being educated in discriminatory educational environments. And even if black students did meet UM’s admissions criteria, many could not afford to attend due to the fact that the university provided little financial support for low-income students. In Sain’s rationale, then, the University of Michigan needed affirmative action to address its own harmful policies, not just the societal discrimination unfolding off campus. Arguments like this, which challenged the university’s racial innocence, never became popular among UM leaders.³⁰

Leonard Sain enjoyed more success offering an argument that showed how affirmative action wouldn’t harm the university’s elite status. He emphasized that alternative admissions tools would bring only talented and “qualified” black students. Affirmative action, in other words, would simply create an admissions system that identified black students who were as talented as any white student who walked onto campus. Implicit in this argument, of course, was a critique of the university’s admissions system and, in turn, the university’s racial innocence. Administrators, though, were willing to accept the implicit critiques that came with reconciling inclusion and quality. They refused to accept any explicit critiques that blamed the university for racial disparities.³¹

This type of rationale proved important in protecting affirmative action from resistance. It helped temper concerns that affirmative action would undermine the university’s elite status. It’s one of the reasons why administrators who crafted these types of rationales believed they had good intentions. But subordinating racial inclusion to the university’s elite status also placed great limitations on the types of possible reform. Any inclusion initiative that threatened UM officials’ stringent definition of quality would never find a place at the university.

UM leaders’ aversion to political and legal risk also shaped the character of affirmative action. In 1963, exchange programs between HWCUs and HBCUs represented the approach that carried the least political and legal risk. Howard University and Williams College, Tougaloo Southern Christian College and Oberlin College, and Spelman College and Barnard College, to name just a few, set up student exchange programs in the early 1960s. By the time Sain came to campus, Harlan Hatcher had already initiated an exchange program at UM. The same day Hatcher listened to President Kennedy’s speech at the White House, Hatcher sat down with Luther Foster of the Tuskegee Institute. The two discussed a student and faculty exchange program between the universities. What made the program especially attractive was that it represented a low-risk commitment for university administrators. Because students attended UM for only a semester, administrators did not have to worry about opponents arguing that the students’ presence lowered the quality of the institution. Furthermore, the program offered an opportunity to bring black faculty members to the university without the long-term commitments of tenure.³²

By fall 1963, though, it was clear that UM leaders wanted to go further than the faculty and student exchange programs, which had been popular in the early 1960s. It was Sain’s job to figure out how much further UM would go. Sain quickly learned that using race in identifying students was a contentious issue that had to be handled carefully. Racial liberalism had institutionalized color blindness in leaders’ thinking, making racially attentive policies immediately suspect. In Sain’s first initiative, he wanted to create a racial census of the student body. Nobody at the university knew how many black students were on campus in 1963. Admissions applications didn’t include questions about race, and the registrar’s office didn’t record such information. So the census involved the painstaking process of counting black students—that is, faculty members and residence hall directors looked for black students in their classes and housing complexes, recorded their names, and sent them to Sain. Some faculty members were uncomfortable with the race-conscious aspects of the survey. One English professor wrote to Sain, “I have explained to the staff the purposes of the survey and have endeavored to answer questions in such a way to quiet anxieties. These anxieties do exist” and “are likely to spread through the student body.” The faculty in the School of Education also shared their concerns. They invited Sain to meet with them because they felt uneasy about identifying students by race and were worried about how students would react to this practice. When Sain met with these faculty members, his notes show that he was prepared to talk about the legal merits of the census.³³

Despite concerns raised by members of the university community, enough faculty and staff members participated in the survey for Sain to release the results in February 1964. The census recorded 148 black undergraduate and 25 black graduate students at UM. There were only 32 black first-year students on campus, and about 25 percent of them were athletes. Perhaps trying to account for probable errors resulting from the census’s methods, Sain estimated that two hundred black students attended the university full time. This meant that black students made up 0.8 percent of the first-year class and 0.5 percent of the university’s total enrollment. A “pathetically small number,” Sain lamented.³⁴

Sain knew the university’s policies had to change in order to improve black students’ access, but he was constantly reminded of the environment he had to work within. For example, when Sain arrived on campus, the regents were involved in a battle with the university’s Human Relations Board, which had uncovered a long-standing endowed scholarship designated exclusively for whites by its benefactor. While the regents refused to begin the potentially lengthy legal process of changing the criteria of an endowed scholarship, they promised to put pressure on all future donors to remove any discriminatory clauses. Ironically, this policy worked to preserve the scholarship for whites while prohibiting attempts to fund scholarships reserved for African Americans. When an anonymous donor offered to fund an annual scholarship for black students who lacked the money to attend the university, the board of regents accepted the donation only after pressuring the donor to remove any reference to race that would “have discriminated in favor of a Negro student.” It represented another example of racial liberalism sustaining white privileges and offering roadblocks to racial inclusion. Internal battles like this must have further revealed to Sain the land mines involved in creating an affirmative action program that used race as a factor in selecting and funding students.³⁵

Any official talented at reading the political winds off campus could also find plenty of evidence that using race as a factor in admissions and financial aid was risky. Opponents to what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were condemning the proposed legislation as a quota bill that would give special preferences to minorities over whites. Moreover, no affirmative action admissions program had been tested in court. Eleven years before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in America’s first anti–affirmative action admissions case, DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974), and fifteen years before Justice Lewis Powell provided his famous opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the constitutional merits for affirmative action admissions programs were up for grabs.³⁶

When UM began crafting its affirmative action program, racially attentive practices weren’t widely accepted in higher education. In 1963, perhaps only four universities practiced affirmative action admissions, all of which were in the Ivy League. Harvard University created an affirmative action program in 1961, Dartmouth University joined in 1962, and Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania implemented programs in 1963. All these programs were modest and weren’t widely publicized.³⁷

It’s unclear if UM officials knew about these early Ivy League programs, but they learned the limits of acceptable inclusion initiatives from peer institutions crafting inclusion policies in 1963. During the summer and fall, UM officials participated in conferences with other universities and colleges on how to advance racial inclusion. UM also hosted a conference of its own—with the help of Hobart Taylor and the PCEEO—in October. Although it was clear that many conference participants endorsed racially attentive efforts to advance equity, the initiatives proposed suggested that not all racially attentive practices were acceptable. The most popular programs discussed at these meetings included scholarship and recruiting programs for black students or for disadvantaged students of all races. None of the reports from these conferences recorded a proposal to create special admissions criteria exclusively for black students.³⁸

For a risk-averse institution, an affirmative action program that focused exclusively on black students was out of the question. Ultimately, Sain made compromises in order to reduce the likelihood of resistance. While Sain had black students in mind when he wrote the new admissions policies, he emphasized that the program would be open to all students, regardless of race, “whose economic and social backgrounds has [sic] been of deprivation and disadvantaged.” Still, Sain crafted admissions practices for the program that he hoped would broaden access for black students. He put more weight on high school counselor evaluations than on grade point averages and standardized test scores. Sain also allowed students the option to interview with an admissions counselor. Moreover, all the students admitted through the program would receive generous grant packages that covered most of their expenses. The program did not yet have a name, but it would soon be called the Opportunity Scholarship Program and, by June, the Opportunity Awards Program (OAP).³⁹

Not forgetting Hobart Taylor’s role in the origins of OAP, Roger Heyns wrote to Taylor that he hoped the program would double the number of black first-year students from the previous year. Taylor would later send the names of promising black students for the program to consider.⁴⁰

Sain returned to his position in the Detroit public school system in spring 1964, months before the first class of OAP students set foot on campus. Despite the “colorblind” criteria of OAP, successors understood the main purpose of the program: recruit and admit more black students. Just like Sain, though, these black officials worked within the political constraints of the university. Their efforts to implement an affirmative action program safe from any resistance limited the number of black students who benefited from the program.

In the sixties, two officials were responsible for the day-to-day operations of OAP. Once Sain left, the university hired one counselor and one admissions officer to run the program. These new OAP officials were African Americans who saw their jobs at UM as an opportunity to improve access for black students. Consider John Chavis, who took the counseling position. Chavis had grown up in Toledo, Ohio, and felt that discrimination in his hometown had stymied his early social mobility opportunities. He worked as a porter for a year and a half after graduating from high school. Only after he was drafted and spent five years in the army did he finally attend the University of Toledo at the age of twenty-six, likely on the GI Bill. When his alma mater finally began an affirmative action recruitment program in the late 1960s, he wrote, “Perhaps the effort, as late as it seems to me, will save others of my race from a lifetime of catching-up.” This was what drove Chavis. He wanted to provide the type of opportunities for young black students that were missing for him in his younger years.⁴¹

As committed as these officials were to increasing black enrollment, potential opposition to affirmative action made implementing a safe affirmative action program difficult. Outlining potential opposition to OAP after 1964 is tough because the historical record has left little evidence of the views of most of the university community on affirmative action. Officials never polled faculty and students on their views, and contentious debates over OAP don’t appear in faculty meeting minutes of the 1960s. The broadest survey of faculty opinions on affirmative action came from a questionnaire sent to individual department chairs in 1966, which requested information on whether each department actively recruited black graduate students and faculty. In response to the question “Do you make any special efforts to recruit Negro students?” sixteen respondents replied affirmatively and eighteen replied negatively. Only two of the respondents suggested that their departments might apply different admissions criteria for black graduate students. Still, the survey suggested that there was at least some support for affirmative action initiatives, while also bringing to light adamant opposition. The responses of opponents were filled with statements such as “I trust that discriminating practices will not be directed against Caucasians and Eurasians?” and “The University should consider … individuals without regard to race.” The survey irked three department chairs so much that they attached letters protesting any suggestion that departments should take race into account. John M. Allen, chair of the zoology department, wrote that special recruiting practices for black students and faculty were “contrary to my own ideas as well as those of my colleagues.” Responses like these probably further reinforced OAP officials’ belief that they needed to downplay the significance of race in their program for undergraduate students.⁴²

This speaks to how institutional change unfolded in the early 1960s, when officials implementing OAP tried to protect the program from resistance. OAP benefited from the fact that universities began to take on the bureaucratic structures of large organizations. Over the course of the twentieth century, faculty increasingly ceded control of management duties to professional offices that worked underneath executive administrators. In the process, much of the day-to-day management duties of undergraduate admissions, financial aid, and counseling operated outside the view of most of the university community. This allowed OAP officials some autonomy to craft and implement policies without the close oversight of people who would have likely brought more resistance if they knew about the program’s practices.⁴³

Still, OAP officials couldn’t create any policy they saw fit. Fear of opposition limited their choices. Even though the university’s bureaucratic structure could hide some of their policies, they were careful in crafting their admissions practices. OAP officials created admissions and recruiting practices that could increase black students’ access while also allowing administrators to promote the program’s benefits for white students. Initially, resisting the impulse to put questions about race on admissions applications was important to that process. The university banned racial classifications on applications in the early 1950s, and pushing to amend this practice might have signaled that OAP was only interested in admitting black applicants. Instead, officials added a box on applications that allowed students to apply as an OAP candidate. Without the ability to identify race on applications, recruiters cultivated a predominantly black pool of applicants to OAP in order to admit mostly black students. Importantly, those black applicants needed to understand that they had to check the Opportunity Awards Program box on their admissions application; otherwise, students would be evaluated like any other applicant. To do this, the OAP counselor traveled to high schools with large black enrollments, developed contacts with high school counselors of predominantly black schools, and built relationships with community institutions in black communities to spread information about OAP.⁴⁴

Officials’ efforts to avoid resistance, though, limited recruiting efforts. For example, the OAP recruiter consciously avoided majority-white high schools—even those schools with black students. Aware of potential legal and political challenges to the program, officials wanted to escape challenges from white students if they realized OAP targeted African Americans. They also, of course, needed to limit the number of white students who applied, because the success of OAP depended on ensuring that black students dominated the applicant pool. Yet this practice also ensured that black students in majority-white schools did not receive information about the program through school visits.⁴⁵

Whatever the limitations of OAP’s policies, its recruiting practices provided an overwhelmingly black applicant pool that ensured black students would dominate OAP admissions. In the fall of 1964, sixty-seven of the seventy Opportunity Awards Program students were black. In subsequent years, black students would continue to represent about 90 percent of the program’s enrollment.⁴⁶

These disparities suggest that OAP doesn’t fit well into the categories that scholars have created to make sense of different affirmative action programs. Scholars have divided practices into soft and hard affirmative action. “Soft” refers to programs that use race as a factor in recruiting and financial aid practices but not as part of the admissions process. In contrast, “hard” refers to programs that use race as a factor in selecting which students to admit. On the surface, OAP might look like a soft program, since applications did not ask for students’ race. But closer inspection reveals how OAP blurs the lines between soft and hard. Despite the fact that admissions officers didn’t officially know the racial background of applicants—unless the student took advantage of the interview option or a recommendation letter referenced the student’s background—race-conscious recruiting practices created a predominantly black pool of applicants for a special admissions program that used different criteria to evaluate applications. So the line between an admissions officer seeing an applicant’s race on an application and the “color-blind” admissions process of OAP, in which admissions officers evaluated applicants with a high degree of certainty about their race, is blurry indeed.⁴⁷

Once admissions officials began admitting students to the program, the racial disparities within OAP made promoting its benefits for white students a difficult task. To avoid backlash, they needed to downplay the racial attentiveness of the program. Early descriptions of OAP suggest that officials weren’t prepared for the public relations game. Administrators’ descriptions of the program fluctuated from a program open to all students but focused on bringing African Americans to campus, to a program exclusively for black students. One early article went so far as to explain that OAP meant to “counteract some of the obstacles faced by Negro students interested in coming” to UM, without mentioning that white students were also able to apply. A 1968 OAP leaflet noted that applicants must be “member[s] of a disadvantaged minority group.” Nevertheless, after OAP’s first year, administrators were generally more careful in downplaying the significance of race in recruiting and selecting students for the program. For example, in 1967, John Chavis claimed that race actually played no role in selecting students for OAP. He explained that the program focused on “poverty and cultural criteria,” not race. Black students made up a disproportionate number of OAP students, he argued, because they constituted a disproportionate share of the “disadvantaged” population in the United States.⁴⁸

UM leaders’ discomfort with racial attentiveness also allowed them to resist new frameworks of measuring discrimination and racial progress. Beginning with Hobart Taylor, federal compliance agencies were trying to get UM officials to see numbers as the primary way to view compliance and racial progress. The PCEEO used racial disparities as prima facie evidence for discrimination. But even when university officials responded to Taylor’s pressure and created an affirmative action program, they didn’t adopt his framework for measuring progress. Administrators wanted to focus on the process of selecting students, not the outcomes. According to UM officials, the important questions for measuring whether the process of selection was fair were these: Did admissions officers admit every black student who had a chance to graduate from UM? Was the OAP recruiter visiting every predominantly black high school? If the answer to these questions was yes, affirmative action was working well. In fact, in 1965, administrators still hadn’t developed any tools to keep track of black enrollment. OAP administrators knew how many black students were in that program, but nobody knew how many black students were enrolled outside OAP.⁴⁹

So while affirmative action changed the admissions selection process at UM, it didn’t radically alter the framework UM officials used to measure progress. This is another reason UM administrators could convince themselves that they were committed to racial inclusion, even while black students composed a tiny percentage of the university’s student body. In their eyes, the number of black students didn’t represent an accurate measure of the university’s commitment to inclusion. Effort, not numbers, represented the best measurement of the university’s commitment.

Even the support services available to OAP became tied up with public relations efforts to downplay the role that race played in the program. Aside from Chavis’s counseling position, the university didn’t provide any special academic services for the program’s students once they were on campus. Publicly, Chavis used this to safeguard OAP from potential opposition. For anyone concerned that the program gave special treatment to the overwhelmingly black pool of OAP students once they were on campus, Chavis reassured them that “there is no attempt to obtain any kind of … preferential treatment for them. In fact, we go to a great deal of trouble to make certain this does not happen.” Resisting special academic services for black students might have helped shield the program from resistance, but it also helped limit the support available to these students. This point wasn’t lost on John Chavis. Behind the scenes, he complained about the lack of resources devoted to helping black students succeed.⁵⁰

Chavis’s criticism sheds light on a major problem that more University of Michigan officials began to recognize: trying to improve African Americans’ access to UM while downplaying racial attentiveness greatly limited racial justice efforts. But in the first years of OAP, officials thought that downplaying the role of race in OAP was necessary to protect the program from backlash. As two black officials concluded in 1968 when surveying the political environment, “For P.R. and other appropriate reasons … it is not proper at this point to restrict our programs to Blacks only.”⁵¹

By fall 1966, OAP faced its first crisis. Of the seventy original OAP students, only thirty-six remained in the program. The numbers got even worse, as only nineteen of these students had graduated by summer 1968. Eleven enrolled for a fifth year. An unsympathetic evaluation called the first class of OAP students “hastily recruited.”⁵²

These numbers produced a crisis because affirmative action imported past concepts about performance that rationalized exclusion. Affirmative action never disrupted the prevailing institutional knowledge that students left the university before graduating because they were academically underprepared. Attrition rates, then, represented the most popular measuring stick to determine whether a group of students was academically capable. The high attrition rates of OAP students called into question claims that affirmative action would bring only “qualified” students to UM. The future of OAP was at stake.

The crisis raised important questions: Who were the legitimate producers of knowledge about black students? Who would administrators trust to explain the academic capabilities of black students? Who would administrators trust in determining whether OAP officials’ admissions tools let in “unqualified” students? The answers to those questions shows how administrators incorporated affirmative action carefully. White social scientists became the legitimate producers of knowledge about black students. The black officials who admitted and supported black students had little voice in interpreting black students’ performance. Black students, too, had no voice in interpreting attrition in OAP’s early years. Black students became the objects of research, not active participants. The marginalization of black voices in institutional research limited the conclusions social scientists offered to explain attrition, which further constrained the scope of affirmative action.

White social scientists took for granted the prevailing assumption that students left UM before graduating because they were academically unprepared and thus “unqualified.” According to white social scientists, the solution to black OAP student attrition rates was to figure out better ways to predict which OAP students could graduate from the University of Michigan. One of the most important of these social scientists was Ruth Eckstein, a researcher in the Counseling Division of the Bureau of Psychological Services at UM. She began by using the university’s traditional admissions tools to predict which black OAP students performed well at UM. In 1965, though, she found that high school performance was a poor prediction instrument. The statistical correlation between OAP students’ high school class standing and their first-year student grade point average at UM was 0.02. In contrast, in a random sample of 255 Michigan first-year students, the correlation between high school class standing and college grade point average was 0.43. In sum, high school class standing had almost no value in predicting OAP students’ first-year student grade point average at the university.⁵³

Initially, the SAT looked like a better predictor of OAP students’ performance. In 1965, Benno Fricke, a longtime UM researcher and proponent of standardized testing, concluded that the predictive value of the SAT for OAP and non-OAP students was almost identical. This was a potentially devastating conclusion for proponents of affirmative action, who argued that the SAT poorly predicted black students’ academic performance. The next year, though, another researcher challenged Fricke’s findings. When Fricke examined SAT scores, he grouped men and women together and examined only OAP students’ first-semester performance. Doris Miller, a researcher in UM’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, reexamined the data by looking at men and women separately and examining GPAs for the entire first year. She found surprising results. Miller discovered that while the SAT held strong predictive value for OAP women, it was a poor tool in predicting how OAP men would perform at UM. Among the first group of OAP men, their SAT scores ranged from 659 to 1330, with a median of 997. Almost half of the students who scored below 997 achieved a GPA of 2.0 or above at UM, and 60 percent of the men who scored above the median achieved a GPA below 2.0. Perhaps even more surprising, more OAP men who scored above the median on the SAT left UM after their first year. When Miller extended the study to include OAP students admitted in 1965, she found that the SAT continued to be a poor predictive tool for men in the program.⁵⁴

The major problem with all this research was that social scientists interpreted attrition through a narrow lens. In a glaring omission, social scientists never looked at the grades of black students who left the university before graduating. They simply assumed that black students who left were failing their courses. Nobody considered that factors other than academic preparation could explain attrition. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, black students and a new cast of black administrators helped give new meaning to black students’ attrition rates. They emphasized the impact of the university’s racial climate on black student attrition. Once social scientists began listening to black students and officials, they soon found that most of the black students who left the university before graduating were in good academic standing. The selection procedures, then, weren’t UM’s biggest obstacle in improving black retention rates.⁵⁵

While social scientists offered important research that supported claims that traditional admissions tools poorly predicted black students’ performance, the research left the admissions office with two problems. First, the office still didn’t have a reliable admissions tool to predict black students’ academic performance at UM. Second, admissions officers still didn’t know that the majority of black students who were leaving UM before graduation were in good academic standing. These problems led to conservative admissions practices in the mid-1960s. As a result, OAP grew slowly in its first years. By 1967, black students’ share of the undergraduate student body tripled. Nevertheless, black students still only constituted 1.6 percent of the undergraduate student body.⁵⁶

The slow growth of black enrollment highlighted UM’s co-optation of federal pressure. Hobart Taylor left the university alone to develop its own program, with no federal oversight, and black campus activism had yet to push administrators beyond campus leaders’ desired “safe” affirmative action practices. OAP offered a glimpse of a program designed with administrators’ priorities and ideals in mind. It was an example of a program designed without external forces pushing university leaders to adopt policies that administrators believed were unviable or challenged UM’s priorities. When UM finally received a stronger dose of federal pressure in 1966, administrators fought to preserve the affirmative action policies that they had already created. Co-optation was a long-term process. It required constant vigilance.

In 1966, Walter Greene, acting regional director of the Department of Defense’s Contract Compliance Office in Detroit, arrived at the University of Michigan to lead a compliance investigation. Much had changed since Hobart Taylor intervened at UM. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed and signed just four months after UM officials announced OAP, brought UM under a new microscope. Title VI of the act was broader than Kennedy’s executive order that originally sparked UM’s affirmative action program. It simply read, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origins, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The language was so broad that it covered everything from hiring practices to admissions procedures to dormitory room assignments. The University of Michigan, of course, fell under Title VI because it was a major federal contractor. But by 1966, it wouldn’t have mattered if UM was receiving money from federal contracts. The Higher Education Act of 1965, which provided federal loans and grants to students, had created another stream of federal money to the University of Michigan every year. In fact, once the federal government began to play a vital role in funding students’ education, it became difficult for universities to lie outside the scope of Title VI.⁵⁷

One of the problems involved in implementing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though, was that the federal bureaucracy was unprepared to enforce the legislation. The Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which oversaw student loan and grant distribution through the Higher Education Act of 1965, was overwhelmed by the new responsibilities of investigating compliance, especially since it also bore the brunt of investigating primary and secondary school segregation. So HEW officials looked for help. They asked the Department of Defense (DoD) to lead a Title VI compliance investigation of the University of Michigan on HEW’s behalf. This was why Greene was at the University of Michigan in 1966.⁵⁸

When Greene began his compliance review at UM, he sought out black students, faculty, and staff to interview. Here was an opportunity for the black community at UM to offer their own views of the university. They didn’t hold back their criticism. Greene relied heavily on these interviews when he wrote his report, in which he concluded that the university had an image problem, as black communities in the state saw UM as an institution for “rich white kids.” Greene also found many problems in the university’s Opportunity Awards Program, which contributed to the poor representation of black students on campus. Greene concluded that OAP’s recruitment efforts were insufficient and needed to be expanded. Regular reviews of admissions practices were also necessary. In other words, high-level administrators needed to take on a more significant oversight role. He also recommended that UM devote more resources to recruiting black students outside the state. Finally, Greene wanted UM to take steps to hire more black employees. Ironically, after Hobart Taylor intervened at UM to enforce Kennedy’s executive order concerning hiring practices, UM had created an affirmative action admissions program but no centrally managed affirmative action hiring program. Departments were free to create (or choose not to create) hiring programs with no support or oversight. Greene suggested that the university needed an equal opportunity office, whose director would hold a position at the vice president level, directly responsible to UM’s president. The office would investigate the policies of all departments, educate people involved in hiring on proper equal employment practices, and receive and investigate complaints concerning discrimination. Perhaps seeing that UM officials were more inclined to support affirmative action admissions than hiring polices, Greene tied the outcomes of affirmative action admissions to hiring initiatives. He suggested that new affirmative action hiring policies were necessary to fix the university’s public image, which would in turn bring more black students to UM.⁵⁹

Just a few months later, Greene returned to UM to carry out another investigation, this time under the authority of President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. The order, which Johnson signed in 1965, replaced Kennedy’s previous affirmative action hiring orders and restructured the bureaucracy of equal opportunity compliance. Still, the language concerning government contractors looked similar to Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925. The order stated that contractors “will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.” When Greene arrived, he found that UM had done little to implement any of the recommendations he had made at the conclusion of his Title VI investigation, not least of which was the creation of an office of equal opportunity, which he still wanted. Greene requested written affirmative action plans from each department, explaining efforts to improve equal opportunity employment practices.⁶⁰

Greene had run into a problem, which he shared with Hobart Taylor. University of Michigan officials didn’t see Greene as a threat to their lucrative federal contracts. The problem wasn’t that the DoD didn’t have the power to cancel contracts—that was well within its authority. The problem was that the DoD was generally unwilling to cancel contracts—and if University of Michigan officials didn’t already know this, Greene’s supervisor had indirectly reminded them of it. Greene’s investigations of the University of Michigan had invited national attention, and when a writer for Science interviewed Greene’s supervisor, Jack Moskowitz, about UM’s compliance investigation, the DoD official emphasized that the agency offered only recommendations, not orders. Moskowitz then said that only flagrant failure to comply would lead the DoD to cancel a contract. So far, he said, no university had been judged so out of step that the DoD revoked a contract.⁶¹

So Greene, like Hobart Taylor, needed sympathetic allies within the university’s executive administration to carry out these reforms. But unlike Taylor, Greene didn’t find them. The problem wasn’t that executive administrators now refused to support affirmative action. Though there had been personnel changes—Roger Heyns had left to become chancellor at UC Berkeley—UM administrators continued to support affirmative action. The problem was that in 1965, executive administrators believed that the university was already doing enough to advance racial inclusion. In this environment, Greene experienced a different response than Taylor had. UM officials attacked Greene’s authority, painting him as a know-nothing bureaucrat. In fact, A. Geoffrey Norman, UM’s vice president for research, suggested that “if there are to be more reviews of this type, the Department of Defense should get a group which understands universities.”⁶²

University officials used the narrative of racial innocence to show that Greene didn’t appreciate all the factors outside UM’s control that led to racial disparities. According to administrators, Greene didn’t understand the political obstacles UM officials faced. Greene mentioned that the black students he interviewed suggested that the university needed to expand its affirmative action program to include black students outside the state. Extending OAP to out-of-state black students would be easy if officials put questions about racial identity on applications. Admissions officials could then take race into account for any black applicant, regardless of residential status. But administrators had created OAP’s admissions practices in order to avoid claims that the program took race into account at the point of selection. It took a lot of effort and money to increase black enrollment without the ability to see a prospective student’s race when evaluating an application. An OAP official had to travel to predominantly black high schools, recruiting students and teaching them how to apply for the OAP program. It was hard enough to do this when the recruiter focused on predominantly black schools within the state; using OAP to increase out-of-state black enrollment would take resources that administrators never imagined devoting to affirmative action. OAP would need enough money and people to travel the country, identifying and visiting predominantly black high schools. Even if the university were willing to devote enough money to do this, administrators thought that using taxpayers’ money to fund out-of-state students would invite backlash. In fact, administrators thought that even using university funds to pay for recruiting trips outside the state would spark consequences from the state legislature. In response to Greene, the university wrote that “as a public institution whose instructional activity is funded primarily from state tax sources,” UM “cannot recruit students from outside Michigan.” Greene just didn’t understand the political environment, UM officials concluded.⁶³

Administrators also claimed that Greene didn’t appreciate the obstacles involved in identifying “qualified” black students and faculty members. “Given population characteristics, limited scholarship endowment, and high admissions standards, the U-M student population is primarily white,” UM’s response read. Attrition rates of OAP were already high, and social scientists struggled to find viable tools to predict black students’ performance at UM. In light of the problems UM officials faced in finding useful alternative admissions tests for OAP students, UM argued that “restructuring admissions criteria to eliminate unintended bias … is not easy to accomplish.” In other words, identifying racial disparities in UM’s enrollment was easy, but UM officials claimed that Greene didn’t appreciate how difficult it was to build a new system that could predict which OAP students would graduate from UM. Similarly, UM officials claimed that Greene didn’t appreciate the small pool of black faculty members in the United States, which limited the university’s affirmative action hiring efforts.⁶⁴

There was a sense of helplessness in these writings, as administrators tried to portray themselves as victims of a larger system of inequality. In other words, administrators became the victims of a public school system that poorly prepared black students for postsecondary study. They were victims of housing and employment discrimination that made it difficult for black students to pay the university’s tuition. And they were victims of standardized tests—tests UM officials chose to adopt—that failed to predict black students’ performance.

By portraying themselves as victims, UM officials were trying to preserve their preferred frameworks for measuring discrimination and racial progress. They were asking Greene to evaluate their effort in pursuing affirmative action in light of all the obstacles, not the outcomes of UM’s policies. The number of black students and faculty on campus, administrators claimed, were poor ways to measure compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive Order 11246. UM officials wanted Greene to take into account all the impediments the university faced in pursuing affirmative action and asked him to give UM officials some credit for all their efforts.

Without sympathetic allies in powerful positions inside UM and without the authority to force administrators to implement changes, Greene failed to spark the institutional reforms he sought. It would take black campus activism to force more substantive change.

The Opportunity Awards Program changed the course of history at the University of Michigan. The black freedom movement’s struggle for affirmative action hiring practices affected UM in unexpected ways. When Hobart Taylor initiated meetings with UM, it’s unlikely that any university official thought the university would receive pressure to create an affirmative action admissions program. But that’s exactly what happened. The year 1963 proved a historic turning point at the University of Michigan, as UM officials responded positively to federal pressure and created the university’s first undergraduate affirmative action admissions program.

Nevertheless, from the moment UM officials introduced OAP, they co-opted the purpose and character of affirmative action, ensuring that inclusion would be a secondary priority. UM leaders reminded the university community that OAP was only viable because it didn’t harm the university’s most important priority: institutional excellence. UM officials also ensured that black students couldn’t identify their race on applications, protecting the university from legal and political threats but also making recruiting and selection especially difficult. Moreover, UM leaders made white social scientists the legitimate producers of knowledge about black students. In the early years of OAP, these social scientists never considered the nonacademic factors behind black student attrition, which helped justify the low enrollments in OAP. Finally, UM leaders resisted pressure to measure the success of OAP by the outcomes of the program. It would take black student protest to challenge these mechanisms of co-optation.