When black student activists led a campus strike at the University of Michigan (UM) in 1970, they challenged entrenched ideas and practices that seemed so natural and embedded in the institution that administrators had never questioned them. Black students called these ideas and practices part of the “bones and sinews of the place.”¹ Some of these bones and sinews had developed more than a century before black activists took over campus buildings at UM; others had developed not long before activists stepped foot on campus.

The institutional values and practices that justified an admissions system that created racial disparities began in the mid-nineteenth century. Two core values emerged at the first board of regents meetings in Ann Arbor. Campus leaders wanted to create a university on par with any in the United States, and they wanted the university to offer broad access to the people of Michigan. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, campus leaders chose to subordinate the ideal of access to the goal of attaining and sustaining UM’s elite status. UM leaders saw exclusion as a necessary price to pay for creating an elite institution.

Other values developed in the aftermath of World War II. In the 1940s and 1950s, administrators slowly purged official practices that mandated or accommodated segregation in campus buildings and social clubs. In their place, campus leaders developed a vision of a model multiracial community on campus. They slowly incorporated the prevailing ideas of racial liberalism: an ideal that suggested that interracial contact and universalism would end individual prejudice in America. Administrators never anticipated—in fact, they never seriously considered—how the implementation of racial liberalism would impact black students. The ways that UM leaders crafted the model multiracial community led to a toxic racial climate at UM.

All institutions have a hierarchy of values. At the University of Michigan, crafting and then maintaining its identity as an elite public postsecondary institution has been its main priority since the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout UM’s history, university officials have tried to marry their ambitions to create an elite university with their concerns about access and inclusion. But at every turn, UM leaders made policy decisions that privileged UM’s status as an elite institution over the principle of access. Since the first regents’ meetings in Ann Arbor, access has remained a secondary value—important but always subordinate to quality. Subordinating inclusion in the university’s hierarchy of values would have long-lasting consequences for racial justice advocates at the University of Michigan.

In the university’s first years, though, its foundational values were up for grabs. The university dates its founding to 1817, when Michigan was a small territory. Augustus Woodward, a territorial judge and alumnus of Columbia College, drafted the piece of legislation that created the university. He envisioned a university funded by tax revenues in order to provide an education at a low cost to students. For two decades, the Detroit university existed in name only. The turning point came in 1837, the same year that Michigan achieved statehood, when the university found a home on forty acres of land in Ann Arbor. Two years later, the University of Michigan finally began offering courses at the collegiate level, with six first-year students and one sophomore enrolled.²

Two competing values emerged when the regents began meeting in Ann Arbor. On the one hand, the regents believed that access should be an important principle at a public institution funded with public money. When the regents thought about the principle of inclusion in the early nineteenth century, they were thinking about access for men—UM restricted women’s admission until 1870—regardless of social class. The regents wanted to ensure that the University of Michigan would not become an institution reserved for the children of wealth. After all, the common critique of public higher education, the regents reported in 1839, was that public funds were used to maintain the status of the economically advantaged “when the impoverished genius and talent had to struggle on without this Public facility.” Providing a low-cost education, then, was central to the University of Michigan’s mission in offering what the regents called an institution “of the People.” While access for black men was probably not on their minds at that moment, the regents never created racial restrictions. Thus, prospective black students would not have to fight the same battles as women against official policies of exclusion. It would take a few decades, but UM admitted its first black student in 1853 and graduated its first black student, Gabriel Franklin Hargo, in 1870.³

Several models were available to an institution wishing to build a university “of the people” in the first half of the nineteenth century. This period marked great growth in higher education. The number of degree-granting postsecondary institutions rose from 25 in 1800 to 52 in 1820 and then to 241 in 1860. These new institutions ranged from professional schools to “multipurpose” colleges that tried to offer something for everyone, mixing “practical” courses with traditional college courses. Most often, these colleges incorporated preparatory instruction in order to admit students who lacked advance training at the high school level. Essentially, most of these institutions provided access to anyone who could pay tuition. This was as much out of necessity as out of a grand vision of accessibility and mass education. The biggest struggle that higher education institutions faced in the nineteenth century was finding enough students to pay for operating costs. Open admissions represented a way to survive.⁴

Regents at the University of Michigan did not copy these models. For all their allusions to a university “of the people,” the regents also had aspirations of building an elite university on par with any in the United States and were willing to exclude most of the state’s students in the process. UM modeled its curriculum and admissions standards on the most respected higher education institutions in the Northeast. An important characteristic of “elite” institutions at this time was their steadfast commitment to a liberal education built around a classics course, which was taught in Latin and Greek.⁵ To gain admission to UM, first-year students took examinations in arithmetic, algebra, geography, Cicero’s Orations, Sallust, Friedrich Jacobs’s Greek Reader, and Latin and Greek prosody.⁶ The board of regents made its intentions clear in 1841, stating that UM’s admission requirements would place the university “on an equality with the best colleges in the United States.” From the start UM leaders saw admission standards as a marker of elite status.⁷

These admission requirements weren’t built to provide broad access to Michigan’s residents. Before 1909, when the state legislature finally required counties to either build a high school or pay for its students to attend a high school elsewhere, many students in Michigan didn’t have access to an education beyond the eighth grade. And access to just any high school didn’t guarantee an education that prepared students to take an exam on Cicero. Michigan wasn’t the only state that offered little training to prepare the public for admission to a school like UM. As late as 1940, more than 50 percent of Americans hadn’t completed an education past the eighth grade. It was no secret that UM’s admission requirements excluded the vast majority of young people in the United States. While this might have represented a political risk for the state institution, it presented an even greater financial risk, as UM officials would have to find enough students who were prepared for this type of study in order to pay for operating costs. Leaders at UM decided to take that risk.⁸

The board’s choices in subsequent decades helped reinforce UM’s hierarchy of values. For the first two decades in Ann Arbor, the university operated without a president. By 1852, the regents decided that the university needed a full-time leader. The board hired Henry Tappan, someone who would help build one of America’s first modern research universities and, in doing so, ensure that inclusion remained a secondary institutional value. The regents knew they were getting someone with a grand vision. The year before, Tappan had gained widespread attention for his biting critique of American higher education in his book University Education, in which he suggested that not a single American postsecondary institution could truly call itself a “university” when compared to the German universities he saw in his travels. This wasn’t someone who wanted UM to aspire to become the midwestern Harvard or Yale, like the regents had originally envisioned. Tappan wanted to create an entirely new American university that could aspire to compete with German universities.⁹

Tappan wasted no time initiating the first steps toward making UM a modern American research university. The new president quickly recruited distinguished faculty members. He put resources toward building a library equal to any in the United States that could support advanced research. He raised $15,000 for an observatory and brought an astronomer from Europe to use it. He oversaw a new laboratory of analytical chemistry and the erection of a new campus museum, which Tappan hoped would become one of the great museums of natural history in the United States. As historian Richard Geiger has concluded, “The University of Michigan was the only institution of higher education in the West that made academic quality its foremost value.”¹⁰

Pursuing Tappan’s vision continued to make access a secondary principle at UM. Creating a research university was expensive and required money and resources that the University of Michigan didn’t have. Until 1869, when the university began receiving money from a state property tax, the main source of public funds came from public land sales. Michigan’s territorial governors had invested in UM by providing the university almost twenty-five thousand acres of land to sell. About nineteen hundred of those acres came from Native American lands handed over to Michigan’s territorial governor, Lewis Cass, at the Treaty of Fort Meigs. The rest of the land came from a federal grant. Michigan was one of seventeen states to receive federal land grants to create institutions of higher education before the more famous Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. The university sold this land slowly through the nineteenth century. By 1881, when the regents had finally sold all the land, they had raised $547,000.¹¹

Half a million dollars was no small sum in the nineteenth century, but it still couldn’t support the type of growth that Tappan envisioned. The university needed more students to cover costs. At this moment, keeping so many people out of the university became a problem, as UM wasn’t receiving enough money from tuition revenues to fund Tappan’s vision. If the university’s leaders were going to achieve their goals of building a university that resembled the German model, they needed a stable student population. Still, they weren’t willing to rethink the connection between admission criteria and elite status.

Part of the solution to maintain selective admissions and create a stable student population came from out-of-state applicants. As the University of Michigan began building a modern research university in the second half of the nineteenth century, it gained respect throughout the country. Its newfound reputation sparked interest from students outside the state who qualified for admission at UM, which broadened its pool of potential students. But as a public university supported by state funds—although not as adequately as UM leaders would have liked—admitting too many out-of-state students posed a political problem. To avoid this, university officials needed to find a way to create a larger pool of in-state applicants who could meet selective admission requirements.¹²

In 1854, future University of Michigan president Henry Frieze offered a plan to increase in-state student enrollment. Like Tappan, Frieze was enamored with the German education system. He was especially impressed with a system that provided a pool of talented students for each successive level of education. If UM officials wanted a more reliable pool of students, they needed to get high school leaders to see college preparation as one of their core responsibilities. To do this, UM would tell high school administrators what type of curriculum was necessary for their students to attend the university, and any high school that wanted to provide that curriculum could do so voluntarily. University faculty would travel to participating high schools and certify those schools whose curriculum met UM’s standards. Any student from a certified high school who completed the required coursework prescribed by UM and gained a letter of recommendation from the principal gained automatic admission to the University of Michigan. Students who didn’t graduate from a certified high school could take an entrance exam to prove they were capable of completing UM’s coursework. Adopted unanimously by the faculty in 1870, this system became known as the certification system. UM was the first to develop it in the United States, and it left its mark on universities across the country in the subsequent decades, becoming the most popular method of admissions in the country.¹³

These changes, though, came at a great cost to inclusion. Aside from the fact that many in-state students still lacked access to a high school education and the automatic admission it offered, rising tuition costs that fueled the skyrocketing operating cost of a rising research university priced UM out of the reach of many low-income students. Between 1869 and 1909, the cost of tuition tripled. Not surprisingly, the number of low-income students declined as tuition and fees rose. Before an era of federal and state financial aid, students had to find a way to pay for these rising costs. Into the twentieth century, loans represented the only need-based funds the university provided to low-income students. While low-income enrollment declined, the university’s revenue from tuition receipts skyrocketed. In 1849, the University of Michigan brought in $1,006 from tuition revenues. By 1909, tuition receipts totaled $327,169. What began as a university that would provide low-cost tuition transformed into an institution that imposed costs that excluded many people in the state.¹⁴

While UM’s efforts to become a modern research university limited access, they fulfilled UM leaders’ aspirations to become an elite American university. By the turn of the century, observers recognized that a sea change in higher education was unfolding. There was now a group of universities that looked recognizably different from the rest of the postsecondary institutions. Their large size, commitment to graduate education and scholarly productivity, impressive libraries, and significant annual revenues set them apart. One of these observers, Edwin Slosson, called them the “Great American Universities.” The University of Michigan was on Slosson’s list, along with twelve others, including Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California.¹⁵

To get on this list, UM officials proved that they were willing to accept the declining number of low-income students as long as the university maintained its status as an elite institution. For all the allusions to an institution “of the people,” University of Michigan leaders never saw inclusion as the institution’s leading principle; they were always willing to sacrifice inclusion for status. By the early twentieth century, it was clear that university officials had a high tolerance for inequality.

Once the University of Michigan secured its position among a select group of elite American universities, maintaining its status became administrators’ primary goal. This was no easy task. Although its position as a modern research university helped signal its elite status, faculty members and administrators still saw the academic preparation of the university’s student body as an important signifier of UM’s quality. In the first decades of the twentieth century—another period of growth in higher education—UM faculty members began to question whether UM’s certification system provided the type of student body that could ensure its elite status. The problem was that the certification system was now making UM too accessible. More high schools were popping up around the state and gaining certification. As a result, UM’s enrollment nearly doubled between 1910 and 1923, increasing from 5,339 to 10,500.¹⁶

UM officials and faculty weren’t alone in worrying about the impact of the growing demand for higher education. Anxieties about growth surfaced at UM during a heated national debate about who should go to college. During the interwar years, the college-going population in the United States increased from 597,857 to just under 1.5 million.¹⁷ Some vocal critics of rising college enrollment, such as George Vincent, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, argued that only a small number of Americans were capable of postsecondary learning. According to Vincent, the population could be divided into three categories: 95 percent of the population constituted a “mediocre group,” and the final 5 percent encompassed a group of “superior, exceptionally able people” and a group composed of the “inefficient, the criminal, the undesirable.” Only the “superior, exceptionally able people,” according to Vincent, should have a place in higher education. This meant Vincent believed that about 97 percent of the American population wasn’t suitable for postsecondary study. On the other side of the argument, some higher education leaders saw colleges and universities as tools of social mobility in a changing economy that demanded more professionals and managers with a postsecondary degree. They were also rethinking both who was capable of college-level work and who postsecondary institutions should serve. Representatives of Washburn Municipal University, for example, suggested that “all students with adequate motivation for doing work on the collegiate level should go” to college. Responding to those claiming that only a small percentage of Americans were capable of higher learning, representatives of Washburn noted that the “group incapable of doing college work if adequately motivated is much smaller than is usually assumed.” Representatives of Fresno State College agreed: “Students with honest purpose, ambition, and character—even if having only average intellectual ability”—should go to college.¹⁸

UM officials might have agreed that someone of “average intellectual ability” had a place in higher education—just not at the University of Michigan. UM officials felt that the status of the university depended on keeping “average” students out of UM. They believed that they needed to protect UM’s status when inclusion and access went too far.

Concerns about the future of UM’s elite status produced new questions about the effectiveness of the certification system. Efficiency remained one of the virtues of admission by certificate. Large admissions staffs proved unnecessary because the system left much of the hard work of selecting students up to the high school principals of certified schools. The deans of each college were able to handle and review all applications without the help of an admissions office. Its key virtue was also a problem, though. Without much control over principals’ decisions, administrators enjoyed little recourse when the faculty was unhappy about the quality of the students. The only tools the faculty had to control the academic preparation of incoming students were revoking the certification of particular high schools or changing course requirements for high school students. Evidence suggests that UM’s colleges generally pursued the latter. If faculty members in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) were concerned about the preparation of students in mathematics, the dean added trigonometry to the course requirements. Not enough language preparation? LSA added more Latin or Greek courses to the requirements. But simply adding courses to the required curriculum didn’t necessarily equate to a better high school education. Students were still coming to UM unprepared in the eyes of the faculty.¹⁹

Amid these fears about student quality, the regents hired Clarence Little, one of the nation’s leading eugenicists, to lead the university in 1925. Eugenicists believed that Anglo-Saxons were biologically superior and feared that their purity was at risk. They also shared a common faith that people could be easily placed in categories through simple tests, such as intelligence tests, which became popular after World War I. These pseudoscientists used intelligence tests to promote the sterilization of the “feebleminded” and justify immigration restriction. Eugenics became so popular in the early twentieth century that 376 universities taught courses on the subject.²⁰

While Little never called for admission restrictions based on race or ethnicity, he incorporated his faith in eugenics at UM by centralizing undergraduate admissions and introducing new testing tools to identify students who couldn’t meet the intellectual demands of the university’s curriculum. In 1925, the board of regents approved the first step of this plan: creating a registrar’s office. In 1927, the regents also approved the Bureau of University Research, which soon turned into the Office of Educational Testing (OET). Little gave these offices opportunities to evaluate students in new ways. When Little first arrived at UM, he brought with him from the University of Maine a program called Freshman Week. This program, instituted at Michigan in the fall of 1927, required all admitted first-year students to take a battery of standardized tests. One of these tests, the SAT, had roots in eugenics. Its creator, Carl Brigham, was a eugenicist who wrote A Study of American Intelligence, in which he claimed “American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.”²¹

Little didn’t eliminate the certification system. Nevertheless, he created offices that would eventually lead to a new admissions system based on standardized tests and high school grades. The introduction of the registrar’s office proved to be one of Little’s long-lasting contributions to admissions reform. Ira Smith became the office’s first leader. Smith came to UM with fifteen years of experience in the registrar’s and admissions offices at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, respectively. To call Smith’s new fiefdom at UM an office might be too generous. His staff included an editorial assistant and a secretary. Together, they handled all first-year admission applications; transfer applications continued to go to the deans of each respective college. At this point, there still wasn’t much for a registrar to do with in-state applicants who went to a certified school. Smith would simply check for a principal’s recommendation and make sure that the student took the required high school courses. Only out-of-state applicants and in-state students who didn’t attend a certified school needed serious evaluation.²²

Smith’s limited power in the admissions process didn’t stop him from thinking about how to identify those students the faculty desired. Smith started collecting whatever information he could about students, then added additional questions to admissions applications in order to collect more data. Initially, Smith didn’t expect that his data collection would undermine the certification system. He thought he could improve student advising if he could forecast which students would struggle academically at UM. Still, in collecting data and trying to predict how students would perform at UM, he was slowly trying to gain more power over the admissions process within the constraints posed by the certification system. Smith was gaining confidence that he could forecast students’ success better than high school principals could. So when Smith saw a student who he thought would struggle at UM—despite the fact that the student had a principal’s recommendation, had graduated from a certified high school, and had taken the required coursework—he called the principal and questioned the official’s decision. Sometimes he would convince the principal that the student would be better served by going to another college.²³

The Principal-Freshman Conference represented another tool Smith used to gain more influence over the certification system. At these annual conferences, Smith met with the principals of high schools that sent students to UM, sharing all his data about which students succeeded in college. Basically, Smith was trying to train principals the same way he might train an admissions counselor. He made the point that principals were sending students to UM who were unprepared and emphasized that new techniques in sorting students were necessary for principals to make more informed decisions about which students to recommend for an elite institution.²⁴

Still, there were limits to Smith’s power in incorporating these tools in the admissions process. While Smith believed he could forecast students’ performance at UM better than the certification system, his prediction tools were flawed. In reality, although he might be able to predict with some degree of accuracy how the top and bottom high school students would perform at UM, he found that students in the middle were “completely unpredictable.” Since over 50 percent of UM students fell into that category, Smith had no idea how most UM students would perform. But that didn’t stop Smith from continuing to put students into categories and making these labels a part of university practice.²⁵

Those at UM who were actually trained to analyze data were more transparent about the problems of forecasting. Researchers in the OET—the other office Little created—began examining all the prediction tools the university had at its disposal to forecast which students would leave UM before graduating. OET researchers weren’t as optimistic about these tools as Smith was, likening admissions to a life insurance company trying to predict the life span of an applicant. With such mixed results in forecasting students’ performance, the certification system held strong through WWII, despite grumbles from faculty.²⁶

Ironically, the research office Little created slowed the incorporation of standardized tests at UM. Nevertheless, Little’s efforts would have long-term consequences. Little left the university in 1929, but the research he sparked on prediction tools continued long after he left. That research evolved after World War II, eventually providing the data necessary to justify making the SAT an admissions requirement at UM.

On the surface, at least, the University of Michigan’s obsession with student quality set UM apart from elite institutions in the Northeast, which worried that focusing too closely on academic credentials would bring too many socially undesirable students to campus. Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were especially concerned that Jewish students with high test scores were overtaking their campuses. Even with a eugenicist leading the University of Michigan from 1925 to 1929, the issue of religion didn’t infuse public discussions about admissions practices like it did at some Ivy League institutions. There was no organized effort at the University of Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s to introduce admissions practices, such as quotas, specifically designed to exclude Jewish students from undergraduate admissions.²⁷

Furthermore, UM officials didn’t create quotas or other policies specifically designed to limit black enrollment when the number of black students on campus climbed in the early twentieth century. UM hosted one of the largest black student populations among historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs) during this period. In 1912, UM hosted thirty-nine black students, which meant that only two HWCUs in the United States enrolled more. An estimate from the 1920s put about sixty black students on campus out of ten thousand—or 0.6 percent of the student population. UM’s record as a top enroller of black students among HWCUs speaks more to the poor record of other institutions than UM’s commitment to racial inclusion. Considering that the black population of the state rose from 1.6 percent to 3.5 percent between 1920 and 1930, significant racial disparities still existed in UM’s student body.²⁸

The priorities behind UM’s admissions system created these disparities. Preserving the university’s elite status was always the driving purpose behind UM’s admissions practices. UM officials didn’t craft admissions policies to challenge racial inequality. Only an admissions system that thought little about inequality could measure students’ merit by their academic capabilities at the moment of admission. In other words, UM’s admissions system didn’t think about how students’ academic capabilities might change after four years—or even two years—of study at UM. They measured merit by how students would perform at UM the moment they stepped onto campus. That type of definition simply reproduced the advantages and disadvantages of race and wealth outside UM’s walls. There were, of course, other definitions of merit available. For example, officials could have defined merit by the predicted academic capabilities of students after four years of study at UM, when students had a chance to overcome educational disadvantages. Furthermore, if university officials made equity an important part of its mission, officials could have defined merit by which students would best use their education to disrupt structures of inequality after they left UM. But university officials never considered these alternatives.²⁹

UM’s definition of merit meant that its admissions system worked in harmony with the discriminatory educational policies in Detroit. African Americans began moving to Michigan in larger numbers beginning in World War I. Most of these black migrants settled in Detroit, where they were met with discrimination and repression. This behavior extended into the school system. Beginning in the 1920s, the Detroit school district created a curriculum tracking system that divided students into different coursework plans based on tests that claimed to measure students’ abilities. Black students were overwhelmingly placed in coursework that prepared them for industrial labor, not postsecondary study. Black students in the Motor City were half as likely to be on the college preparatory track than white students. For the few black students on the college preparatory track, white principals remained the gatekeepers to their admission at the University of Michigan. As late as 1955, there were two black principals in the entire Detroit school system, including all primary and secondary schools.³⁰

The certificate system created a perfect recipe for racial discrimination. Evidence from UM’s records suggests that the university distributed certifications to high schools liberally, especially in southeastern Michigan, where most black residents lived. But lack of certification wasn’t the problem. The problem was that black students didn’t just have to graduate from a certified high school to gain admission to UM; they also had to complete a specific set of college preparatory courses. The tracking system made that extremely difficult. And for the few black students who did have access to such courses, they had to get a letter of recommendation from their principal. Thus, the same white high school administrators who were complicit in a discriminatory system decided whether a black student would get into UM. The University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions system was “color-blind” only in the sense that UM officials didn’t look at an applicant’s race when deciding who to admit. Instead, they outsourced the process of selection to secondary-school officials engaged in racial discrimination. If black students could run the gauntlet of discrimination in Detroit’s school system and qualify for admission, UM officials would permit their entry.³¹

Black students’ access to the University of Michigan didn’t improve when UM officials eliminated the certification system. The final nail in the certification system’s coffin came during yet another explosion in college enrollment. The rising demand for college education after World War II revealed another problem with the certification system: it was a poor tool for controlling enrollment growth. Again, the certification system was making UM too accessible, which potentially threatened the university’s status.

If the 1920s enrollment growth concerned officials and faculty, the post–World War II growth created a crisis. The demand for higher education was unparalleled in American history. During the 1939–40 academic year, American postsecondary institutions enrolled about 1.5 million students. Ten years later, enrollment had almost doubled, reaching close to 2.7 million. By 1960, the number reached 3.6 million. UM wasn’t immune to the growing demand for higher education. In 1940, 1,730 students made up the entire first-year class. Immediately after the war, Ira Smith received almost 1,500 undergraduate applications in a single day. The post–World War II baby boom and growing high school enrollments around the country made it clear to UM administrators that the demand for higher education wouldn’t return to pre–World War II levels anytime soon—if ever.³²

UM officials had only a few tools they could use to control undergraduate student growth. First, because nonresidents didn’t have access to the certification system and the automatic admission that it provided to qualified students—with the exception of a few high schools in neighboring states—Smith could curtail nonresident enrollment. And that’s exactly what he did, but he did so strategically, picking which out-of-state students to privilege and which to deny. He ensured that out-of-state applicants from the children of alumni would still have access to the university. To limit enrollment, he discriminated against out-of-state women, restricting their access unless they were veterans or legacy applicants. Elisabeth Lawrie, the assistant registrar, justified discrimination against these women, arguing that it would not “be any great hardship on women. There is not now a pressing need for women to rush through their college work.”³³

These tools put only a small dent in the surging demand for access to UM, and for those committed to maintaining UM’s status as an elite institution, these particular tools posed a threat to the university’s quality. Postwar growth was putting stress on the university’s infrastructure and faculty. UM had only so many faculty members, so many seats in classrooms, and so many beds in dormitories. UM faculty and administrators worried that the university would have to compromise its academic standards to accommodate the demand for higher education after World War II.³⁴

Structural changes within higher education exacerbated concerns about student quality. UM’s status as a modern research university made it unique in the early twentieth century. By the post–World War II period, more postsecondary institutions were claiming research status. As President Harlan Hatcher recalled, “The pre-eminence of Michigan as we had known it, in the previous 100 years, practically, was no longer unique.” As officials searched for ways to set UM apart from these emerging research universities, the academic preparation of UM’s student body became even more important as a marker of the university’s elite status.³⁵

In response to concerns over student quality and rapid growth spread across the country, elite universities began raising their admission standards. UM officials watched this process with trepidation. Charles Odegaard, the LSA dean at the time, warned that the “pressure from mediocre students to gain admittance [to UM] will increase” as they get shut out of other elite schools. If UM didn’t shut them out too, he suggested, its elite status would diminish. In effect, more flexible admissions systems allowed competing institutions to have more control over sorting the “high ability” students from the “mediocre” students as application numbers skyrocketed. In this context, the “mediocre” student became a dangerous threat to UM’s status.³⁶

What happened next reveals a recurring pattern that would eventually have an impact on the evolution of affirmative action at UM. When a particular group was deemed a threat to the university’s elite status, it faced an intellectual assault that justified its exclusion. In the 1950s, “mediocre students”—some of the same students who were deemed qualified in previous decades—were portrayed as a waste of university resources and a drain on the faculty’s time. These students, the argument went, stymied the intellectual growth of “superior” students in the classroom and unfavorably influenced the social and extracurricular environment of these same students outside the classroom. Even worse, the presence of too many “mediocre” students made it difficult to recruit “superior” students who wanted to be challenged by their peers. For a university that prized faculty research, low-performing students were also problematic because, according to one UM researcher, they produced “unnecessary problems for a busy and scholarly faculty.” In other words, helping “mediocre” students produce satisfactory work diverted too much of the faculty’s time away from research.³⁷

UM officials also introduced diversity language to justify the exclusion of previously qualified in-state students in order to enroll a large number of nonresidents. In the immediate post–World War II period, out-of-state students’ share of the student body dropped significantly to accommodate the surge of in-state applicants. Faculty members and administrators loathed the practice of limiting nonresident enrollment to control growth. Out-of-state students were valuable to UM because they paid more money, but just as important, they were considered better students. Out-of-state students faced more stringent admission standards, and their presence, UM officials believed, was necessary to maintain the university’s elite status. Of course, this is how administrators and faculty discussed out-of-state students internally. Recognizing that it wasn’t the best tactic to tell Michigan taxpayers and state legislators that their children were intellectually inferior to the students UM could recruit from outside the state, UM administrators and faculty publicly stressed how in-state students benefited from the diversity that out-of-state students brought to UM. Words like “national character,” “cosmopolitan,” and “heterogeneity” filled the public statements that justified the large numbers of nonresidents at UM. Some people called this diversity rationale into question. Weren’t there areas in the state that were almost totally unrepresented at UM? Wouldn’t students from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula bring different perspectives to UM, just like students from Ohio? These were marginal voices, however, that never gained much traction at UM. After all, diversity in this context was always about justifying UM’s quest to get large numbers of the nation’s “best” students.³⁸

UM officials pursued two paths to preserve UM’s status in this new era of mass higher education. First, they pushed for the expansion of already existing postsecondary state institutions and the creation of new ones to accommodate the students they considered mediocre. The idea here was that the University of Michigan would receive pressure from the state legislature to admit “mediocre” students if other outlets were not available. To relieve this pressure, UM president Harlan Hatcher proved instrumental in expanding the number of junior colleges in the state and encouraging the growth of Michigan State University.³⁹

Second, faculty and administrators became more willing to entertain a new admissions system. In the postwar period, the university moved away from the automatic admission guaranteed by the certification system and replaced it with a new system that gave admissions officers the power to select both in-state and out-of-state students. A new admissions office, inaugurated in 1949, led this transformation. Clyde Vroman became the university’s first admissions director. Vroman was an unusual choice to lead an admissions office. A high school dropout, he eventually graduated from high school in 1933 at the age of twenty-nine. Nine years later, he had a PhD in secondary education and a master’s degree in music, all from the University of Michigan. He began teaching music and education courses at UM until he received an offer to lead the admissions office. Without any prior experience, he helped transform admissions into a professional practice at the University of Michigan.⁴⁰

Despite his lack of experience, Vroman was able to do what Smith couldn’t. He convinced faculty and administrators that he could predict how students would perform at UM better than high school principals could. He offered an admissions system that would focus on high school grades, standardized test scores, and a college preparatory curriculum. Vroman made the SAT a requirement on an experimental basis for out-of-state applicants in 1955 and for in-state applicants in 1961. After claiming its validity in selecting students, Vroman made the exam a permanent part of the application process for out-of-state students in 1957 and for in-state students in 1963.⁴¹

Vroman wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of social scientists. Ira Smith’s innovations fell victim to skeptical researchers; Vroman’s admissions innovations received the full intellectual support of the university’s research arm. In particular, Vroman received the support of Benno Fricke. Fricke served as the assistant chief of the university’s Evaluation and Examination Division, a research office created in 1945. Fricke’s job involved analyzing the predictive value of the common admissions tools used in the United States. He concluded that UM could no longer rely on principals to predict which students could graduate from UM. The most accurate predictors of students’ performance, according to Fricke, were their high school grade point averages and SAT scores. He sold these practices to the faculty as “objective” and “considerably accurate.”⁴²

Fricke offered a sense of order and fairness to a system that was going to exclude even more in-state applicants than had the certification system. But a look at Fricke’s internal reports suggests that these prediction tools were a lot messier than Fricke had let on to the faculty. In one internal report he admitted, “It is reasonably safe to say that the accuracy with which freshman grades are predicted has not changed over the past thirty years.” Much like Smith, Fricke could only predict with a high degree of certainty the performance of students with high school grades and standardized test scores in the top and bottom fifth of UM’s current students. In other words, Fricke couldn’t successfully predict the performance of 60 percent of students in their first year at UM.⁴³

Nevertheless, this wasn’t a problem for Fricke. He suggested that UM should simply increase the number of students whose SAT scores and high school performance put them in the top fifth of applicants. In other words, he wanted the admissions office to focus on students whose performance was easily predictable. These were the valuable students. As a goal, Fricke wanted to reduce the number of students whose performance was difficult to predict to 15 to 25 percent of the university’s student body. The unpredictable students, a full sixty percent of UM’s undergraduate population, suddenly became potential threats to the university’s quality.⁴⁴

The consequences of Fricke’s research and the university’s move to modify admissions standards based on standardized test scores proved monumental in determining how university officials would define merit and talent. Sixty percent of UM’s student body now threatened UM’s quality, not because UM researchers could predict their poor academic performance but because researchers couldn’t predict how they would perform. There were many brilliant students in this group, but there were also many students deemed “mediocre” and low performing. Because researchers like Fricke couldn’t sort the brilliant from the rest, everyone in this group was deemed a risk to the university’s quality. Fricke, in other words, transformed predictability into merit.⁴⁵

These new admissions tools were likely popular because they gave UM an aura of selectivity that allowed it to claim elite status in an emerging period of mass education. As I mentioned previously, mass higher education disrupted the stratification of higher education. Elite universities began to rely even more on their selectivity and the quality of their student bodies to claim their elite status.⁴⁶

All of this speaks to how the SAT gained legitimacy and authority as a measurement tool at the University of Michigan when so much of the internal research suggested that it was unreliable in identifying talented students. When research was translated into public statements, the messiness became orderly. The environment of fear about the future quality of UM also likely helped the UM community overlook—or at least ask fewer questions about—much of this messiness. The benefits of the new admissions system offered a new sense of confidence that UM could maintain its elite status.⁴⁷

In sum, the primary purpose of these new admissions tools was never to accurately predict the “best” students; rather, the primary purpose was to preserve the university’s elite status. Preserving status has always been put above fairness and inclusion at the University of Michigan. In fact, regardless of the SAT’s poor utility in predicting the ability of students, once SAT scores became a reliable tool for sustaining UM’s reputation, doing away with the test proved almost impossible.

Much like the certification system, the new admissions system continued to ignore the social world of applicants. When Benno Fricke studied the correlation between SAT scores and academic performance at UM, he gave no attention to race. Because UM students took these exams once they arrived on campus, it’s likely that only a few black students were part of Fricke’s studies. As late as 1963, a generous estimate put two hundred black first-year students on campus. The numbers wouldn’t have mattered because Fricke didn’t ask test takers for their racial identity. This lack of attention to race helped UM present the SAT as a legitimate tool for measuring the merit of all students effectively, regardless of their background.⁴⁸

The fact that UM leaders implemented the SAT with no discussion of race shows just how easily the exam shed its eugenics legacy. Faculty members and administrators started to disconnect testing from eugenics in the 1920s, when Clarence Little introduced standardized tests during Freshman Week. Administrators and faculty members never challenged the SAT because it was rooted in racial pseudoscience. Early researchers questioned its effectiveness, not its racist origins or consequence for black applicants. It’s unclear how many people within the university community shared Little’s faith in eugenics. Faculty members didn’t directly reference eugenics when discussing admissions reform in public meetings and reports. Perhaps most faculty members were attracted to Little’s faith in standardized tests only because they hoped it would preserve the university’s status. Whatever the reason, they were still willing to overlook (or accept) the reforms’ connection to racial pseudoscience. This speaks to how UM officials and faculty normalized racism. The UM community embraced the tools of eugenics while ignoring the racist ideology behind standardized testing. This process of de-racializing the test made it easier for UM officials to incorporate it as a tool in the 1950s and ignore the racial disparities it produced.⁴⁹

Racial disparities, of course, plagued the SAT and brought criticism from civil rights groups. The SAT, though, wasn’t the only admissions mechanism that ignored the social world of students and produced disparities. By continuing to place emphasis on a college preparatory curriculum in admissions decisions, officials kept the fate of black students’ admission in the hands of Detroit officials. The problem was that black students’ access to college preparatory courses didn’t greatly improve during the postwar period. Black parents protested against the poor quality of their children’s education, especially the lack of college preparatory courses. But reform was slow, and efforts to integrate the city’s schools through busing initiatives in the early 1960s were met with harsh resistance from white parents.⁵⁰

Before the 1960s, only one school within the University of Michigan considered the social world of black applicants when crafting admissions practices. By the late 1940s, UM’s medical school recognized the structural factors that gave white students advantages in the admissions system. With these structural problems in mind and believing that there was a pressing need for black doctors, the medical school set up UM’s first affirmative action admissions program. There is so little documentation of this program that it’s unclear when it started. But since the earliest affirmative action admissions program recorded thus far began in the early 1960s, UM’s medical school was years ahead of what scholars consider the pioneers of affirmative action in higher education.⁵¹

The program fell victim to protest. Surprisingly, these challenges to the medical school’s affirmative action program came from the Committee to End Discrimination (CED), a coalition of many different student groups on campus. When students began to pressure the medical school to reform its admissions practices in spring 1949, none of the students in CED understood that the school’s practices benefited black applicants. Students only knew that the medical school asked for students’ race and religion on applications in addition to requesting a photograph. To them, this was prima facie evidence of discrimination against black applicants.⁵²

CED members didn’t come up with this assumption about the dangers of racial identification and discrimination on their own. These students found inspiration in the growing popularity of racial liberalism that followed World War II. Racial liberals saw racism as one of the great social problems in the United States that threatened American democracy. Within universities, they imagined a world without formal barriers designed to limit or exclude African Americans. In their eyes, eliminating race as an important institutional category was fundamental to this process. To Secure These Rights, the famous report President Harry Truman commissioned from his Committee on Civil Rights, gave the students a road map, listing the types of policies universities used to discriminate against black students. Questions about race were an obvious red flag, but so too were requests for photographs, as the medical school had implemented. The students cited the committee’s report when they attacked the medical school.⁵³

Students’ pressure on the medical school heated up in the fall of 1949. CED representatives participated in a series of meetings with Wayne Whitaker, chair of the medical school’s admissions committee. Whitaker took a cautious approach by trying to reassure the students that the medical school did not discriminate. The committee, according to Whitaker, “regard[s] the problems of race and religion as insignificant” in determining who to admit. But Whitaker’s attempts to reassure CED did not end the organization’s campaign. And it was clear that CED was making inroads with the university’s administration. In February 1950, administrators organized a committee to study CED’s claims about discrimination. Only then did Whitaker reveal the true purpose of the medical school’s questions about race.⁵⁴

The fact that the medical school used racial identification to improve access for black students made little difference to CED. Students continued to pressure UM officials to remove requests for photographs and questions about race from applications. By the end of 1950, a committee led by Professor Harold M. Dorr made the recommendation to every college and school at UM that “pre-admission photographs and questions regarding race, religion, national origin, and ancestry be eliminated from admission forms.” Soon thereafter, a representative of UM’s president’s office announced that Dorr’s recommendation was now university policy. The medical school officially changed its forms in fall 1951.⁵⁵

The pressure from the CED and the administration’s new policy had an immediate impact on black students’ access to the medical school. A national survey of medical schools in the late 1940s revealed that UM’s medical school enrolled more black students than any other HWCU. In the midst of the backlash to affirmative action, however, black enrollment fell by half. Later, by the 1970s, declining numbers of black students would signal that there was a potential problem with racial inclusion policies. But for racial liberals, a decline in black students did not necessarily signal a problem, as they didn’t measure success by the number of black students on campus. Ensuring that race played no role in choosing people for jobs or admission was more important to racial liberals than implementing a policy that raised black enrollment. In fact, counting the number of black students or employees—a key part of measuring success for future affirmative action proponents—violated the principles of racial liberalism. After all, counting by race made race an important category, something racial liberals wanted to avoid. That’s why the students who protested against the medical school’s affirmative action program didn’t rethink their position when black enrollment fell after the school modified its admissions policies. The outcomes of admissions policies were less important than a color-blind process of selecting students.⁵⁶

The color-blind admissions process produced poor outcomes for black students across the university. By 1963, the first time UM officially reported black enrollment, approximately two hundred black students were on UM’s campus—or 0.5 percent of the student body. That means that if the estimate of black students from the 1920s is correct, which placed sixty black students on campus (0.6 percent of a smaller student body), black students’ share of the UM student population actually declined slightly between the 1920s and early 1960s. This is especially significant considering that the black population in the state rose dramatically during this period. In Detroit, for example, African Americans’ share of the city’s population rose from 4.1 percent to 28.9 percent between 1920 and 1960.⁵⁷

Retaining control over what constituted fairness and racism represented a key tool that allowed UM administrators to claim racial innocence, even as few black students gained access to the university. Racial liberalism helped rationalize admissions policies that created disparities while prohibiting admissions criteria designed specifically to increase black enrollment. Despite UM leaders’ focus on the process of selecting students, they were noticeably silent on how the university’s admissions process was unfair to black students. Demanding pictures as part of the admissions process signaled unfairness. Standardized tests that greatly disadvantaged black students were fair. Questions about race suggested prima facie evidence of discrimination. Admissions criteria that focused on a college preparatory curriculum, largely inaccessible to black students, represented fairness. Racial liberalism never kept race out of university policies; it simply helped UM officials claim that they cared about racial inclusion while muting discussions about how the university’s admissions policies reinforced discrimination in primary and secondary schools. Even when university leaders later rejected some of the principles of racial liberalism and adopted affirmative action, they never rejected racial innocence. Racial innocence continued to be an effective weapon for avoiding any institutional culpability for racial disparities.

As UM leaders were undermining the university’s first affirmative action admissions program, they were crafting special admissions programs for other groups. These programs gave administrators the confidence that they could incorporate the principle of inclusion without disrupting the entire admissions system. Minor modifications could be made to implement inclusion and preserve the university’s elite status.

UM’s special admissions practices for international students were emblematic of efforts to reconcile access with the more important value of institutional quality after World War II. UM’s increasingly exclusive admissions policies called international students’ access into question. The University of Michigan had a long history of admitting international students. As early as 1858, international students constituted 4.5 percent of the student body. The university carried that tradition through the twentieth century. By the mid-1950s, 960 international students were on campus, accounting for 5.5 percent of UM’s students. Few universities in the United States matched that number, and UM consistently ranked among the top three enrollers of international students in the country. China represented UM’s most fruitful recruiting ground. Between 1854 and 1954, no U.S. university came close to educating the number of Chinese students that UM enrolled.⁵⁸ But as UM initiated new tools of applicant selection, UM’s registrar, and later the admissions office, had a difficult time evaluating applications from international students. Many of the international students who were admitted had little knowledge of English and struggled in their coursework, which sparked complaints from faculty.⁵⁹

International students’ struggles, however, didn’t stop UM from admitting them. University officials created special admissions criteria for international applicants. Still, UM officials created rules to ensure that special admissions programs would preserve the university’s hierarchy of values. First, any special admissions program had to serve a social need that the university had an interest in addressing. In international students’ case, in times of war university officials felt they had a responsibility to educate students in war-ravaged countries without access to postsecondary training. In peacetime, assumptions about American universities’ responsibility to modernize “backward” places drove administrators’ commitment to admitting international students. UM officials pitched international student enrollment by recounting the work of UM alumni who had returned to their home countries and “built railways and river locks in China, … promoted Turkey’s strategic network of highways,” and “attacked the scourge of the Nile, the liver fluke, which is carried in its contaminated waters.” Their work would also have obvious benefits for the United States, administrators argued. These graduates would go back to their home countries and develop business relationships with American corporations. For example, a Chilean engineer educated at UM would become “familiar with American models and specifications and is bound to import American machinery rather than British or German.” UM officials also saw the presence of international students as a tool to challenge the growing importance of nationalism. Leaders at UM saw nationalism as a modern problem that led to the world wars of the twentieth century. Admitting international students, in administrators’ eyes, facilitated a cultural exchange that would get UM students to “think in terms of humanity at large, not as self-centered and isolated national groups.” In the special admissions process for international students, then, UM officials saw the opportunity to contribute to a new world where American businesses would have greater access to global markets, UM alumni would solve the social problems of “backward” places, and world wars would be relics of the past.⁶⁰

These arguments alone still weren’t enough to justify international students’ admission. The second rule ensured that proponents of special admissions had to show that the program wouldn’t undermine the university’s elite status. In this case, proponents had to show how admitting large numbers of international students who often struggled in their coursework would not hurt the university’s quality. Advocates used the diversity rationale, arguing that international students broadened the educational experience of U.S. citizens at the University of Michigan. Through contact with “diverse personalities,” American students would widen their “understanding of life and people.” It was an education that students could not get simply by learning about different cultures through classroom lectures. The university set up a place on campus that was supposed to facilitate this engagement between American and international students. The International House provided campus housing for many of the international students, developed programing that promoted the positive traits of different cultures, and sought to bring American students into contact with international students. International students, according to the diversity rationale, improved the educational experience of American students, which justified their special admissions criteria.⁶¹

Officials also crafted special admissions practices for men. In the eyes of most administrators and faculty members, the problem with moving to an admissions system that admitted students based on high school grade point averages, high school standing, and standardized test scores was that women often outperformed men on these measurements. Officials in LSA decided that they needed to limit women’s enrollment. As a model, they could have used the Ivy League’s practices of discriminating against Jewish applicants by introducing subjective personality factors that were supposedly lacking in women. Instead, LSA officials crafted a new policy of proportionalism, which required that a man be admitted for every woman admitted. The fact that LSA officials were so open about the proportional system suggests that they weren’t concerned about backlash to policies that formally limited women’s enrollment. Administrators and faculty members who were concerned about women’s rising representation at UM never explained why they thought this was a problem, perhaps because the people involved thought the problem was obvious.⁶²

If administrators didn’t need to articulate the reasons behind these practices, they still needed to address concerns about quality by showing how the special admissions practices for men wouldn’t hurt the academic capabilities of the student body. Their rationale required some intellectual jujitsu. By almost all measurements, the data on women’s high school and UM performance suggested that they outperformed men. The chair of LSA’s oversight committee on undergraduate admissions even reported that women were responsible for improving the quality of the first-year class. Women, on average, also achieved higher grade point averages at UM. But that didn’t stop advocates of women’s restriction from mobilizing evidence to support their case. Despite the fact that women performed better in their coursework at UM, they left LSA before graduating in higher numbers than did men. UM officials never considered the social factors that pressured women to leave higher education in the post–World War II period. Instead, the data led advocates of women’s restriction to argue that women matured much earlier than men, which explained their superior performance in high school, on standardized tests, and even in their first years at UM. Admissions tools, they argued, were flawed because they privileged a group with high attrition rates and didn’t consider the late development of male students. Using this logic, letting in more male students actually improved the quality of the university because more men successfully completed the university’s upper-level courses.⁶³

The justifications for men’s special admissions practices show that UM officials were capable of considering alternatives to an important feature of the admissions system that had long preserved racial disparities. UM measured merit based on a candidate’s qualifications at the time of application. An alternative, which they used here for men, was to measure merit by predicting the academic capabilities of a student after four years of study at UM. UM officials, of course, never considered this method for black students.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to point out the difference between the evidence necessary to challenge the validity of traditional admissions tools for a particular group and the evidence necessary to support the diversity rationale. The diversity rationale, used for international students, wasn’t as easy to measure and test. In the mid-twentieth century, there were no tools set up to determine whether American citizens benefited from their contact with international students. People on campus took international students’ positive contributions for granted. That didn’t mean that nobody worried about the academic preparation of international students, but the diversity rationale made no guarantees about their academic performance. International students added value through their presence on campus; they didn’t face the same burden of proving they were just as capable of completing the coursework as any other student. But when the rationale for a special admissions program hinged on challenging the validity of admissions tools, advocates faced a different standard. University researchers had already set up a sophisticated, if flawed, system that measured whether admissions tools effectively predicted students’ performance. Any claim that these admissions tools didn’t measure a particular group effectively, then, seemed easy to assess and required empirical evidence. That’s why advocates of special admissions practices for men relied heavily on data to support their cause.

So far, I’ve highlighted the obstacles UM officials faced in showing how special admissions programs wouldn’t hurt the quality of the university. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. UM’s post–World War II program for veterans, for example, found a place at UM without reconciling the perceived tension between quality and inclusion. Veterans’ admissions policies didn’t just deviate from the normal high school curriculum required for admission; rather, the university was willing to admit veterans who hadn’t graduated from high school. As long as the veteran applicant showed a chance of doing satisfactory work and had completed three years of high school, the applicant was granted admission. UM officials argued that veterans deserved special treatment because of their service. The success of this program speaks to the special place military service held during the period and the temporary nature of this program. It was understood that the special admissions practices for veterans would last only a couple of years and, consequently, would not have any long-term consequences for the university’s quality.⁶⁴

Two other groups—legacies and athletes—enjoyed access to special admissions criteria without the need to regularly articulate how their presence didn’t hurt the university’s quality. In evaluating out-of-state applicants, the university privileged the children of alumni. The university also evaluated applications from potential athletes differently. In internal reports and faculty meeting minutes, special admissions practices for legacies and athletes were usually discussed without any rationale. Only in the case of the sons and daughters of international students did an official suggest that special admissions practices were necessary in order to create a “Michigan tradition” in other countries. The fact that university officials rarely had to articulate these rationales suggests that alumni and athletes enjoyed a special privilege where few people ever questioned their presence and access to special admissions practices.⁶⁵

Still, these programs wouldn’t have existed if administrators and faculty members didn’t see value in these two groups. The university community connected both alumni and athletes to the university’s prestige. Running an elite university was expensive, and donations from alumni were essential to maintaining the university’s status. In 1921, President Martin Burton called the university’s alumni a “moderate-sized army,” standing at fifty-two thousand. He recognized that alumni donations were responsible for much of the university’s equipment and recently constructed buildings. Two-fifths of all the university’s property and operating funds came from alumni. When officials added up all the university’s money, property, and equipment that hadn’t come from the state government, they revealed that alumni donations amounted to $22,721,634.17. Special admissions practices for legacies, then, became one way to keep this important donor pool happy. Special admissions practices for athletes also had value because they helped the university administration satisfy alumni. Beginning in the early twentieth century, few things were more important to alumni than a winning football team. Getting the best football talent, regardless of whether these athletes qualified for admission, represented a tool to keep alumni money flowing.⁶⁶

These special admissions programs created problems for black students. In the short term, the programs meant that white and non-U.S. citizens would largely benefit from special admissions, while black students faced a system that produced harsh racial disparities. In the long term, the principles of special admissions created obstacles for future activists who wanted to make the university more accessible to black students. The idea that inclusion required only minor modifications through a special admissions program weakened black activists’ calls to ditch the university’s admissions practices and build a new system from scratch based on the principle of racial justice. The programs’ obsession with quality also meant that black students had to prove their merit constantly, always under suspicion that their presence undermined the university’s status.

UM’s admissions system clearly excluded many black students, but the university’s admissions policies were not the only factors that kept black students’ representation below 1 percent of the student body for the better half of the twentieth century. For the small group of black students who could afford to attend UM and overcame the obstacles put in their way by local school districts, UM’s toxic racial climate created an additional roadblock. Black students needed to be willing to come to and stay on a campus with a reputation as an uninviting place for minorities. Thus, the social environment, not just the selection and funding procedures, excluded black students.

While UM admitted and graduated black students long before many other universities in the United States, the history of UM’s racial climate mirrors that of most HWCUs. Before the post–World War II period, the University of Michigan did little to end discriminatory practices on or off campus. At least into the 1920s, black students were prohibited from attending college dances and using the university swimming pool. University housing was also segregated into World War II. In fact, until 1930, black women could not live on campus. In the classroom, black students might find themselves in the classes of U. B. Phillips, a historian who characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, or A. Franklin Shull, a zoologist who believed that whites were genetically superior to African Americans. Moreover, between 1925 and 1929, black students traversed a campus led by a prominent eugenicist. Off campus, black students found segregated restaurants and discriminatory housing practices. Black students’ efforts to challenge this environment were met with retribution from UM administrators.⁶⁷

After World War II, university administrators ended official policies of racial segregation, yet they maintained practices that allowed white students to act on their prejudices. As late as 1959, the housing office allowed students to request to live with a member of the same racial group, asking the question on applications: “Are you interested in a roommate of a nationality, or race other than your own?” These policies enjoyed strong support from UM students. One 1949 survey recorded that 59 percent of UM students supported the housing office’s practice of obtaining students’ racial information before making housing assignments. Only 9 percent of students stated that they would like to live with a black student. The irony here is that in the same year that a student movement used the ideal of color blindness to end affirmative action in the medical school, the majority of UM students supported the collection of racial information in the housing office that protected white students from rooming with black students.⁶⁸

Executive administrators also undermined some efforts to eliminate discriminatory practices. An investigation revealed that the constitutions of thirty-three fraternities and three sororities on campus included racially discriminatory clauses. In November 1950, in a close vote of twenty to eighteen, the student legislature approved a proposal to mandate that all campus fraternities and sororities remove discriminatory clauses within six years. UM president, Alexander Ruthven vetoed the plan. Ruthven and his successor, Harlan Hatcher, also refused to call on the Ann Arbor City Council to pass fair practices laws, despite evidence that black students faced discrimination off campus. Segregated restaurants and barber shops dotted Ann Arbor’s map. Other businesses might serve black patrons but stated preferences for white employees. In the case of a local ambulance service provided by Staffan Funeral Home, the owner didn’t hire black students because he feared objections from white employees. Finding housing off campus also frustrated black students. In some cases, the discriminatory practices of rental companies were well known. The largest rental complex in Ann Arbor, Pittsfield Village, openly discriminated on the basis of race. In some cases, landlords were explicit, telling black applicants that they would not rent to people of color. In 1961, the Office of Student Affairs received reports of sixty-eight landlords that discriminated on the basis of “race, creed or national origin.” But in cases where individual landlords didn’t state their racial preferences in advertisements, black students looking for housing could only hope that meant that the owner was willing to rent to a person of color.⁶⁹

The university had a close relationship with some of the discriminatory rental companies in Ann Arbor. The university provided mortgages to developers, expanding Ann Arbor’s apartment stock. It’s unclear just how many mortgages the university held, but it’s clear that it profited from at least one company that practiced racial discrimination. In the late 1950s, Cutler Hubble Company of Detroit obtained a mortgage from the university to build two Ann Arbor apartment buildings, Arbordale Manor and Parkhurst. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission and the Ann Arbor Human Relations Commission later found that the company discriminated against prospective black tenants.⁷⁰

Still, the late 1940s represented a clear moment of transition, as racial liberalism began to take hold slowly and unevenly among administrators. The university became an intellectual hub for research on interracial relations when the Research Center for Group Dynamics moved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to UM in 1948. Suddenly the university was sponsoring race relation workshops in Detroit and supporting new research that supported the premises of racial liberalism. In August 1952, for example, the center led the intergroup relations workshop “Human Relations in School and Community.” The workshop brought sixty-two educators and eight active community members from around the country to learn “how to meet the problems of intergroup tension and conflict as these arise in school and community.” One of the workshop’s field trips took participants to Detroit to review the work of the Mayor’s Interracial Committee in “Negro-White” relations.⁷¹

By the 1950s, the university had implemented some of the proposals offered by the Student Government Council’s Human Relations Board. In the case of off-campus housing, one of the board’s first steps was to make sure the university did not serve as a vehicle for discriminatory landlords. New policies followed that prohibited landlords who discriminated on the basis of race from advertising in any of the university’s venues or publications. Some landlords removed their advertisements; others remained insistent that the university should help landlords discriminate. Even after learning about the policy, Marcia Minnis, a local landlord, asked if a university official could just send white women to her house. Nevertheless, the policy gave black students access to the housing advertisements of landlords who had at least signed a document agreeing not to use race as a factor in choosing tenants. It also gave black students an opportunity to make complaints to an organization with some power, as the board could prohibit a landlord’s access to a valuable advertising outlet.⁷²

By the end of the 1950s, UM leaders took the university’s most significant step in implementing racial liberalism. In 1959, the board of regents passed a bylaw stating that the university “shall not discriminate against any person because of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, or ancestry.” The housing office subsequently eliminated questions on applications that allowed students to request a roommate of the same racial group. At the turn of the decade, the ideal of color blindness was embedded in university policy.⁷³

As racial liberalism took hold, university officials began to embrace the idea of creating a model multiracial community, seeing an opportunity to use the university to address white prejudice. George Palmer, a professor at UM’s law school and a member of the governing body of student housing, explained these ideals when he argued for an end to housing policies that allowed students to choose to live only with people of their own racial background. Palmer claimed that if a student who holds racial prejudices “associates with a member of such a group long enough to learn something about his qualities as a human being, it is possible that he will change his attitude toward this group.” Only by ending racial separation and encouraging interracial contact could UM help “purge … something that lies heavy on the conscience of the American people; the treatment of the Negro.”⁷⁴

Racial liberals like Palmer made two assumptions, both rooted in post–World War II racial liberalism, about how to address racism and create a model multiracial community. First, interracial contact was vital to improving race relations. Second, expressions of racial identity harmed race relations. Racial liberals put their faith in universalism, which highlighted the similarities and deemphasized the differences between whites and blacks. A shared American identity, the assumption went, was essential for members of different racial groups to see their common human identity.

These assumptions created a toxic racial climate for black students. Officials’ emphasis on interracial contact helped them see black students as tools in changing white students. Black students’ interactions with white students was essential in getting white students to overcome their prejudice. Universalism also helped officials see black culture as something to be overcome, not celebrated. Black culture threatened the shared American identity, which administrators believed was vital to improving race relations.

Notice the subtle differences between the ways in which university officials tried to improve relationships between American citizens and international students, and the ways in which they tried to improve relationships between white and black students. The end goal was the same. In both cases, university officials wanted students to see each other as human beings, not as citizens of different countries or members of a different racial group. But the path to see each other as humans was different. Sure, contact between the two groups was important, but for international students, university officials emphasized the positive cultural traits of different nationalities. It would be out of respect for those positive cultural differences that American citizens would learn to overcome stereotypes, see value in cultural differences, and ultimately see international students as equal human beings. But improving relations between white and black students followed a different model. Downplaying cultural differences and emphasizing a shared American identity was fundamental to getting different racial groups to see each other simply as human beings.

This speaks to how racial liberals viewed black culture. Chinese students, according to UM officials, brought with them a culture that UM students should appreciate and could learn from. Racial liberals didn’t see the same positive value in black culture. Emphasizing the importance of a shared American—white middle class—identity was as much a critique of African American culture as a grand vision of racial progressivism. It’s no surprise, then, that words like “culturally deprived” filled racial liberals’ descriptions of African Americans. In UM officials’ eyes, black students brought a cultural identity that was threatening. It added no value to the university, and it offered nothing to white students and faculty.⁷⁵

It’s no surprise that these ideas created a toxic racial climate. Nobody at the University of Michigan thought to ask black students what they thought of these “color-blind” policies. In fact, no UM official commissioned a study on black students’ social experience until the late 1960s. The lack of black voices in administrative and staff positions helped UM officials believe they were acting in the best interest of black students. There were no black administrators; there were no black regents. As late as 1963, the university employed only eight black faculty members at or above the rank of instructor. As a result, whites controlled the institutional knowledge about black students without any input from African Americans.⁷⁶

William Boone, a master’s student at UM, was the only researcher who thought to ask black students about the university’s racial climate before the late 1960s. In 1940, he asked black students at UM, “Do you feel that your social life within the University community is adequate?” Eighty-five percent of students responded negatively. He found that black students “rarely participated in any of the social activities” and that “their contacts [with white students] were mostly entirely academic in nature.” The students’ conclusions were filed away with other UM theses. No social scientist at UM asked these questions again for almost thirty years.⁷⁷

Scholars who listened to black students at other HWCUs during the post–World War II period found that black students expressed similar frustration with the racial climate. A late 1950s study of two groups of black students—one group that attended a historically white midwestern university and one group that attended a historically black southern university—tested the perceptions black students held about higher education. The survey found that black students thought HWCUs and HBCUs offered different advantages. Black students who attended the HBCU concluded that they were trading the academic prestige of an HWCU for a social life. These black students reported feeling “more at ease in an all Negro group” and had an easier time adjusting to college life. They also noted that they valued the opportunity to learn about black history and study contemporary problems that African Americans faced—topics that were lacking at many HWCUs. Nevertheless, they thought that the education they received at their historically black institution was inferior to that offered at a predominantly white institution. Black students at the HWCU, in contrast, cited the lack of a social life as the most notable disadvantage of attending such an institution, but they chose to make that sacrifice because of the perceived academic advantages of historically white universities.⁷⁸

When social scientists finally began examining UM’s racial climate in the late 1960s, they found that black students reported similar feelings about UM. In response to these studies and campus protests, UM leaders began questioning some of the assumptions behind UM’s model multiracial community. Administrators eventually reconsidered their commitment to universalism and accepted the idea that celebrating black culture was compatible with improving race relations. Nevertheless, despite criticism from black students, UM leaders held steadfast to their commitment to interracial contact as the key tool for changing white students.

In 1964, the University of Michigan created an undergraduate affirmative action program that signaled its most dramatic step toward policies of racial inclusion. But the long-standing developments over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would loom large over these new racial inclusion initiatives. The university’s hierarchy of values, which privileged UM’s elite status over inclusion, would hang over affirmative action like a black cloud. Racial liberalism never sought to disrupt this hierarchy; rather, it sought to preserve it in the wake of pressure for racial justice. Affirmative action proponents would have to prove that they, too, weren’t trying to disrupt the institution’s hierarchy of values.

Just as university officials had a high tolerance for racial disparities in its admissions decisions, they also had a high tolerance for a poor racial climate. The model multiracial community failed to address black students’ social alienation on campus. Nevertheless, UM leaders would cling to the goal of creating a model multiracial community on campus that privileged combating prejudice over addressing black students’ alienation. Black students’ experience on campus remained a secondary concern.