When the BAM negotiating team arrived at the Michigan Ballroom on April 1, 1970, to a cheering crowd of twelve hundred, the frustration after a long battle with Fleming was evident in their speeches. “This wasn’t the best agreement we could have settled on,” Dave Lewis told the crowd, “but it was a first step, a first substantial step.” BAM leaders knew that much of the hard work was still to come. BAM leaders explained that they were ready to help the university in the “long-range, day-to-day, tedious work of … implementing the programs that have now become part of the University policy.” “Tedious” didn’t do the task justice.¹

The five-year period between 1970 and 1975 changed the University of Michigan. The university implemented the most ambitious affirmative action admissions policies in its history, increased the number of black officials on campus, and redistributed millions of dollars to inclusion initiatives. At the same time, UM administrators deployed new and old techniques to co-opt black campus activism. They added new disciplinary codes to deter confrontational activism; expanded the inclusion bureaucracy; and fought against black, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American activists who tried to build on the BAM concessions. By 1975, BAM’s revolutionary vision that called for a new institutional mission was nowhere to be found. The university still hadn’t reached the 10 percent black enrollment goal, and the racial climate was still creating obstacles for black students on campus. The fact that black campus activists weren’t able to mobilize a campus strike that rivaled BAM’s in response to these failures signaled that executive administrators had a firm grasp on racial inclusion once again.

Fleming went to work after the BAM strike to show the UM community how the concessions didn’t disrupt the university’s values and priorities. In fact, Fleming claimed that these new inclusion goals were perfectly compatible with the university’s mission. Fleming had two objectives in framing the concessions this way. First, he wanted to protect the institution from BAM’s revolutionary vision: to place racial justice at the heart of the university’s mission. Second, as someone who was committed to affirmative action, he wanted to protect the university’s racially attentive admissions practices from opponents. University leaders saw themselves as mediators, caught between student activists who could undermine the university’s reputation and white backlash, which sought to undermine the university’s commitment to affirmative action.

BAM offered a biting critique of the university. According to BAM, the university was part of a larger “white power structure” that “systematically rob[bed] Black people of financial security, political sovereignty and human dignity.” The solution didn’t involve simply eliminating individual prejudice on the part of administrators; it involved challenging a “structure” that “is embodied in the impersonal institutionalization of power that we find in the very standards, goals, systems of measurement and operating procedures.” So for BAM, changing the university’s “structure” didn’t mean incorporating racial justice into UM’s existing values. To them, racial justice was incompatible with the university’s existing values. Nothing less than rethinking the entire university value system was going to work. And with a new value system would come new ways of measuring and defining institutional quality, which didn’t see black students as impediments to the university’s reputation.²

Fleming and other officials rejected BAM’s portrayal of UM as a racist institution that needed to be rebuilt from its core. Maintaining control over the definition of racism continued to be a key tool in the university’s racial innocence narrative. After the BAM strike, university leaders reframed the BAM concessions as an effort to address the problem of racism outside the university’s walls. The university’s admission tools weren’t racist. The university’s mission to preserve its elite status based on standardized test scores wasn’t racist. In rejecting claims of institutional racism, UM leaders emphasized that the university could implement reforms without undermining established values and priorities.³

At the same time, university officials defended the concessions against white backlash. Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, used the BAM strike as a political football. At a Republican fund-raising event in Des Moines, Iowa, which was covered in major news outlets around the country, Agnew called the University of Michigan’s concessions a “callow retreat from reality.” The BAM strike played into two of Agnew’s favorite political narratives: college campuses were too willing to give in to student protesters who did not represent the views of most Americans, and affirmative action was taking away jobs and admission slots from better-qualified white applicants. According to Agnew, by conceding to unruly protesters, UM was destroying the quality of the American higher education system. Because there were not enough “qualified” black students to increase black enrollment to 10 percent of UM’s student body, Agnew argued, the university would have to lower its standards and, in turn, lower the quality of the university. Angry alumni, students, and Michigan citizens joined Agnew by flooding Fleming’s office with letters of dissent. Others wrote letters to the editor in newspapers around the country, using UM’s case to vent their anger over affirmative action.⁴

UM officials defended the BAM concessions against these attacks by showing how the concessions fit into the university’s hierarchy of values, which privileged the university’s elite status over inclusion. To challenge critics who argued affirmative action lowered institutional quality, university officials drew on the internal studies of the 1960s. The University Relations Office released a document stating, “There is considerable evidence that this group is not as accurately judged by test score devices which are generally applied to those who have both cultural and educational advantages in elementary and secondary schools.” Furthermore, it claimed, “There is also evidence that their high school grades are less meaningful than their degree of motivation.” Fleming would repeat these exact words in the Detroit Free Press the next month. Fleming also wrote back to disgruntled letter writers with a similar message: “We believe that there is evidence that testing devices do not as well reflect black as white aptitudes, and that high school grades do not have the same value.”⁵

Fleming also reframed BAM’s vision of racial justice to speak to the interests of business leaders. The university’s reliance on donations created powerful interest groups that didn’t share BAM’s worldview. The BAM strike made an immediate impact on fundraising, adding to the university’s financial problems as state contributions declined. In the year after the BAM strike, private donations to the university dropped by one-third.⁶ Fleming needed to reverse this trend. That meant courting donors and alleviating concerns about the university’s new commitments to an ambitious affirmative action plan. Here he relied on businesses’ dependence on the university’s affirmative action program to meet their own affirmative action goals. Fleming knew how important the University of Michigan was to businesses that wanted to comply with federal equal employment mandates. UM served as a recruiting ground for employers searching for potential black employees, and the university hosted special offices, such as the College of Engineering’s Minority Projects Office, to help businesses find black students. A short list of the companies that came to UM to interview black undergraduate and graduate students during the 1970–71 academic year through the Minority Projects Office included General Motors, General Electric, and Gulf Oil. Looking for business leaders’ continued financial support in the aftermath of BAM at the Economic Club of Detroit, Fleming claimed that when the university finally reached the 10 percent goal, it would not only substantially increase blacks’ representation at the university but also “[pour] them into the job market.” Fleming later confirmed that after an initial drop in donations, BAM did little to hurt the university’s fund-raising campaigns in the long term. This was likely due, at least in part, to the fact that many businesses had a stake in increasing the number of black graduates in order to pursue their own affirmative action hiring programs.⁷

Fleming and other UM officials took control over the intellectual rationales of affirmative action from BAM in the early 1970s. Together, they co-opted BAM’s rhetoric, stripping any reference to institutional racism. Instead, officials offered an argument for affirmative action that preserved the university’s hierarchy of values, privileging the institution’s status over inclusion. The efforts to use these same arguments to defend affirmative action against opponents, though, speaks to how administrators could undermine black students’ vision and still feel as though they were champions of black students’ access. Opponents of affirmative action became a convenient reference point for administrators in framing who was for and against racial inclusion. Their battle to preserve affirmative action in the face of white backlash allowed campus leaders to portray themselves as champions of racial inclusion even while undermining BAM’s vision of racial justice.

“The University of Michigan operates within the general tenet that dissent is to be fostered rather than suppressed on a university campus but that disruptive dissent is incompatible with the purpose of an academic community,” James Brinkerhoff, the university’s vice president and chief financial officer, wrote in 1971. Brinkerhoff was preparing a document for the governor that described all the steps the university had taken since the BAM strike to prevent more campus disruptions. The document signaled a new era of discipline. In the late 1960s, Fleming tried to accommodate dissent, believing that repression would only lead to more problems on campus. But the BAM strike marked a turning point in UM’s history. BAM’s tactics forced UM administrators to make concessions that they thought were unviable and potentially compromised UM’s priorities. More than ever, Fleming tried to punish the types of dissent that made BAM successful. All the methods he defined as unacceptable would be met with a new disciplinary regime that handed out harsh consequences.⁸

Fleming wasn’t just concerned with another strike that would lead to more concessions; Fleming was also concerned about controlling the implementation of the concessions already won in April 1970. There were still many details left to be worked out, and campus leaders wanted as much control over those details as possible. Confrontational activism represented a tool that black activists could use to influence the outcomes of the BAM concessions.

Disciplining BAM protesters represented the first step in controlling protests. The University of Michigan wasn’t well prepared to punish tens, let alone hundreds, of students for nonacademic infractions after the BAM strike. There was no university-wide set of rules or disciplinary body that governed all students. The Student Government Council had its own set of rules governing undergraduate students and its own judiciary body. Each school and college within UM also had its own set of rules and disciplinary procedures. The problem with this decentralized structure for Fleming was that he had little control over the process. The rules and punishments also varied greatly. It wasn’t an ideal structure for someone who wanted to deter future protests through discipline.⁹

Fleming had to work within these limitations to punish BAM supporters who broke campus codes. When he negotiated with BAM members, they agreed on a disciplinary process that allowed students accused of a violation to have their cases heard in front of their respective school’s or college’s administrative board or by a hearing officer from outside the university, selected by Fleming. In the end, professors brought charges against nine students. By November 1971, four had been found guilty, three were acquitted, and two cases were still pending.¹⁰

Fleming and the regents wanted more control over the definition of unacceptable dissent and the process of disciplining students who violated campus rules in any future protest. Just over two weeks after BAM members celebrated the concessions, the board of regents introduced a new set of university-wide rules and disciplinary procedures without faculty and student input. The rules prohibited the “use of force or violence” against anyone on campus, “disruption or unauthorized interruption of a class” or any “authorized university activity,” “continued occupation of a university facility after being ordered to leave by the president or his agent,” and “defacement, damage to or theft of university property.” The regents outlined a variety of penalties, ranging from a warning to expulsion. Cases would be heard in front of a hearing officer employed by the president exclusively to hear these cases. The new rules clearly defined acceptable dissent. Not surprisingly, none of the most effective tactics of the BAM strike fell under acceptable dissent. The goal here was clear: limit the power of campus movements by threatening harsh consequences for any protest tactic that could force administrators into concessions that they thought were unviable. Under the rules, students who wanted to fight for institutional change were left to write requests to administrators and hold public demonstrations—as long as they didn’t interrupt a class or a university function.¹¹

The interim rules joined a growing disciplinary apparatus created in both Congress and Michigan’s state legislature. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal and state legislatures passed laws that used financial aid to punish students involved in campus protests. In 1969, Congress passed two appropriations bills that affected student protesters. The 1969 appropriations bill for the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW) included a provision stating that no HEW funds could be used to support a student convicted by a court “of the use of or assistance in the use of force, trespass, seizure of property under control” of a higher education institution “to prevent officials or students from engaging in the duties of pursuing studies.” An amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1968 went even further, allowing schools to deny aid to students who violated the university’s rules regarding disruptions. In January 1970, Michigan joined thirty-two other states in passing new laws regarding campus disruptions. The State Higher Education Bill prohibited state financial aid to students who were convicted in court of “disorderly conduct, violence to a person, or damage to property” while participating in a campus disruption. It also prohibited aid to any student convicted of the same violations by a university disciplinary authority.¹²

Michigan’s state legislature added another layer of criminal codes for student activists. In the wake of the BAM strike, Michigan’s governor William Milliken signed a law that allowed a judge to impose a jail sentence of up to ninety days and a fine of between $200 and $1,000 for acts so ambiguous that they could include almost any protest tactic. A protester could go to jail for presenting a “clear and substantial risk of physical harm or injury to other persons.” Equally vague, a protester could be convicted of constituting a “risk of damage to or the destruction of property of the institution.” Going further, the law prohibited the “unreasonable prevention of disruption of the customary and lawful function of the institution by occupying space necessary (for carrying to the institution’s functions) by the use of threat of force.” Finally, for any student who refused to leave a campus building when ordered to do so by the university president or a president’s “designee,” a court could impose a fine of up to $500 and a thirty-day jail sentence.¹³

UM’s efforts to discipline students empowered these laws. Before the BAM strike, when university officials tried to limit police intervention on campus and the campus rules for nonacademic conduct were weak, these federal and state laws weren’t great deterrents for student demonstrators. However, the regents’ interim rules and judicial process made the possibility of a campus violation for demonstrating more likely. After the BAM strike, students were also more likely to come into contact with police on campus and face criminal conviction. When students returned to campus in fall 1970, they found two police officers stationed on campus, hired with federal money meant to improve police-community relations. The university had never assigned full-time police officers to the campus before.¹⁴

University officials also created the university’s first director of safety position in fall 1970. The director wasn’t a sworn police officer but was tasked with gathering information about potential campus disruptions by developing contacts within and outside the university in order for UM officials to prepare for, and potentially stop, campus demonstrations before they started. The director would also coordinate any police activities if law enforcement was called to campus. This represented an attempt to professionalize UM’s responses to campus disorder. Before BAM, administrators tried to use their limited knowledge to anticipate and respond to campus protests. After BAM, they created new positions to deal specifically with activism.¹⁵

These measures didn’t target faculty, but faculty allies of student activists still experienced retribution. Gloria Marshall was a key faculty ally for BAM. In 1970, she was a young black faculty member in the anthropology department coming up for tenure. In the aftermath of the strike, the regents were ready to exact revenge by denying her tenure. Only after the vice president for academic affairs, Allan Smith, pleaded with the regents not to use Marshall’s role in the strike as a factor in their decision did the regents finally approve her tenure. However, it was still a warning to untenured faculty that their support of black campus activism could potentially undermine their future at UM.¹⁶

Administrators were more willing to exact revenge in other ways. UM’s Center for Research and Conflict Resolution (CRCR) provided important resources for BAM in the early stages of the strike. BAM activists initially organized the strike out of a student’s apartment with a single phone line. CRCR leaders offered the center’s office to BAM, and it quickly became the strike’s headquarters. BAM activists suddenly had access to multiple phone lines, printers, and meeting space—all important resources for a campus protest. A year after the BAM strike, administrators closed the center. Justifying the decision, one executive administrator explained, “When it comes to educational change, our faculty are mostly conservative. They want to make sure that strong academic discipline is kept.” Faculty allies might not have experienced disciplinary hearings, but they still faced retribution after the BAM strike.¹⁷

This new disciplinary regime hung over the heads of student activists and their allies in the early 1970s. Students now faced a greater threat of arrest and conviction, campus code violations, and the loss of financial aid. They had to make more difficult calculations when deciding whether to participate in protests. Faculty members, too, had to worry about tenure and the future of academic centers. These disciplinary measures influenced how administrators implemented the BAM concessions. In an environment that limited the power of activism, administrators had more control over what the new inclusion programs would look like.

The new disciplinary codes made it more likely that black students would work for change with institutional bureaucrats. Fleming continued to place great faith in the inclusion bureaucracy to move dissent inside University of Michigan offices after the BAM strike. Executive administrators preferred to channel institutional change through the inclusion bureaucracy because campus leaders believed that they could control inclusion bureaucrats. Executive administrators could reject reforms coming from the inclusion bureaucracy that they thought were unviable or challenged institutional priorities and values. In the aftermath of the strike, executive administrators expanded the bureaucracy created in the 1960s, hiring new black officials across the university. Administrators moved to make some quick reforms to show activists that the institution could change without more protest. By 1972, activists saw black enrollment climbing, new supportive services, a new black studies center, an office devoted to affirmative action hiring, and racial sensitivity programs in campus housing.

Administrators believed that increasing black enrollment, in particular, was important in showing activists that the administration was committed to implementing the concessions. The 10 percent black enrollment goal represented the most visible concessions and the easiest for students to measure and evaluate. Thus, UM leaders turned to the inclusion bureaucracy to increase black enrollment quickly.

Executive administrators immediately fulfilled one of BAM’s demands that they believed was vital to increasing and sustaining black enrollment. BAM wanted Fleming to fund J. Frank Yates’s plan for a supportive services program. Before the strike, Yates had crafted an ambitious proposal while serving as assistant to the dean of LSA, but Fleming chose not to fund it. In the immediate aftermath of BAM, Yates suddenly received the funding and autonomy to create his supportive services program.

In fall 1970, just months after the BAM strike, Yates introduced the Coalition for the Use of Learning Skills (CULS). The program was open to students regardless of race but targeted black undergraduate students. The College of Literature, Science, and Arts, in which the vast majority of black students were enrolled, hosted the central branch of the program. CULS offered a variety of new services, including an orientation for Opportunity Program students to prepare them for the potential emotional and academic obstacles they might face once the school year began (Goodman dropped “Awards” from the program’s title in 1970). CULS also improved the academic support black students received. For required first-year courses, CULS provided course-specific study groups led by specially trained upperclassmen, graduate students, or faculty members. In addition to helping students master the course material, the study sessions worked to improve the basic skills necessary to succeed at the university, including analytical reading and writings skills and test preparation. CULS also offered special sections of English 123, a required composition course for all first-year students, specifically set up for minority students—although technically open to all students—and taught by nonwhite teaching assistants. Yates developed the special sections with the “assumption that for minority students, a racially homogenous atmosphere is more conducive to the improvement of writing skills.” Rather than reading Thoreau and Shakespeare, the course material revolved around literature produced by black writers. These courses incorporated the critiques of a Eurocentric curriculum that black students had been making at UM since 1966. Ten minority students took advantage of the special sections in 1970, but enrollment expanded quickly. In 1973, 192 black students and 10 other minority students enrolled in CULS’s sections of English 123.¹⁸

There were, of course, other motivations behind administrators’ support for CULS. The program helped address fears that increasing black enrollment would compromise academic standards. As much as Fleming and other administrators cited studies showing that traditional admissions tools didn’t effectively measure black students’ potential, they still feared that more aggressive affirmative action policies would produce skyrocketing attrition rates for black students. Improving academic support services, then, seemed to be the only alternative to ensure that attrition rates wouldn’t explode.¹⁹

Some faculty members raised the same concerns and put pressure on executive administrators to build new academic support services to support the Opportunity Program (OP). These faculty typically supported more aggressive affirmative action practices but still saw those practices as a potential threat to the University of Michigan’s elite status if not implemented properly. A professor of physics, for example, expressed concern that administrators were not discussing the “special programs of instruction” to prepare students from what he called “substandard ghetto schools” for the rigorous standards of the University of Michigan. Without academic support programs, he assumed the university would face a large number of frustrated black students “seeing their dreams for a better life crumbling. The resulting riots and destruction would far eclipse the present problems.” He feared that the riots would force administrators to grant “soft degrees” and, in turn, lower the quality and reputation of UM.²⁰

This professor’s concern about granting soft degrees gets to the heart of the anxieties brought about by the BAM concessions. As much as the evidence suggests that the majority of UM’s faculty supported affirmative action in principle, many still believed that the drive for racial equity, if taken too far, could undermine the university’s status as an elite postsecondary institution. Some faculty members might have worried that UM would become the next City University of New York (CUNY). By 1970, CUNY’s “open admission” plan had become the symbol of an inclusion program that went too far, threatening the institution’s reputation. In spring 1969, a multiracial coalition of CUNY students successfully fought for an admissions system that would open the institution to any student who graduated from a New York City high school. Critics argued that CUNY represented a campus that stretched the delicate balance between equity and quality too far.²¹

Yates’s supportive services program helped to win community members confidence that the university could pursue the BAM enrollment goal without lowering academic standards. That confidence empowered George Goodman, the admissions official who would carry out the affirmative action goals of the BAM concessions. Goodman began his career at the university in 1968 as the admissions official in charge of the Opportunity Awards Program. For the first two years of his career, recruiting black students was a one-person job. With few resources, he traveled the state trying to increase black enrollment. Everything changed when Fleming agreed to the BAM concessions.²²

Goodman soon found the resources necessary to expand the program. An influx of financial aid dollars from the university’s general fund proved particularly important in increasing black enrollment. Federal and state financial aid didn’t cover the full cost of OP students’ education. In 1971, for example, 40 percent of the financial aid for minority students came from the university’s general fund. To meet BAM’s goals, UM would have to devote an unprecedented amount of general fund money to black students’ financial aid packages. Between the fall of 1970 and 1973, the university’s general fund contribution to OP students’ financial aid packages rose from $782,753 to over $5 million. The sum was so large that Fleming briefly considered prohibiting Detroit OP students from living on campus. Fleming figured he could save the university money if it didn’t have to pay for those students’ room and board. UM instructors would go to Detroit to teach classes for OP students during their first year; UM would allow them to live on campus beginning in their sophomore year. Another plan would have sent buses to Detroit every weekday to transport students to their classes in Ann Arbor and then take them back home at the end of the day. Fleming never put these ideas into practice, and the university’s contribution to OP students’ financial aid exploded.²³

The Opportunity Program also benefited from money to expand its staff. In the six months following the BAM strike, ten new staff members joined OP. Many of these staff members were African Americans who had worked in Detroit. The new staff allowed the admissions office to pursue an unprecedented recruiting campaign that brought more students into its special admissions process. The rising numbers of black applicants to OP reflects the success of their efforts. The fact that the BAM concessions came at the end of the 1969–70 academic year made it difficult for the admissions office to make major changes before the incoming class was solidified. Four hundred seventy-two students applied to OP for the fall 1970 class. The next year, though, after a full year of recruiting, 810 students applied to OP. By 1972, the number rose again to 842 applicants.²⁴

Goodman also received the independence and support needed to create policies that could increase black enrollment. In these policies, SAT scores played less of a role in admission decisions. For OP applicants on the margins of the program’s criteria, Goodman began using an alternative test, created by UM researcher Benno Fricke, that measured motivation. As a result, the OP admission rate went up, even as the number of black students applying skyrocketed. Between 1964 and 1968, the program’s admission rate stood at 58 percent. By 1973, the OP admission rate had risen to 71.8 percent.²⁵

These policy changes—increased funding, a larger staff, new academic support services, and new methods to measure “ability”—made an immediate impact on the program. Black enrollment in OP rose from 229 in 1970 to 362 in 1971 and 442 in 1972.²⁶

As enrollment rose, students felt some optimism about working within the inclusion bureaucracy to address the university’s racial climate. Complaints of racial tension only increased in the aftermath of the BAM strike. As black enrollment grew, so did reports of the word “nigger” on dormitory doors as well as other forms of verbal and physical abuse. Adding to the tension, one of the dormitory building directors reportedly called black students “monkeys” in a public meeting. When black students tried to create a space for themselves in dormitories, such as a black lounge, white students complained.²⁷

Black students turned to the inclusion bureaucracy for help. Georgia Williams arrived at UM just before the BAM strike. She filled a new position in the housing office—director of special programs—created after John Feldkamp failed to find a solution to black students’ demands for a separate living space in 1969. She became one of the many black officials who would spend their career at UM helping black students improve their experience on a predominantly white campus. One student described Williams as a mentor to black students and someone who saw her job as something more than a way to pay her bills. When black students came to her asking for help in addressing the racial climate in the dormitories, Williams assisted them in developing Race Awareness Workshops. About fifty to seventy-five people attended each of the five workshops intended to improve race relations.²⁸

In the early years after BAM, then, there were positive signs that student activists might be able to achieve significant institutional change without more protest. Inclusion bureaucrats showed that they could implement important changes. Black enrollment almost doubled in just two years, as the university put an unprecedented amount of money into recruiting and financial aid for the Opportunity Program. CULS offered the academic support services that BAM called for. And activists found support from Georgia Williams in creating sensitivity training in campus housing.

As long as inclusion bureaucrats pursued programs and policies that executive administrators supported, black students witnessed institutional change, even if it didn’t always fulfill their expectations. Black student activists began to experience the limits of working within the inclusion bureaucracy when they began pushing for changes that executive administrators opposed. The proposals that tried to improve black students’ social experience on campus received the greatest level of scrutiny from campus leaders. The obstacles black officials faced in improving the racial climate demonstrate the power executive administrators wielded over the inclusion bureaucracy. The battles would test Fleming’s co-optation strategy in the wake of BAM.

BAM activists wanted to continue to fight for initiatives left out of the 1970 concessions. In particular, they believed that white administrators had yet to take black students’ social alienation seriously. The rising number of black students that would come to UM as a result of a more aggressive affirmative action program would help address this issue, but black students argued that a larger black student population alone wouldn’t solve the problem. Activists wanted physical spaces on campus where black students could briefly escape the overwhelmingly white social and academic environments. University of Michigan president Robben Fleming and the board of regents rejected these appeals during the BAM strike, but black students held out hope that new inclusion officials could help implement these initiatives.

The quick implementation of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) also likely gave BAM activists a sense of optimism. CAAS institutionalized black studies. As an academic center, CAAS wasn’t part of the inclusion bureaucracy, but it clearly showed that black students could force the university to create spaces on campus devoted to serving black students’ interests. During the 1970–71 academic year, 1,026 students enrolled in CAAS’s degree program, while another 424 took classes offered by CAAS. The center also represented the BAM concession that most closely resembled what sociologist Fabio Rojas calls a “counter center,” which he defines as “a formalized place inside mainstream organizations where alternative viewpoints are established.” CAAS would serve as a home to faculty who would continue to fight for racial justice within the university. In future years, CAAS faculty produced new research on black students that challenged institutional knowledge and supported future black protests, helping black students organize and put pressure on the administration.²⁹

Still, CAAS sheds light on the differences between the leaders of academic centers and inclusion bureaucrats. Although academic units still had to answer to executive administrators, they enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the administration that inclusion bureaucrats did not. Academic units also enjoyed independent budgets, which allowed them to pursue initiatives that administrators might have been uncomfortable with. Inclusion bureaucrats, in contrast, had to appeal to executive administrators to fund their projects. This gave administrators more control over the initiatives inclusion bureaucrats proposed.

When black student activists began calling for reforms to improve the racial climate, they realized just how little power inclusion bureaucrats held. Black activists wanted a black student center. The center had been part of BAM’s demands, but the regents refused to make it part of the concessions. Black student activists went to Gilbert Maddox for help. Stephen Spurr, vice president for student affairs, hired Maddox as the special assistant of academic projects after the BAM strike. Maddox’s main task was to create new programs to improve black retention rates. Maddox’s support for the black student center represented another example of a black official who brought an interpretation of attrition that challenged prevailing assumptions. The leading interpretation of the period continued to see attrition as the product of academic deficiency. In contrast, Maddox believed that black students’ social environment on campus helped explain their higher attrition rates, making a direct connection between black students’ academic success and the university’s racial climate. He believed that the black student center would build a strong sense of cultural identity and help improve retention rates.³⁰

Maddox’s background likely informed his analysis of attrition and the emphasis he placed on strengthening black students’ cultural identity to improve retention. Maddox graduated from Wayne State University in 1951, but only after almost failing out during his first year. After teaching in the Detroit Public School District, Maddox entered graduate school and received his doctorate degree in speech in 1970. Throughout the 1960s, he spent much of his professional life promoting the value of black history and culture. Maddox produced and hosted an eighteen-week black history television and radio series. He also directed plays at the Concept East Theatre, a Detroit theater that targeted a black audience, and hosted and produced Profiles in Black, a Detroit public television series that profiled important black leaders.³¹

Maddox went to Spurr, his direct supervisor, to try to get support for the center. Spurr thought Maddox’s idea had “a great deal of merit” and endorsed the project as long as black students could still use “conventional services,” so that participation in a “racially segregated center” did not become compulsory for black students.³²

What happened next reveals the degree of oversight campus leaders exercised over the inclusion bureaucracy. Spurr’s support, even though he was an executive administrator, wasn’t enough. Fleming and the board of regents scrutinized new student services for black students more than other programs. The problem was that Maddox’s proposal for a black student center violated one of the prevailing assumptions behind racial inclusion policies at UM since World War II: that interracial contact was vital to improve race relations, as segregation reinforced prejudice. Fleming and the regents still placed great value in this ideal in the early 1970s.

In a world where many campus leaders divided programs into the neat categories of integration and separatism, Maddox faced the burden of showing how a black student center was compatible with the goal of improving race relations between white and black students. To Maddox, the center would give black students a space to develop the racial pride that was necessary to build an integrated society. One racially exclusive space, then, wouldn’t prevent meaningful interracial contact at UM. In fact, Maddox suggested, it would improve interracial relationships in all other spaces. Maddox’s rationale showed how black officials tried to accommodate white administrators’ goals of improving race relations through interracial contact to gain the necessary support for their programs. In the end, improving black students’ experience on campus—and, in turn, black retention rates—wasn’t enough to justify Maddox’s program.³³

Executive administrators still didn’t see the racial climate as a leading cause of black student attrition. CULS, which offered tutoring and special courses, best reflected administrators’ understanding of attrition. Academic deficiency led to attrition, administrators thought. A year later, social scientists on campus would provide new studies that supported Maddox’s claims about the connection between the racial climate and attrition. Before those studies were available, though, Maddox fought a losing battle in getting administrators to see the student center as a black retention initiative. The hard truth was that black perspectives often needed the support of white social scientists. Black voices needed data, data, and more data. Maddox didn’t have any data to support his claims; consequently, he was never able to change the discussion over what was at stake in the student center.³⁴

Campus leaders also refused to reconsider their hierarchy of priorities. Building a model multicultural community remained more important than addressing black students’ social alienation. Despite Maddox’s efforts to show how one racially exclusive space would improve interracial interaction in all other spaces, campus leaders continued to believe that any racially exclusive space—no matter how small—would harm race relations. For the regents, there was no grey area in defining integration and segregation. President Fleming added that Maddox’s proposal represented the “kind of separatism which we thought was undesirable.” Fleming contended that “gradually, as their numbers increase, I think Black students will feel more comfortable here.” “I would hope our Black students would recognize the good faith effort on the University’s part,” Fleming continued, “and understand that we can’t change everything overnight.” Fleming recognized that black students faced social problems and that a black student center might help mediate some of those issues. But for Fleming, improving relations between white and black students was more important.³⁵

Fleming’s comments invited criticism from black students, who were not willing to wait for the gradual change that the president called for. One student called Fleming’s argument “alarmingly simplistic.” For black students, she contended, coming to the university was like coming to a “foreign, unfriendly country.” Like foreign visitors, a variety of social and cultural characteristics, including speech patterns and social conventions, set black students apart at a predominantly white university. African Americans’ unique position, the student argued, meant that the university needed to recognize them as a distinct group with different needs. Black students also expressed frustration with the slow pace of institutional change to effectively address their feelings of alienation. “When the University decides to change itself,” the black student commented, “it moves like a huge, tired animal. Departments and offices … are shaken up a bit and put back a few yards ahead. Old policies and old attitudes slowly peel off like dead skin.”³⁶

This was the struggle of black officials in the early 1970s, who tried to implement programs that challenged administrators’ priorities and preconceptions about improving race relations. Maddox faced an administrative structure that offered him little power and support. As he realized these limitations, Maddox began to question whether campus leaders were committed to any fundamental changes. In 1971, frustrated with the administrative obstacles he faced in supporting black students, Maddox resigned from his position. He then joined with J. Frank Yates, director of CULS, and Charles Kidd, a black professor in Michigan’s School of Public Health, to write a scathing opinion piece in UM’s student newspaper. The group accused the university of hiring black officials without giving them any power, which represented a “calculated attempt to fool” people “into thinking that great progress is being made.” In reality, they argued, black administrators were pawns that only hid executive administrators’ apathy for black students’ struggles.³⁷

Making such a strong accusation might not seem like a pathway into an administrative position, but incorporating dissent into the inclusion bureaucracy became a tool to try to show that campus leaders were committed to addressing black students’ concerns. Six days after the letter was published, Charles Kidd accepted the position of assistant vice president for student affairs. Suddenly, Kidd was the highest-ranking black official at UM. Kidd had spent the late 1960s and early 1970s as a student activist at UM while working toward his PhD in environmental engineering. In 1971, he was a newly minted faculty member in the School of Public Health and planned to leave the university for a better job.³⁸ But the offer to implement the victories of the BAM strike, a strike that he had been a part of, convinced him to stay. Over the objections of his family, Kidd “succumbed to my desire to get further involved because I believed I could affect some change.”³⁹

Despite Maddox’s experience with the regents, building a black student center became one of Kidd’s primary goals. Kidd didn’t think he could get the regents to change their position. He knew, if given the chance, the board would squash the project, so creating the center became an exercise in political maneuvering. The regents had ruled that university funds couldn’t be used to create the center. Kidd thought that this left open an opportunity to establish a black student center with private funds. As he searched for alternatives, he came across the Martin Luther King Memorial Fund, a private scholarship fund set up in 1968 after black students chained the doors of the Administrative Building shut. In order to circumvent the regents, Kidd received a grant from the MLK fund to purchase a building and finance UM’s first black student center.⁴⁰

In the summer of 1971, students learned about the new Trotter House, a three-story, fifteen-room building on Michigan’s campus. Kidd named the house after William Monroe Trotter. Trotter was one of the most vocal and famous civil rights activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1901, he founded the Boston Guardian—a newspaper that focused on the battle for black equality. He was a cofounder of the Niagara Movement, an ardent opponent of Booker T. Washington, and an uncompromising writer and activist. Kidd didn’t advertise Trotter’s background. In fact, when one executive officer asked him who William Monroe Trotter was, Kidd didn’t tell him because he feared that Trotter’s background might undermine the house.⁴¹

The building eventually housed counselors for black students; meeting rooms for black student organizations; and spaces for social events, exhibits, and lectures. Without the need to get funding and approval from executive administrators, he didn’t need to reframe the purpose of the Trotter House to appeal to campus leaders’ priorities and values. Instead, Kidd focused on the value of the center for black students, rather than emphasizing how the center could improve race relations. The Trotter House, Kidd stated explicitly, was for black students to create a central location to hold social and cultural events relevant to African Americans. Kidd hoped the Trotter House would foster “better unity amongst the Black community.” The house did not accommodate members of other racial groups because, according to Kidd, “different groups would demand different things to create a home-like atmosphere.”⁴²

The obstacles Kidd had to maneuver to win the Trotter House highlights executive administrators’ efforts to control the inclusion bureaucracy. Even when an inclusion official successfully circumvented executive administrators, the victory still felt fragile. The Trotter House occupied a tenuous position on campus, dependent on private funds and operating without the full support of executive administrators.

Black student activists trying to work within the inclusion bureaucracy to change housing policies never found a solution like the Trotter House, which circumvented executive administrators. Black students identified campus housing as a principal contributor to the poor racial climate. These were spaces where black students experienced regular incidents of racism and feelings of social isolation, as some black students lived on floors without another black student in sight. In other spaces, there were ways to create informal black communities. Black students might eat together, for example, in a campus cafeteria filled with white students. But housing spaces felt more fixed, harder to transform. Students were assigned to a space with another person, after all.⁴³

Black students initially turned to Georgia Williams, the housing official who had helped black students create racial sensitivity training. Black student activists saw few positive results from the sensitivity training. They found that the white students who had shown up to the voluntary sessions weren’t the ones who needed it the most. When students lost faith in racial sensitivity training, they called for more ambitious reforms, which led to another showdown between black officials and the board of regents. In December 1971, not long after the Trotter House opened on campus, a group of black women living in Stockwell Hall, led by Gayle Nelson, and members of the South Quad Minority Council, led by Lee Gill, began a campaign for an all-black living corridor within a UM dormitory building. They justified the living unit by citing “gross inequities,” “dehumanizing” conditions, and “double standards” within Michigan’s student housing. The university’s color-blind housing policies, Nelson claimed, impeded black students’ “psychological, sociological and intellectual development” by forcing them to live with white students. An all-black corridor would offer a form of protection against the realities of living in a predominantly white dormitory.⁴⁴

Gill later called the original proposal for a racially exclusive living unit “part of being naïve and not understanding the political process” at UM. Gill and Nelson soon understood that the board of regents would not approve racially exclusive spaces in university dorms. Getting around this problem would not be as easy as Kidd’s solution for a black student center, which took advantage of private funds to purchase a building for black students’ use. Gill and Nelson were dealing with spaces in university-owned buildings, where first-year students were strongly encouraged to live. They also faced an important legal obstacle. In 1969, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare sent a memo to universities receiving federal funds, clarifying whether university housing allotted by race was compatible with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The simple answer was no. The memo concluded, “All housing which is owned, operated or supported by the institution … must be made available to all students without regard to race.”⁴⁵

Williams helped students carefully craft their new proposal in order to avoid claims of intentional segregation while still fulfilling their goal of living in a community with other black students interested in cultivating racial pride. They proposed Afro-American and African Cultural Living Units, which they described as spaces with “an educational, cultural, and social identity with Afro-American and African life-styles,” leaving open the possibility that white students could also live there. For a model, they used existing housing communities at UM where students chose to live together because of common interests, such as learning a foreign language. Anticipating claims that the students would only choose other black students to live in the units, drafters of the proposal created selection methods that they saw as being color blind. To live in the units, applicants would have to meet at least three of five requirements:

1. Participation in Afro-American and African courses.
2. Participation in educational, social, or cultural activities designed to promote better multi-ethnic sensitivity and understanding.
3. Participation in experiences, which were designed to promote more positive race relations.
4. Living experience in a multi-ethnic environment.
5. Human relations skills for the implementation of the goals and objectives of the Afro-American and African Cultural Living Unit, namely designing and implementing activities which will promote educational, cultural, and social identity with Afro-American and African life styles.

Williams and the students believed that the criteria provided a color-blind method for selecting students that would help avoid claims of intentional segregation.⁴⁶

It’s unclear whether Williams and the students found inspiration for this proposal from other institutions. Northwestern University, for example, had come up with a similar solution when HEW told the university that its plan to create a racially exclusive housing unit violated civil rights laws. Also, recall that John Feldkamp’s 1969 proposal took a similar approach, emphasizing cultural affinity, not race. Organizing housing spaces around a shared interest in black culture offered a way around claims that the university violated the law by taking race into account in allotting housing space.⁴⁷

Georgia Williams and the staff of the housing office started the application process to prove that white students would live in the corridor. They found that many white students wanted to live in the space. The housing office accepted 103 students to live in the unit, of which 30 were white. Williams and the students used this evidence to show that black students had no intention of segregating themselves.⁴⁸

The university’s legal counsel, R. K. Daane, still wasn’t convinced that the units would comply with civil rights laws. Daane believed that the living units were actually intended only for black students, and that de facto segregation would emerge despite the color-blind language of the proposal. He warned that if the units did become segregated, then the university would face “an entire galaxy of legal problems ranging from equal protection and freedom of association to the more arcane questions arising under the 1964 and 1968 Federal Civil Rights Acts and the Fair Housing Act.” Daane feared that using race as a factor in the selection process offered the only way to ensure that the units would be multiracial; otherwise, the units had the potential to become entirely black. But Daane warned that using race as a factor in selection, even to create a multiracial unit, could invite potential lawsuits. The regents, then, would have to weigh Daane’s interpretation of the law and his assumptions about the intentions of black students against Williams’s evidence that the units could sustain their multiracial character.⁴⁹

If Fleming and the regents were looking for a legal opinion that countered R. K. Daane’s, they could find support from the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. The commission, created in 1963 as part of the state’s new constitution to investigate claims of discrimination based on “religion, race, color or national origin,” endorsed the legal merits of the living unit.⁵⁰ The ACLU joined the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, as did the Detroit Urban League and the Michigan Democratic Black Caucus.⁵¹

Civil rights laws represented just one obstacle. Williams and the students also needed to show that the living unit was compatible with the administration’s goal of creating a model multiracial community. An early rationale suggested that the units were necessary to protect black students from the psychological damage they experienced when forced to live in and occupy white-majority spaces. But students eventually realized that in order to gain support from UM’s executive administrators, they needed to show that the living units would lead to better race relations. Lee Gill wrote in UM’s student newspaper that if black students wanted to segregate themselves, they would have chosen a facility on the outskirts of campus. Instead, they chose a space on the middle floors of the South Quad complex in the heart of campus, “because we did not want to be isolated or segregated, but wanted to be in a place where interaction and involvement was guaranteed.” According to Gill, after black students developed a “Black consciousness,” students and staff in the housing unit would lead “outreach activities,” which “would bring minority people into interactions with the majority to promote greater understanding and more livable co-existence with each other.” This justification mirrored Maddox’s rationale for a black student center.⁵²

The final proposal in March showed how executive administrators’ priorities, which privileged addressing white prejudice over addressing black students’ social alienation, continued to influence black students’ proposal. Williams and the black students were more explicit about how the living units would support the model multiracial community. They didn’t abandon the language of their original proposal, which laid out the benefits the units would offer to black students. But they also proposed programs that they hoped would address the board of regents’ interest in improving relationships between black and white students. The proposal included weekly race awareness workshops, forums, and seminars for students living in the units, designed to build “racial understanding, individually and culturally.” It pitched the living units as a place where white and black students could learn to live with “different races and cultures.”⁵³

The new rationale for the living units appealed to administrators’ interests by bringing the ideal of cultural diversity—which suggested that learning to value cultural differences could lead to better race relations—into the conversation about the meaning and purpose of racial inclusion. This rationale also resonated with many students on campus. Michigan’s Student Government Council, for example, supported the living units by arguing that the administration’s color-blind housing policies more closely resembled segregation than did black students’ proposal. “Black and White students,” the council reported, “eat at separate tables, use separate lounges, have separate governments, attend separate parties, and, in short, live separate, segregated lives.” Two African American students in a corridor dominated by white students “is hardly a real integration of the two cultures.” In contrast, the council thought that black students’ proposal represented a more legitimate attempt at integration, in which white and black students would live together and “work out the difficult problems of mutual racism and cultural difference.”⁵⁴

However, Williams and the black students quickly found a problem with using diversity as a rationale for the living spaces. The members of the Michigan community who were attracted to this new language focused exclusively on diversity’s potential to improve race relations, ignoring the fact that black students were using diversity language to justify programs that addressed their feelings of social alienation and to gain more power over the spaces they inhabited. Throughout spring 1972, the black students who advocated for the living units continued to remind administrators and fellow students that one of the purposes of the living units was for African Americans to “gain a greater knowledge of themselves,” which would “increase [black students’] psychological, sociological and intellectual development.” But it was clear that black students were losing control and ownership of the meaning and purpose of diversity.⁵⁵

Black students also found that one of the unintended consequences of this language was that it offered a new intellectual framework to those white students who opposed black spaces. Before the introduction of the diversity framework, most students and administrators at UM saw segregation as a problem because it perpetuated white prejudice, harming African Americans. Diversity rhetoric, which promoted the benefits of interracial interaction for white and black students, helped some white students see themselves as the victims of racially exclusive spaces. A group of female students living in Bush House of South Quad, for example, argued that the black students promoting the living units were actually trying to create a segregated living unit. The Bush House contingent viewed this as a problem because they saw contact with members of different ethnic and racial groups as part of the educational experience provided by dormitory living that allowed the student to “grow as a person.” They emphasized the fact that few students had had much contact with members of different racial groups before coming to Michigan. So part of the valuable educational experience offered by dormitory living, they argued, was “to provide the student with the opportunity to come into contact with other people from a variety of cultural, racial, and religious environments and backgrounds.” These students used diversity language to communicate a new value in interracial contact: that white students’ interaction with students of different racial and ethnic groups was an important experience that they were entitled to. Diversity language, then, helped white students see any attempt to take their access to students of color away as harmful to whites’ education.⁵⁶

As white students shifted their attention away from how the living units would benefit black students, one black official tried to refocus the discussion to get administrators to see the connection between the racial climate and black student retention. In March 1972, as the board of regents was set to rule on the proposal, Kidd suggested that it would be wise to remember that academic failure did not explain the high attrition rates of black students. Like Maddox, Kidd argued that black students’ “inability to adjust to the university environment” due to the “drastic change from urban ghetto life to a large predominantly white university” explained the attrition rates. Kidd was trying to frame the living units as a retention initiative rather than a program that had to prove whether it would improve race relations. Just like Maddox, Kidd faced administrators who were reluctant to change their assumption that academic deficiency represented the key explanation for attrition. The first internal social science data that supported Kidd’s argument was still eight months away. Black officials rarely overturned the long-held assumptions of white administrators without the help of social scientists.⁵⁷

The proponents of the living units still saw some hope by late spring 1972. Their proposal pushed Fleming to modify his understanding of separatism. Just a year earlier, Fleming had called a black student center the “kind of separatism which we thought was undesirable,” but the efforts of Williams and the students to guarantee that the units would be multiracial made Fleming stop and think. The proposal didn’t fit neatly into what seemed to be the simple categories of integration and segregation. He struggled with the decision for months. He read the opinions of the various civil rights groups who wrote to him with advice. In the end, despite the fact that the units would be predominantly black, Fleming decided to support the living units. He pointed out that many of the housing units on campus were overwhelmingly white, but none of the critics of the proposal questioned whether they were segregated. “Is 95 per cent white segregated?” Fleming asked. “Or is it 90 per cent or 70 per cent? We don’t really know. When our dorms are 95 per cent white … we haven’t called it that.” He suggested that critics of the proposal were applying a different standard of integration to the black students’ proposal, since most white students were able to live together on campus without any questions from the university’s legal counsel.⁵⁸

What happened next further reveals the obstacles inclusion bureaucrats faced in implementing initiatives. Williams and the black student activists had gained the support of the president of the university, but even that wasn’t enough; the regents would still have to vote on the living units’ fate. Few initiatives on campus received this type of scrutiny, but the volatile issue of race and campus space ensured that inclusion initiatives had to run the gauntlet of the university bureaucracy.

The regents voted unanimously against the living units. Although the housing office had already completed the application process for the living units and could show board members that 103 students—73 black and 30 white—were accepted, several regents argued that the housing office could not guarantee that the living units would not become de facto segregated in the future.⁵⁹ Regent Gerald Dunn made it clear that he “didn’t want us as a public body to go on record in support of segregation of any kind.” Regent Lawrence Lindemer went further in calling the proposal “among the most counter-productive moves suggested on the University campus in a long time.” The regents then unanimously supported a resolution recognizing that although “there are serious academic, counseling, and living problems for minority students on campus,” the “Regents do not approve the proposal for Afro-American and African Cultural Living Units.”⁶⁰

In place of the living units, the regents approved the African American Cultural Lounge in South Quad. Stocked with books about black history and adorned with African-themed murals painted by CAAS instructor and professional artist Jon Onye Lockard, the lounge became an important space on campus for black students to socialize and hold meetings. But the lounge was still a far cry from the living units.⁶¹

Georgia Williams continued to argue that the living units represented the best way the housing office could support black students, but the resistance of the board of regents limited the solutions Williams could pursue. In the end, Williams abandoned the fight for new living units and created a diversity training program in the dormitories—the same type of program black students had initiated with Williams and abandoned because they were ineffective. Williams described Project Awareness as a sensitivity training program developed for “students and staff to gain a knowledge of dealing with different races and cultures” and the “problems … arising because of differences.” Project Awareness included a variety of programs meant to introduce students to different cultures and to teach students how to live in racially integrated spaces. For example, students in Mosher-Jordan Hall, one of Michigan’s dormitories, watched Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed narrated by Bill Cosby. The film explained the importance of racial identity to African Americans and showed the lengths that they went through to assimilate into the white world. Students in Couzens Hall attended the talk “Black Language—Fact or Fiction,” in addition to participating in an interracial dance and events organized around black art, food, and beauty.⁶²

The frustration black officials felt in trying to improve the racial climate led to turnover within the inclusion bureaucracy. Fighting to change an institution from low- and mid-level positions without the support of campus leaders proved taxing. Black officials, like Williams, often came into the institution with grand ambitions and optimism that they could transform UM to meet the needs of black students. But they soon found out that most of their grand visions would be met with strong resistance and left their positions frustrated and disillusioned. Williams soon resigned. Regular turnover among black officials proved problematic in trying to advance black students’ goals over the long term. Some of the black students’ strongest allies left within a year of taking a management position; others didn’t last much longer. Students would struggle in the future to find a stable set of black allies in staff positions who could help lead institutional reforms.⁶³

The problem didn’t stop there. In the aftermath of the living unit struggle, administrators implemented a new hiring strategy that helped executive administrators gain tighter control over the inclusion bureaucracy. Many of the black officials hired in the late 1960s and early 1970s tried to help black students advance initiatives that made executive administrators uncomfortable. This led some administrators to become more careful in vetting the views of future black officials. As the students fought for the living units, the university was searching for a new vice president for student affairs. The university hired Henry Johnson, the first African American to hold a position in the president’s executive cabinet. But Johnson was no great victory for black activists. In Johnson, the university hired a black administrator who supported the regents’ vision of inclusion. Johnson immediately stated his opposition to the living unit. “There is no future for Blacks in the area of separatism,” he stated.⁶⁴

Henry Johnson also helped administrators co-opt black students’ vision of cultural diversity. “A diverse Black population within the predominantly white institution,” Johnson contended, “can offer a mutual learning experience—of great value to the Black student community” and “of great value to the white community as well. The interchange of experience can benefit us all.” Johnson’s comments shed light on what black students lost in the early 1970s. Diversity became a central framework for university administrators in their efforts to improve race relations, but missing in the diversity language was how it would address black students’ social alienation on campus. What began as a tool for black students to gain more control of their social environment was transformed into a new administrative vision to create the multiracial community. Diversity in administrators’ hands helped officials take control of the meaning of inclusion.⁶⁵

Despite all that black students had lost in addressing social alienation and gaining some control over living spaces, there were no signs of a renewed black protest movement in 1972. For Fleming, the absence of disruptive protest represented the measure of co-optation’s success. Campus leaders managed to retain control over campus priorities and values, ensuring that the model multiracial community remained more important than reforms that would address black students’ social alienation on campus. Black students might have been unhappy about that, but the fact that Fleming came to work every day without having to call the police to arrest protesters was a sign that co-optation was working.

In spring 1973, black students received more bad news. Enrollment projections for the 1973–74 academic year showed that black enrollment would fall well short of the BAM concessions. The university had agreed to the goal of raising black enrollment to 10 percent of the student body by fall 1973. As admissions officials began sending out rejection and acceptance letters, they projected that black students would comprise between 8.5 and 9 percent of the student body.⁶⁶

University officials rushed to explain the university’s innocence in failing to meet the BAM enrollment goal. Declining resources became a favorite explanation. State appropriations to UM declined in the early 1970s, which made it more difficult to fund supportive services programs and generous financial aid packages. According to the admissions office, the funding shortage also made it more difficult to compete with other in-state institutions that began to offer generous merit-based packages for black students with high standardized test scores.⁶⁷ Others blamed the pool of “qualified” black students. In explaining the failure to meet the 10 percent goal, Pat Wilson, an undergraduate admissions counselor, explained that UM “is a selective institution.… We cannot and will not take every minority student who applies.” Here Wilson suggested that the admissions office was innocent because it was protecting the university’s elite status. There simply weren’t enough “qualified” black students to admit. The alternative, according to Wilson, was admitting “unqualified” black students and compromising the university’s selectivity. Admissions officials didn’t simply see themselves as gatekeepers; they saw themselves as protectors—protectors of the university’s reputation.⁶⁸

The assumption that black students left UM before graduating because of academic deficiency supported the narrative of racial innocence. This assumption only led to the conclusion that straying even further from the traditional admissions tools to admit black students would simply increase attrition rates. The university had put an unprecedented amount of money into academic support services for black students after the BAM strike. CULS offered tutoring and even separate introductory courses for minority students. If black students couldn’t succeed with these resources, the popular argument went, what else could the university do?⁶⁹

As officials tried to explain the university’s innocence, Fleming revealed how racial disparities also offered a tool to show potential donors that BAM didn’t compromise the university’s elite status. Standing in front of a crowd of four hundred spectators at the Economic Club of Detroit, he claimed that coming up short of the BAM goal revealed that the university “did not, as some people thought, abandon all admissions standards.” One way to view Fleming’s speech is as a response tailored to a key constituency in order to defend affirmative action. The university relied even more on donors, many of whom opposed or were skeptical of affirmative action, especially as state appropriations declined. Clearly black campus activists weren’t the only constituency that Fleming had to respond to in the early 1970s. But this perspective overlooks how university officials contributed to donors’ perspective that few black students were academically prepared to compete at Michigan University.⁷⁰

As university officials rushed to explain why UM didn’t meet the BAM enrollment goal, they kept vital information from the public about why black students left the university before graduating. Missing from university officials’ assessment of attrition was new internal evidence that showed that most of the black students who left before graduating were in good academic standing. These studies began circulating internally in November 1972 and social scientists continued to find similar results in 1973. One study, conducted by Ruth Eckstein, found that half of the OP students who dropped out were in good academic standing (2.0 GPA or above). Even among black OP students who had earned a GPA of 3.0 or above, 22 percent still left the university without a diploma.⁷¹ Eckstein’s study made an immediate impact on administrators’ views of attrition. Her research reached the top levels of the university, with university president Robben Fleming expressing alarm at the fact that 50 percent of OP students who left the university were in good academic standing. Mirroring Maddox’s claims, Fleming now argued that the university’s counseling services, “which have concentrated largely on students having academic problems, have not adequately addressed non-academic problems.” As executive administrators admitted that their long-held assumptions were probably wrong, they commissioned more studies on attrition. Chuck Woodward, who conducted one of these studies, agreed that nonacademic factors were primarily responsible for OP attrition. After interviewing twelve staff members who worked with OP students, he concluded that “below-the-surface” factors better explained the high attrition rates of OP students than did academic failure.⁷²

Another researcher found that social alienation was especially important in understanding why minority women left the university before graduating. The researcher found that 50 percent of minority women in the Opportunity Program and 73 percent of those enrolled outside the program left UM voluntarily before graduating—meaning that their academic records hadn’t forced them out of the university. In comparison, 36 percent of minority men in the program and 46 percent enrolled outside the program withdrew voluntarily. Despite these findings, the unique struggles black women faced on campus remained outside the scope of most studies. The striking fact about administrators’ understanding of race is that while they often recognized the intersections between race and class, they rarely recognized the intersections between race and gender in evaluating black students’ experiences on campus. Still, studies like this continued to show administrators that the racial climate played an important factor in black student attrition.⁷³

Despite the fact that Fleming admitted that the university’s assumptions about attrition were likely wrong, UM officials never used these studies to explain to the public why the university failed to meet the BAM enrollment goal. The public continued to receive messages about black student deficiencies. UM officials likely worried about the consequences that the new attrition data would have on their co-optation strategy. Racial innocence had long been a strategy in deflecting criticism and curtailing disruptive protest with broad campus support. Highlighting black student deficiencies worked seamlessly with the narrative of racial innocence, while studies that blamed the university’s racial climate held UM officials responsible for racial disparities. That knowledge could have sparked a new campus strike. It could have also provided ammunition for a new fight for black living units.

This lack of transparency had serious consequences for black students and the future of affirmative action. UM officials talked openly about the fact that black students scored lower on standardized test scores and suggested that black student attrition rates were twice as high as whites because of black students’ academic deficiency. These public comments and data added fuel to the fire of white backlash and anti-affirmative action forces. In contrast, the data and social science reports that vindicated black students’ academic performance at UM found a place in office file cabinets and internal memos. Officials never communicated the new findings to the public. University officials can never be seen as the victims of white backlash when evaluating the limits that white resistance placed on affirmative action programs. They contributed to this backlash and then saw themselves as champions of racial inclusion when they defended the merits of affirmative action against critics.

If Fleming measured the success of co-optation by the lack of confrontational protest, then hiding attrition data paid off. The administration had failed to meet the most important and visible BAM concession. Even worse, the projections for black enrollment for fall 1973 were too generous. When students arrived on campus, black enrollment stood at 7.3 percent, more than a percentage point below early projections. And yet Fleming could look calmly outside his office window and see no sign of another campus uprising. That was more important to Fleming than telling the public the truth about black student performance.⁷⁴

If the failure to meet the BAM concessions disappointed black students, the outcomes of affirmative action hiring further revealed the limits of the inclusion bureaucracy in changing the institution. Black students had long connected the small number of black faculty members to the poor racial climate. Affirmative action hiring didn’t make it into BAM’s demands, but mention of the small number of black faculty members filled activists’ critique of the institution. Perhaps that’s why Fleming included affirmative action hiring in his plan to implement the BAM concessions. Fleming, though, didn’t create a full-time director position immediately after the strike. Instead, he planned to hire a part-time staff member to help departments find prospective black faculty, issue a statement urging departments to “pursue [Black faculty] vigorously,” and ask departments to create reports on the efforts they made to recruit and hire black faculty. Still, there was no plan to create incentives or consequences to motivate departments to improve affirmative action hiring efforts.⁷⁵

Fleming didn’t create a full-time position to oversee affirmative action hiring until black students received help from white women, who pushed university leaders to make more significant reform. A month after BAM finalized negotiations with Fleming, FOCUS on Equal Employment for Women—an Ann Arbor group that included many UM faculty and staff—filed a sex discrimination complaint against the university with HEW. In previous years, the civil rights victories of the 1960s had frustrated many feminist activists working in higher education. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which precluded discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal contracts, did not cover sex discrimination. Title VII, which dealt with hiring practices specifically and did protect women, excluded certain employee classifications, making it difficult for faculty members to use it. But new opportunities arose in January 1970 when Bernice Sadler, an activist working with the Women’s Equity Action League, used Executive Order 11375 to file a complaint with HEW arguing that there was an industry-wide pattern of sex discrimination within higher education and requesting that the agency conduct compliance reviews of all universities and colleges receiving federal contracts. The executive order amended Executive Order 11246—President Johnson’s previous order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating based on race, religion, and national origin—to include sex discrimination. The strategy quickly spread. Not long after Sandler’s complaint, the National Organization for Women filed a sex discrimination complaint against Harvard University under Executive Order 11375, which resulted in the first HEW investigation into a university’s discrimination against women.⁷⁶

Just a month after the conclusion of the BAM strike, FOCUS brought this strategy to Ann Arbor, when the group filed a discrimination complaint against the University of Michigan. The Chicago HEW office sent a team of investigators to UM at the end of August. Two days later, Don Scott, who headed the investigation, informed Fleming that the university was engaged in discrimination against women and offered a plan to address that discrimination. The plan included back pay for lost wages due to discrimination and a salary equity plan in all job categories. It also called for an affirmative action promotion plan for women in the university. Fleming resisted these changes, which culminated in HEW’s decision to withhold new federal contracts from UM, resulting in the loss of $7.5 to $15 million. Fleming continued to resist until January 1971, when a slate of UM’s federal contracts was set for renewal. Finally, Fleming settled with HEW, which resulted in several commitments, including salary equity between male and female employees in the same classification, payment of back wages lost to discrimination since October 1968, and priority consideration for women in clerical or nonacademic positions for promotions.⁷⁷

The threat HEW posed to UM’s federal contracts represented a new era of federal compliance at UM. University officials saw HEW bureaucrats as more of a nuisance than a threat in the 1960s. But when HEW strengthened its enforcement, losing federal contracts suddenly became real, and UM officials began taking federal compliance more seriously. Even so, it would take another year and a half for the university to create a special position to help the university comply with federal discrimination laws, including racial discrimination. Nellie Varner, who created the university’s first black studies program, became the university’s first director of affirmative action in September 1972.⁷⁸

Varner’s position, though, didn’t come with the authority necessary to transform hiring practices at Michigan. She never had the power to hold the people who made hiring decisions accountable for following affirmative action hiring guidelines. Executive administrators never intended to take any power away from individual departments in making hiring decisions, even if that meant few women and minorities were hired in faculty positions. Just as administrators believed the university’s status was tied to bringing the “best” students to campus, they also believed UM’s status was tied to hiring the most accomplished faculty. Therefore, the admissions office was supposed to protect the university’s status, much like individual departments were supposed to protect the university’s reputation through their hiring choices. The same types of fears about affirmative action admissions, then, framed executive administrators’ resistance to holding people accountable for affirmative action hiring. Given those constraints, Varner went to work improving data-gathering mechanisms and educating departments about their affirmative action responsibilities. By 1974, Varner could claim little success. Between 1972 and 1974, female minority representation on the faculty stayed stagnant. Male minority faculty representation showed small gains, rising at the assistant professor rank from 4.6 to 5.7 percent, at the associate professor rank from 6.2 to 7.4 percent, and at the professor rank from 3.1 to 3.4 percent.⁷⁹

In January 1975, Jewell Cobb’s nomination as dean of LSA represented the ultimate test of Nellie Varner and her affirmative action office’s efforts to educate the university community on their affirmative action duties. When Frank Rhodes was promoted from LSA dean to vice president for academic affairs, a black woman rose to the top of the applicant pool to replace him. At the time, Jewell Cobb was dean at Connecticut College, where she had developed a reputation as a strong advocate for black students. The problem was that Cobb wasn’t Fleming’s first choice. Fleming preferred Billy Frye, who had become associate dean of LSA two years earlier and was currently serving as interim dean.⁸⁰

Despite Fleming’s preference for Frye, the search committee recommended Cobb. The regents quickly approved the committee’s decision. However, the zoology department refused to give her tenure. Although administrators, such as deans, don’t typically teach courses, they still expect tenure in an academic department. The reason is obvious: tenure in a department gives an administrator job security. If Cobb’s contract as dean wasn’t renewed, she could stay at UM and teach in the zoology department.⁸¹

Zoology faculty claimed that they denied her tenure because of deficiencies in her scholarship. The truth was that the zoology department had a long history of resisting affirmative action. Recall the 1966 survey of departments’ affirmative action hiring and graduate student recruiting practices covered in chapter 2. The survey offended a few department chairs so much that they attached letters opposing affirmative action. One of those letters came from the chair of the zoology department, who wrote that special recruiting practices for black students and faculty were “contrary to my own ideas as well as those of my colleagues.” To add to the problem, zoology was also Billy Frye’s home department.⁸²

The case showed how executive leaders at UM enabled departments, such as zoology, to resist black candidates. The decentralized management structure gave individual departments the power to hire and nominate faculty for tenure. Fleming claimed he had no authority over academic departments’ decisions, but it was a constraint he created for himself. No thought went into how to overcome decentralization. During the Fleming administration, decentralization was taken as a given, even if that meant affirmative action hiring goals were rarely fulfilled. In the future, UM presidents would commit to hiring more black faculty, and administrators would find that there were many tools they could use to push departments to fulfill affirmative action goals. In the 1970s, though, Fleming used decentralization as an excuse. He was trapped by the decision of the zoology department. In other words, decentralization supported executive administrators’ narrative of racial innocence and helped hide the fact that Fleming’s preference for a different candidate likely aided his inaction.⁸³

Fleming called Cobb with the news, offering her a two-year contract without tenure. It was another disappointing experience at UM for Cobb. She had first come to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate in 1941. She quickly learned about the university’s poor racial climate after being assigned to live in a racially segregated league house off campus. She recounted that once she arrived, she “was never allowed in the mainstream of social life on campus.” Cobb transferred to Talladega College after her first year. Now, more than thirty years later, she found herself again feeling unwelcome at the University of Michigan.⁸⁴

Word quickly circulated about the university’s offer to Cobb. Betty Morrison, a black education professor at UM, told a reporter, “To call [the offer] insulting is almost too mild.”⁸⁵ George Goodman, who began his career at the university as the Opportunity Program’s admissions counselor and by 1975 was the program’s director, called the administration’s offer to Cobb a “personal affront to every responsible minority person.”⁸⁶ Anonymous sources began telling Michigan Daily reporters that Fleming was deliberately derailing Cobb’s appointment in order to support his first choice, Billy Frye. Two hundred students, faculty members, and university officials protested outside the Administration Building.⁸⁷

Fleming wouldn’t budge. Nobody in the executive administration tried to get the zoology department to reconsider. Cobb finally declined the offer after negotiating for about two weeks. To no one’s surprise, Fleming’s top choice, Billy Frye, got the job.⁸⁸

In the aftermath, an internal investigation committee blasted Fleming and the zoology department. The committee reported that the zoology department’s process of reviewing Cobb’s merits and denying her tenure took only twenty-four hours. Zoology faculty only had some of Cobb’s publications, and Cobb was never consulted about which publications she felt were most significant. The department never invited her to give a presentation of her research. In fact, nobody in the zoology department ever contacted Cobb to ask her anything. The committee concluded that the zoology department’s decision to deny Cobb tenure simply allowed Fleming to move ahead with Frye’s candidacy. Regional HEW officials tried to withhold a large federal grant in response to the university’s unusual offer to Cobb, but the agency’s top leaders overturned the decision.⁸⁹

The incident represented a great loss for Varner, demonstrating the limited impact she had made in her time at UM. To add insult to injury, her office had to refocus on convincing the federal government that UM was in full compliance with affirmative action laws. HEW still hadn’t approved the university’s affirmative action plan. Finally, in February 1976, Varner’s plan gained HEW’s approval. It must have been a pyrrhic victory for her. She successfully accomplished what her supervisors most wanted from her—the federal government’s approval of an affirmative action plan so that the university’s federal contracts were secure. But she failed to make the type of impact on hiring practices that she had hoped for when she took the position. Like so many black administrators, she left her position in frustration, resigning the month after HEW accepted the affirmative action plan.⁹⁰

The demonstration outside the administration building in response to Fleming’s offer to Cobb was brief and unorganized. Again, Fleming must have thought that co-optation was working. Black discontent over affirmative action hiring didn’t translate into disruptive protest that could challenge Fleming’s inclusion policies. A month later, though, he saw the first sign that another campus movement might be brewing that could undermine his control of inclusion.

By February 1975, Fleming’s co-optation strategy had survived for years without another black campus strike. Despite failing to meet the BAM enrollment goal, resisting black students’ efforts to address the racial climate, and playing a visible role in undermining Cobb’s candidacy, Fleming didn’t see the signs of an emerging black campus protest. But suddenly in February 1975, he found a large group of student activists occupying the Administration Building, calling for new ambitious racial justice reforms. But this time, the students in the building looked different. Alongside the black students, Chicano, Asian American, and Native American students filled the rooms of the building.

The BAM strike had ignited activism among nonblack minority groups who wanted to build on black students’ victories. Chicano, Native American, and Asian American students believed that black students were reaping the rewards of racial inclusion, while other minorities were left behind. As black student organizing began to decline after BAM, these minority groups provided the energy behind a new wave of activism that eventually led to the 1975 building occupation.

Especially concerning to nonblack minority groups were their small numbers in the Opportunity Program. From fall 1964 to 1969, 669 new black students entered UM through OP. In the same period, 8 Chicano, 6 Asian American, and 2 Native American students gained access through the program. To put this into perspective, 124 white students were admitted as Opportunity Program students in the 1960s. This meant that the vast majority of nonblack students entered UM through the traditional admissions process and without the financial and support services of OP. For example, in fall 1968, about 99.4 percent of Native American students, 96.2 percent of Asian American students, and 68.8 percent of Spanish-surname students gained admission to UM without the benefits of OP. In contrast, only 40 percent of black undergraduates were enrolled outside OP in 1968.⁹¹

Chicano students were in the best position to gain better access to OP in the aftermath of the BAM strike. Second to African Americans, they were the best organized group on campus and the only nonblack minority group to win any concessions in the BAM strike. Recall that Fleming agreed to hire a Chicano recruiter and pursue the goal of enrolling at least fifty Chicano students by the fall semester of 1970. After the strike, to fulfill the concession made to Chicano students, the admissions office hired Raymond Padilla—the leader of the campus protest group Chicanos of Michigan—as an admissions counselor. According to Padilla, admissions officials didn’t know about his activist past when he was hired, and Padilla certainly didn’t offer the information in his interview. Once he got the job, he tried to advance the concessions he had won as an activist from within the admissions office.⁹²

Padilla went to work establishing connections with Chicano communities in Michigan. Thus far, OP recruiters had focused on predominantly black high schools. Now Padilla started traveling to predominantly Chicano high schools and distributing bilingual recruiting pamphlets about OP across the state. He also created a program that reclassified the children of migrant workers as in-state students, broadening the number of Chicano students who could access the Opportunity Program. To qualify, an applicant’s parents had to have worked in the state of Michigan during three of the previous five years. These initiatives had an obvious impact. Between 1964 and 1969, only 8 OP students had Spanish surnames. In 1972, under Padilla’s direction, 70 students with Spanish surnames were enrolled in the program. By 1974, that number had jumped to 124.⁹³

Administrators put up more obstacles for groups not included in the BAM concessions. The BAM concessions, in administrators’ eyes, had already stretched the university’s budget too far. Now they tried to ensure that demands from other minority groups would not stretch the budget even further. Native American and Asian American students faced an uphill battle.

The small number of Native American students made it difficult to exert pressure on the administration. During the 1970–71 academic year, there were 41 Native American undergraduate students on campus. That meant that they constituted 0.2 percent of the undergraduate student body that year. In comparison, 732 black undergraduate students (3.8 percent) walked onto campus in fall 1970. Yet that didn’t stop Paul Johnson from making demands on UM administrators to improve Native Americans’ access. Johnson was a UM graduate student in the early 1970s and the associate director of the Great Lakes Indian Youth Alliance—an organization that fought for educational opportunities for Native Americans. He found a part-time job as a graduate assistant in the admissions office to help fund his graduate work and was able to use some of his time recruiting Native American students. But Johnson knew that the little time he was allowed to spend on recruiting efforts was woefully inadequate to improve access for Native Americans.⁹⁴

In May 1971, Johnson submitted a proposal to the regents that made a series of recommendations to improve the university’s commitment to Native Americans. First, he wanted a full-time Native American recruiter in the Opportunity Program. Second, because Johnson believed that OP’s focus on in-state students limited Native Americans’ opportunities, he wanted the university to fund out-of-state recruiting. There were only thirty thousand Native Americans in the state of Michigan, which made for a small recruiting pool. But the issue of out-of-state recruitment meant more than expanding the pool. “Not only is the limited number of Indians a rationale for out of state recruiting,” Johnson argued, “but Indian people did not draw any state or territorial boundaries; non-Indians did after stealing the country from its original inhabitants.” Limiting the OP program to in-state students, he suggested, only served as another tool whites used to take power and access away from Native Americans.⁹⁵

Johnson’s proposal didn’t lead to quick institutional change. As was often the case, university officials cited budget concerns when explaining why university officials had yet to act on any of Johnson’s recommendations. In other words, the BAM concessions had already taxed the university’s resources. At the end of July, when university administrators hadn’t made any attempt to fulfill Johnson’s requests, he threatened the university with legal action. When the university again failed to respond, Johnson filed a lawsuit in August in Washtenaw County Circuit Court. The case hinged on an interpretation of the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, in which Chippewa, Pottawatomie, and Ottawa tribes gave land for what would become the University of Michigan. Article 16 of the treaty stated, “Some of the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomy tribes … believing they may wish some of their children hereafter educated, do grant … to the corporation of the college at Detroit” 1,920 acres of land that officials could use or sell. Officials did eventually sell that land and use it to fund the university’s development in Ann Arbor. The lawsuit claimed that the treaty required UM to provide educational opportunities to Native Americans, and the university had failed to fulfill this obligation. As a remedy, Johnson wanted the court to order UM to pay 3 percent compounded interest on $1 for each of the 1,920 acres. Johnson hoped the university would pay $1 million toward Native American education at UM.⁹⁶

University officials promised to contest the lawsuit. By the mid-1970s, the lawsuit that Johnson filed in 1971 continued to move slowly through the court system. Roderick Daane, the university’s lawyer, fought for a narrow interpretation of the 1817 treaty, which gave the university no responsibility to provide new funds or admissions practices that would expand Native Americans’ access. The case wasn’t resolved until 1981, when the court finally ruled in the university’s favor. The university made only one small concession after Johnson filed the lawsuit. The Undergraduate Admissions Office hired one Native American recruiter, but he was hired only half time. He also had to work within the constraints of the Opportunity Program. Despite Johnson’s recommendations, OP continued to serve only students living within the state.⁹⁷

Asian Americans faced a different problem: how they would convince the university that they were a “disadvantaged” group and maintain access to the Opportunity Program even as their representation on campus grew to historic numbers. Since the university began reporting racial and ethnic data to HEW, Asian American students represented the second largest minority group on campus. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian American undergraduate enrollment stayed steady, holding at 0.7 percent. By 1974, an additional fifty Asian American students were on campus, as their numbers reached over two hundred. For the first time, Asian American students represented 1 percent of the student body.⁹⁸

Asian Americans’ growing representation on campus raised concerns about their status as “disadvantaged” minorities. The 1970 census—although flawed in many ways—showed that Asian Americans represented about 0.7 percent of the U.S. population. For the first time in UM’s history, a minority group’s representation on campus exceeded its share of the U.S. population. In January 1974, George Goodman, now director of the Opportunity Program, decided that Asian Americans could no longer qualify for OP solely through their minority status. Asian American applicants could still qualify, just as whites could, if they could prove they were socioeconomically “disadvantaged.”⁹⁹

The decision helped spark an Asian American student movement at UM. While other groups formed protest organizations along ethnic lines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian American students did not do so until 1974. In that year, a group of Asian American students, who would eventually form East Wind, organized to preserve their status as “disadvantaged” minorities. The university had failed, in the students’ words, to provide “equal minority treatment.”¹⁰⁰

According to Asian American activists at UM, the problem was that university officials mistakenly saw Asian Americans as the “model minority.” In historian Ellen Wu’s words, the stereotype came to signify “a racial group distinct from the white majority, but lauded as well assimilated, upwardly mobile, politically nonthreatening, and definitely not-Black.” This stereotype took hold by the mid-1960s. Asian American student activists tried to challenge the “model minority” image by highlighting a long history of discrimination against Asian American groups, which resembled the discrimination that other minority groups faced.¹⁰¹

The students also hinted at a critique that would become much more prominent among Asian American student activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The term “Asian American” itself hid the fact that large disparities existed in economic status among Asian Americans who emigrated from different nation-states. Using the term, student activists claimed, gave UM officials an excuse to ignore the most disadvantaged groups, such as Filipinos. The fact that only Canada sent more international students to UM than China and India only exacerbated the “model minority” stereotype and kept officials from recognizing disadvantaged Asian American groups. UM kept careful records concerning which minority students were U.S. citizens in order to report figures to the federal government. Thus, the numbers the university released concerning Asian Americans didn’t include international students. Nevertheless, the number of Asian international students, activists argued, made it appear to people walking around campus that Asian American students were even better represented than they actually were. In 1973, for example, there were 853 graduate and undergraduate students of Asian descent, but only 322 were American citizens. Despite their efforts, OP continued to exclude Asian Americans—except those who could prove economic disadvantage—from the program.¹⁰²

More than any minority group on campus in the mid-1970s, Asian American activists responded to this situation by calling for a broad coalition of minority students. They suggested that the university was trying to divide minority students by not allocating enough resources to support all the minority groups on campus. As each group fought over limited resources, minority students often saw one another as obstacles to overcome, not potential allies. Asian American activists suggested that “minority groups seem to forget that what brought them together was a common history of racist oppression. Instead of working together, they have often engaged in comparative oppression which is, at best, a counter-productive activity.” For a brief moment in 1975, it looked like minority students could overcome these obstacles and form a multiracial coalition to challenge the university.¹⁰³

“We’re here because we want to turn the University upside down,” a student protester told a reporter in late February 1975 while sitting on a faux Mahogany desk outside Robben Fleming’s office. Fleming’s secretary usually sat at the desk, but a group of two hundred students had stormed the Administration Building and sent personnel scrambling. In some respects, the protest looked similar to past building occupations for racial justice. Sleeping bags and food covered the orange carpet. Students talked about nonnegotiable demands. But a quick look inside the building showed reporters that something new was unfolding. This was a multiracial student protest calling for demands that spoke to the needs of all minority groups. Although the protest would later be remembered as the second black action movement, or BAM II, the students called themselves the Third World Coalition Council (TWCC).

The TWCC made six nonnegotiable demands that the group’s leaders said had to be met before the students would leave the Administration Building.

1. Recognition of the Third World Coalition Council as the official negotiating team of minority students.
2. Immediately reinstate Cleopatra Lyons (a black nursing student who had been expelled for allegedly administering insulin to a patient without a doctor’s approval).
3. Establish an Asian American advocate.
4. Establish a Chicano Cultural Center.
5. Raise the appointment of the Native American advocate from half time to full time.
6. Total amnesty from reprisals for all demonstrators.

The TWCC also called on Fleming to begin negotiations on a series of other demands. One of these demands called for the university to increase the percentage of Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans at UM to match their composition in the U.S. population. Thus far, administrators avoided any nonblack enrollment goals tied to a specific percentage of the student body. The BAM concessions, which established the 10 percent black enrollment goal, put black students in a unique position. Other minority groups wanted the university to make similar commitments.¹⁰⁴

The rest of the TWCC’s supplemental demands concerned only African Americans. Black students wanted to hold the university accountable for not meeting the 10 percent black enrollment goal within the established time frame. The 1970 BAM concessions originally gave the university until the 1973–74 academic year to reach the 10 percent goal. In fall 1973, black enrollment stood at 7.3 percent. A year and a half later, the university still hadn’t reached the enrollment goal. Now activists put even more pressure on university officials, demanding that the university raise black enrollment to 13 percent of the student body by September 1976 and a percentage equal to or greater than African Americans’ share of the state population by September 1977. They made similar percentage demands for black faculty.¹⁰⁵

The administration’s failure to fulfill many of the BAM concessions also influenced the demands. The students were no longer willing to entrust the implementation of protest victories to administrators and staff members. Black activists wanted more control over the power mechanisms of the university. The Black United Front, the major black activist organization of the period, wanted control of the admission, financial aid, and recruitment of black students. The group also wanted control of 25 percent of UM’s budget and all university services for black students. Black activists saw the value of black administrators in implementing demands and thus called for an immediate increase in black officials. But they also saw that not all black administrators worked in the interest of black activists. The Black United Front wanted the power to hire and fire black administrators.¹⁰⁶

Fleming didn’t grant any of these demands. The students tried to hold out, forcing the university to concede or use the police to physically remove the students. But after nearly sixty hours, the students left the Administration Building with only a simple promise from Fleming that he would continue to talk to them. It was a great failure for the most significant coalition of minority groups in the university’s history thus far.¹⁰⁷

There were early signs, however, that the coalition wouldn’t be able to hold together long enough to force Fleming into action. The imbalance in the demands among minority groups—with black students’ interests dominating the list—suggested tension. Even more telling was the lack of socialization among groups when they got inside the building. Black students occupied one room, other minority groups sat in a different room, and white students congregated in yet another room.¹⁰⁸

Interracial tension, though, explains only part of the TWCC’s failure. The fact was that building takeovers were poor tools to create change in 1975. In the late 1960s, building occupations looked threatening to administrators, who hadn’t seen that type of protest before. But subsequent protests changed that. The 1970 BAM strike might have led to unprecedented concessions, but it also made protests that didn’t make physical threats or destroy property appear tepid and nonthreatening. Staff and administrators described the 1975 protesters as mild, even polite, in comparison to the 1970 activists. Dorothy Parker, a secretary in the Administration Building, compared the two protests, suggesting that the 1970 strike “was much more threatening. Any of us who were here could tell the difference.” The 1970 protesters, she continued, “let you know that they were going to be violent right from the start and they were.” Richard Kennedy, UM’s vice president of state relations, told a reporter, “The mood was entirely different.” “The hostility, the vehemence,” he continued, “I can’t describe it. The tenor was totally different.” Levi Cash, the assistant to the president, called the 1975 building takeover “just another routine event.”¹⁰⁹

The routineness—the feeling that the takeover was easy to manage—revealed the consequences of the new disciplinary laws and codes implemented after the BAM strike. The multiracial coalition of 1975 faced a different environment than had the BAM protesters. The grand bargain Fleming eventually struck with students in the early 1970s was that he was willing to accommodate protest, even building takeovers, as long as students didn’t destroy property or make physical threats. Any protests that used BAM’s more confrontational tactics would face the full consequences of UM, state, and federal disciplinary codes and laws. The goal was to create demonstrations that were, in Cash’s words, “just another routine event.”¹¹⁰

As the TWCC demonstrators found in 1975, most routine events didn’t create significant change—or any change at all. The failure of the TWCC had long-lasting consequences. It would take more than a decade for another multiracial protest coalition to emerge at the University of Michigan. The small 1975 protest was a sign that Fleming’s tactics were working. Even as UM failed to meet minority students’ expectations, Fleming avoided another major demonstration that shut down the university.

In the years after the BAM strike, campus leaders wrestled control of inclusion from activists. While black enrollment rose to historic heights, it never reached the 10 percent goal. Administrators carefully controlled initiatives to address the racial climate, rejecting attempts to create intraracial spaces. Black students saw an unprecedented number of black officials on campus, but those officials struggled to implement activists’ vision of justice. Other minority groups joined black students in activism, but these groups failed to create a multiracial movement that could challenge the administration to implement new demands.

The fear administrators shared regarding the black campus movement was gone by the mid-1970s. It’s no coincidence that an era of racial retrenchment emerged as black campus activism waned. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, university officials implemented new policies that reversed most of the enrollment gains black students had won over the course of the late 1960s and early 1970s.