Epilogue

In 2006, Michigan voters approved an amendment to the state Constitution that banned affirmative action in public institutions. It was a devastating blow to the University of Michigan’s efforts to preserve affirmative action. UM had just spent millions of dollars defending racially attentive admissions in court. The political arena, though, proved to be the university’s most formidable obstacle.¹

One way to read Proposal 2 is as the culmination of a conservative backlash to affirmative action at the University of Michigan. There is no doubt that these anti–affirmative action efforts have made racial inclusion more difficult at UM. But this book has shown that focusing blame on conservative court cases and political efforts to ban affirmative action misses the role institutional officials have played—and continue to play—in the persistence of racial inequality at UM. University of Michigan officials have long crafted visions of inclusion that accommodated and defended racial inequality. Proposal 2 didn’t create racial disparities and a poor racial climate at the University of Michigan—it simply exacerbated existing problems.

In the wake of Proposal 2, black enrollment began to decline, and the racial climate worsened. Battles on campus since 2006 have revolved around the university’s culpability in racial retrenchment. University officials have deployed racial innocence, blaming the constitutional amendment for any problems on campus. Black students, though, have tried to hold the University of Michigan accountable for its part in new era of retrenchment, despite Proposal 2.

One month after Michigan voters passed Proposal 2, University of Michigan president Mary Coleman announced the Diversity Blueprints Task Force, headed by Provost Teresa Sullivan and Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Lester Monts. Coleman, who replaced Bollinger in 2002, asked the task force to recommend new policies that would comply with Proposal 2 but still further the university’s goal of diversity. Sullivan and Monts took advantage of the fact that postsecondary institutions in other states had already faced similar bans on affirmative action. By the time Michigan voters passed Proposal 2, public postsecondary institutions in California, Washington, Georgia, and Florida had all crafted “race-neutral” alternatives. Administrators in Texas also had experience in dealing with a court-ordered ban on affirmative action before Gratz and Grutter overturned Hopwood and allowed public universities in Texas to use race as a factor in admissions again. Sullivan and Monts organized a two-day workshop with representatives from the University of California–Berkeley, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of Washington—all flagship public universities—to discuss how they responded to bans on affirmative action admissions practices in their own states.²

UM’s admissions office implemented many of the proposals that came out of the workshop. To evaluate students’ contribution to campus diversity, admissions officers created essays about identity and life experiences. One essay, which was required of all students, asked applicants to respond to a prompt: “Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.” An optional prompt asked students to “describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”³

The university also purchased a new program that offered proxies for race. The admissions office paid $15,000 per year to use Descriptor Plus. The College Board developed the program to help schools “shape [their] class profile” and “[t]arget hard-to-attract populations,” including minority students. The tool used College Board and U.S. census data to divide high schools into 180,000 different geographic neighborhood clusters, which have, what the College Board called, “unique behavior profiles.” In short, the program divided high schools into neighborhood clusters with students that share similar SAT scores, college acceptance rates, incomes, and racial backgrounds. Using an applicant’s information, University of Michigan admissions officers could search for whether an applicant went to an underperforming high school or lived in a neighborhood marked by “limited access to educational opportunities.” The assumption, of course, is that a higher percentage of underrepresented minority students attend underperforming schools and, thus, could serve as a proxy for race.⁴

The University’s Alumni Association also tried to help UM mitigate the impact of Proposal 2. Before 2006, UM’s affirmative action strategy depended on racially attentive scholarships to attract what officials thought were the “best” black students. When Proposal 2 eliminated those scholarships, the Alumni Association stepped in to provide similar funding resources. The association was a private organization, so it wasn’t covered by the state’s new constitutional amendment.⁵

Despite these efforts, underrepresented minority students’ share of Michigan’s student body began to decline. In 2006, underrepresented minority students composed 12.2 percent of incoming first-year students. In 2010, their share of incoming first-year students stood at 10.8 percent. Proposal 2 affected black enrollment even before Michigan voters passed the initiative. Applications from black students dropped dramatically during the contentious debate over Proposal 2. As a result, black students’ share of incoming first-year students dropped from 7.2 percent to 6.1 percent between 2005 and 2006. Between 2007 and 2009, black undergraduate enrollment held steady between 6.19 and 6.58 percent. After that, the University of Michigan changed its applications, allowing students to check more than one race and ethnicity identification box. The university placed students who checked more than one box in a separate category, making it difficult to tell how many of those students might have identified only as black if the university had preserved its past application form. Since UM created this separate multiracial category, the percentage of students who identified only as black has hovered between 4.4 and 4.78 percent.⁶

When black enrollment began to decline in 2006, officials faced pressure to explain why racial disparities were increasing. They turned to a common technique: blaming external factors for the drop in black enrollment. Proposal 2 was to blame. The university was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Coleman and other officials tried to get critics to focus on the university’s inclusion efforts in order to claim racial innocence. They emphasized that black enrollment didn’t decline as much at UM as it had at the University of California–Berkeley and the University of Washington after those universities faced similar bans. Coleman stated that she was “pleased with holding our own with regard to underrepresented students.” When Coleman made similar arguments at a Trotter House fireside chat, Walter Lacy, an undergraduate student, responded, “This is the response you get about race. That is, ‘we’re doing the best we can.’ ”⁷

Coleman initially signaled that the university might challenge Proposal 2 in court, but UM’s lawyers never filed a lawsuit. Instead, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, an activist group fighting against anti–affirmative action measures, filed the case against the state of Michigan and the board of regents of UM, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University. The case hinged on a complicated legal argument that claimed Proposal 2 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Coleman placed some hope in the lawsuit.⁸

The University of Michigan’s racial innocence narrative found a place in the case. Although UM was a named defendant in a complicated case, UM officials wanted the court to rule in the plaintiff’s favor and strike down Proposal 2. UM officials challenged Michigan’s attorney general, who defended the merits of Proposal 2 in court. They claimed that the state’s public universities couldn’t maintain underrepresented enrollment through race-neutral means. Ted Spencer, UM’s director of admissions, testified at the trial court about the difficulties he experienced in maintaining underrepresented enrollment in the wake of Proposal 2. UM also filed a brief in the case, claiming the decline in underrepresented minority enrollment after the passage of Proposal 2 clearly showed that UM couldn’t create a diverse student body with race-neutral admissions policies. UM argued that it was a victim of the constitutional amendment. In 2008, the district court ruled against the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, but in October 2013, the Sixth Circuit reversed the decision, offering new hope to UM officials that they could soon return to old affirmative action practices. But when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on appeal, university leaders would have to wait.⁹

As UM officials waited for the high court’s decision, black student activists were ready to mount a campaign against a new era of racial retrenchment. Black students had a low tolerance for administrators’ excuses. They understood that Proposal 2 closed some of the most effective means of offering access to black students. Still, black activists refused to accept the idea that administrators were victims of Proposal 2. They refused to believe that university officials had exhausted all the available tools to raise black enrollment and improve the racial climate. Well publicized incidents of racism helped fuel a new protest movement. In perhaps the most highly publicized incident, Theta Xi, a fraternity on campus, advertised a “Hood Ratchet Thursday” party.¹⁰

As happened so often throughout the University of Michigan’s history, the new protest movement began with black students’ testimony. In November 2013, UM’s Black Student Union launched #BBUM—a Twitter hashtag that stood for Being Black at the University of Michigan. The BSU asked students to go onto the social media site and testify about their experience on campus. The Twitter campaign caught national attention. Many of their testimonies could have come from any of UM’s black students in previous decades:

• @angel_crisstina: I look around to see how many stares I get after the instructor says Racism is the topic … since I’m the only Black person in class #BBUM
• @TheSenCity: #BBUM being the one of the 5 Black males in the largest freshman dorm on campus
• @Tiaraevelynn: Knowing more about other cultures than they know about ours #BBUM
• @Cjeremya: That first class when Black culture become the topic and you suddenly become the voice of all Black people #BBUM
• @JENNxoxo_: That pause that a person has when you say you’re from Detroit. & you’re just thinking “Yes, I made it here too.” #BBUM
• @LavashiaJM: #BBUM having to be extremely cautious of the tone of my voice because ill be seen as loud or ghetto.
• @Larealkay: Being Black at umich means that I am accepted, but not necessarily welcomed. #BBUM¹¹

The Black Student Union turned #BBUM into an organizing tool. By the time students returned from the winter recess, the group was ready with a list of demands for the administration. After Harry Belafonte spoke as part of the University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, BSU representatives were standing on the steps of Hill Auditorium ready to announce their demands.

• We demand that the university give us an equal opportunity to implement change, the change that complete restoration of the BSU purchasing power through an increased budget would obtain.
• We demand available housing on central campus for those of lower socio-economic status at a rate that students can afford, to be a part of university life, and not just on the periphery
• We demand an opportunity to congregate and share out experiences in a new Trotter [Multicultural Center] located on central campus.
• We demand an opportunity to be educated and to educate about America’s historical treatment and marginalization of colored groups through race and ethnicity requirements throughout all schools and colleges within the university.
• We demand the equal opportunity to succeed with emergency scholarships for Black students in need of financial support, without the mental anxiety of not being able to focus on and afford the university’s academic life.
• We demand increased exposure of all documents within the Bentley (Historical) Library. There should be transparency about the university and its past dealings with race relations.
• We demand an increase in Black representation on this campus equal to 10 percent.

The students adopted a tone that administrators hadn’t heard from a black student group since the late 1980s. They gave the university a seven-day deadline to meet the demands or the BSU would respond with “physical action.”¹²

Coleman agreed to meet with the group. While UM officials were willing to take some responsibility for the racial climate, Coleman and UM officials were unwilling to take responsibility for black enrollment. It was clear that she didn’t think the university could reach the BSU’s 10 percent black enrollment goal, and she didn’t believe that the BSU should fault UM leaders for that. The next month, she gave a speech that addressed the BSU’s demands and emphasized the limitations that Proposal 2 placed on the university. “We have struggled in the wake of Proposal 2 and the ban on affirmative action. We know that,” she told the audience. “Our commitment [to diversity] has never waned. The environment in which we operate, however, has changed.” She emphasized all that the university had done to try to limit the impact of the constitutional amendment. She claimed the university had implemented the “best practices” available to give underrepresented minority students access to UM.¹³

UM officials developed a favorite metaphor to describe why the university struggled with inclusion in the face of Proposal 2. “It’s like having your hands tied behind your back,” Provost Martha Pollack said of the constitutional amendment. UM officials used it to deflect accountability. Much like officials before them, they asked the UM community to recognize the constraints they worked within and give them credit for all their efforts to advance inclusion.¹⁴

If Coleman had been holding out hope that the Supreme Court would solve some of the university’s problems, she was sorely disappointed. In April 2014, the court rejected the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action’s arguments. In a 6 to 2 decision, the court upheld Proposal 2. Two months later, Coleman retired.¹⁵

“I firmly believe that we cannot achieve true excellence without leveraging the experiences and perspectives of the broadest diversity of students, faculty, and staff,” Mark Schlissel told the audience at his inauguration as president of the University of Michigan in September 2014. Clearly responding to the pressure from black students on his predecessor over the last year, he emphasized that “students of all experiences and backgrounds should feel they have a place in this community. We must continue to reach out to the most promising students, from our state and from across the nation and around the world.”¹⁶

Just two months before he gave his inauguration speech, the Provost’s Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion released a report on achieving inclusion at UM. Provost Martha Pollack created the committee in the midst of #BBUM. The problems the committee identified looked the same as those uncovered by committee after committee during the previous fifty years. Minority students experienced a hostile racial climate. Minority students needed more academic support services. The university didn’t do enough to recruit and retain minority faculty. The university’s decentralized structure made it difficult to coordinate inclusion efforts. The university didn’t do enough to hold people accountable and create consequences for failing to achieve inclusion. The recommendations, too, looked like stock administrative responses to student pressure. The committee recommended the formation of yet another committee to make recommendations on improving the racial climate and another task force to study academic support services. It also suggested an aggressive public campaign “reaffirming the University’s commitment to diversity as a core value.” The committee did offer one stinging critique of the university’s response to Proposition 2. “Many in the University community have used the passage of Proposal 2 as an inappropriate excuse for inactivity around diversity issues,” the committee concluded.¹⁷

The committee report didn’t stop the university from using Proposal 2 to advance a narrative of racial innocence. As UM formulated a strategic inclusion plan, university officials saw another opportunity to tell the university’s struggles to the Supreme Court. In 2012, the University of Texas found itself in front of the nation’s highest court. Abigail Fisher, a white undergraduate applicant, sued UT, claiming its affirmative action admissions practices didn’t meet the narrow tailoring test of strict scrutiny. The majority remanded the case to the lower court, deciding that the district court didn’t interpret strict scrutiny properly. When Fisher returned to the Supreme Court in 2015, UM officials decided to put their narrative of racial innocence to use to help UT.¹⁸

UM filed an amicus brief in the case, trying to show what would happen if the court ruled in Fisher’s favor. Proposal 2 took away the University of Michigan’s successful affirmative action programs, the brief claimed. University officials exhausted all the race-neutral options they had available, but these options failed. The university couldn’t sustain minority enrollment. “The University’s nearly decade-long experiment in race-neutral admissions,” the brief read, “is a cautionary tale that underscores the compelling need for selective universities to be able to consider race as one of the many background factors about applicants.”¹⁹

The university’s brief, much like its legal arguments in Gratz, misrepresented institutional history to tell a story of racial innocence. #BBUM suddenly became the result of “student dissatisfaction with persistent low Black enrollment” caused by Proposal 2. The brief quoted students who wrote on Twitter about feeling isolated and being the only black student in a class. These weren’t problems the university was responsible for, according to the brief. Proposal 2 caused these problems. Black activists on campus didn’t support Proposal 2, of course, but they weren’t using Twitter to protest the constitutional amendment. They were using Twitter to combat the university’s narrative of racial innocence. They were trying to bring attention to the failures of university policy.²⁰

As UM officials continued to invoke their racial innocence, Schlissel unveiled his strategic plan to improve inclusion. The plan included many of the hallmarks of past co-optation techniques, which attempted to quell activism while offering few systemic changes. The plan tried to move black students’ #BBUM testimony on Twitter onto a university-controlled website called Diversity Matters. Second, the plan offered an influx of money into inclusion programs—a consistent feature of co-optation. In the past, that money often didn’t last long and rarely fixed systemic problems. Time will only tell how long the money will last in coming years. Third, the plan expanded the inclusion bureaucracy, creating yet another administrative position to oversee diversity programs.²¹

As of 2018, the Go Blue Guarantee represents the most significant reform to come out of Schlissel’s strategic plan. The program covers undergraduate tuition and fees for in-state students with family incomes of less than $65,000. It’s UM’s most important commitment to low-income students since the mid-1970s. Recall that UM undermined access for low-income black students when officials redistributed the university’s general fund resources used for need-based aid to support merit aid. The Go Blue Guarantee comes closer to the Opportunity Program’s original financial aid policies than any program since the mid-1970s.²²

Removing financial barriers are meaningless, though, if underrepresented students can’t gain admission. UM hasn’t crafted new admissions practices to match the ambitious Go Blue Guarantee financial aid commitment. Wolverine Pathways, introduced in 2015, represents the university’s most significant admissions initiative. It’s a UM-community partnership that offers a supplemental education program to prepare students for UM’s competitive admissions process. The program started in two small school districts with large percentages of underrepresented students and expanded to include Detroit in 2017. Students enter the program in seventh or tenth grade and are expected to remain in the program until they graduate from high school. During the academic year, students participate in sixteen Saturday courses, which involve project-based learning to enhance math and communication skills. During the summer, they participate in another sixteen daylong sessions. The program also offers standardized test preparation.²³

Wolverine Pathways is an admirable program that will improve education opportunities for a select group of underrepresented students. But the program isn’t a substitute for changes to the admissions system. The outcomes reveal the Wolverine Pathways’ small impact it on UM’s student body. The first class of students who spent four years in the program entered college in fall 2018. Of the eighty-nine students, forty-one gained admission and planned to enroll at the University of Michigan. The university hasn’t reported the racial and socioeconomic background of these students. Nevertheless, even if all forty-one students are black, they still represent only 0.6 percent of the incoming class.²⁴

In fall 2018, even with the Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways, black students made up 5 percent of the first-year class. That represents a 1 percent increase from fall 2017. A 1 percent increase is nothing to scoff at, but it’s also nothing to celebrate. A September 2018 study made that clear. The University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center released a report card grading public universities in all fifty states based on criteria that included black students’ share of the student population in relation to young blacks’ (18 to 24 years old) share of the state population. The University of Michigan received an F, finishing in the bottom quintile of all public universities. The Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways aren’t programs that will lift UM out of the bottom quintile. Neither program will come close to raising black enrollment to match blacks’ (18 to 24) share of the state population—17 percent.²⁵

The University of Michigan isn’t alone. In the same University of Southern California study, other highly selective public universities received poor scores for black students’ representation on campus. The University of Virginia received an F. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill received an F. The University of Texas-Austin received a D. The University of California–Berkeley received the highest grade of any elite public university with a C. It was a generous grade considering that black students at the Berkeley campus represent 1.9 percent of the student body and African Americans represent 6.6 percent of California’s eighteen to twenty-four year old population. Grade inflation has extended to our universities’ inclusion efforts.²⁶

If the nation’s elite private universities were included in the study, they would have also received dismal grades. At Stanford University, black students represent 3.8 percent of the student body. Black students at Bryn Mawr College represent 5 percent of the study body. At Harvard University, black students represent 6.7 percent of undergraduate students. The fact is that despite the protests for racial inclusion that enveloped universities and colleges nationwide in recent years, racial disparities persist at the nation’s most selective institutions. Only 7 percent of black college students attend highly selective colleges and universities in the United States. Sixty-four percent of black students attend four-year and two-year schools for which a high school diploma is the only admissions requirement. In contrast, 23 percent of white and 36 percent of Asian American students attend the nation’s most selective universities and colleges.²⁷

Since UM’s dreary black enrollment numbers are part of a larger national story, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the university’s recent responses to protest mirror popular reforms around the country. The Go Blue Guarantee, for example, represents a national trend. Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, and Brown University cover tuition for students whose families make less than $60,000. At Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, and Rice University, students from families making less than $65,000 don’t pay tuition. Programs at Princeton University, Dartmouth University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are even more generous, covering tuition expenses for students with family incomes ranging from $90,000 to $140,000.²⁸

Some selective colleges and universities have gone further than the University of Michigan in reforming admissions. This book has shown the negative impact standardized tests have had on racial inclusion. While UM continues to require these tests as part of its admissions process, other universities are now removing these exams from the selection process or making them an optional requirement. In 2018, more than one thousand four-year institutions no longer require the SAT or ACT as part of their admissions process. Most of these institutions aren’t selective, but some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions have modified their standardized test requirements. Among selective institutions, the nation’s top liberal arts colleges are leading the way. Bowdoin College, Bates College, Smith College, Bryn Mawr College, and Wesleyan University no longer require standardized tests, and are all ranked among the top thirty liberal arts colleges according to U.S. News and World Report rankings. Even more top liberal arts colleges are now “test flexible,” which varies widely among institutions, but the policy generally gives students the ability to submit different types of test scores as a substitute or supplement to the SAT or ACT. For example, Hamilton College gives applicants the option to submit three exams of their choice, which could include an individual section of the SAT, the ACT writing score, an SAT subject test, an advanced placement exam score, or an International Baccalaureate final exam. In all, ten of the top thirty ranked liberal arts colleges have test-optional or test-flexible admissions policies. In fact, over half of the top one hundred liberal arts colleges have these policies. The nation’s most selective research universities, though, lag behind. In June 2018, the University of Chicago became the first top ten ranked research university to make the SAT an optional admissions requirement. Only three of the top thirty and twelve of the top one hundred national research universities have test-optional or test-flexible policies.²⁹

Recent studies show that test-optional policies, in particular, raise underrepresented minority enrollment at selective institutions. In one study that compared test-optional institutions to peer institutions that required the SAT or ACT, the researchers found two-thirds of test-optional colleges and universities saw their underrepresented minority populations grow at higher rates than their test-mandatory peers. Still, these jumps in underrepresented enrollment haven’t fully closed the racial gap at selective institutions. A few test-optional universities and colleges have reported an impressive rise in their underrepresented minority enrollment of 3 to 4 percent, but most have reported more modest increases.³⁰

It’s too early to evaluate the full impact of test-optional policies for racial inclusion. While Bowdoin adopted the policy in 1969, most of these selective institutions have only a few years of experience in selecting students without standardized test scores or with alternative scores. There are promising signs that test-optional policies could eventually lead to greater growth in underrepresented enrollment than researchers have seen thus far. Selective institutions with test-optional policies have seen applications from underrepresented students, including low-income students, skyrocket. These developments are a reminder that the SAT and ACT have taught black students to discipline their ambitions. For more than half a century, universities and colleges have used standardized tests to signal to black students where they “fit” in higher education. Removing this requirement has clearly sent a message to more black high school students that they might now fit at the nation’s most prestigious institutions.³¹

These reforms offer a glimmer of hope that black student enrollment for students of all socioeconomic backgrounds will rise in coming years. But these reforms are too limited to produce the type of access that black student activists have called for. The problem is that these reforms share the hallmarks of co-optation that filled this book, as they protect elite universities’ hierarchy of values. They preserve a system that largely evaluates institutions’ quality by the academic credentials of their students at the moment students apply. These credentials are better predictors of wealth and race than anything else. Even if universities reject the SAT, there are plenty of other credentials, such as the number of advanced placement courses students take, that will continue to produce racial and socioeconomic disparities at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities.

The problem with celebrating reform is that it often helps people forget all the discriminatory policies still in effect. University of Chicago officials’ celebration of their recent reforms serves as a case in point. When the University of Chicago announced UChicago Empower, which made the SAT an optional admissions requirement and offered applicants the opportunity to present alternative materials, such as a two-minute video, the dean of admissions suggested that the program “levels the playing field, allowing first-generation and low-income students to use technology and other resources to present themselves as well as any other college applicant.” Reform doesn’t level the playing field. Overlooking all the exclusionary admission methods still in play at the University of Chicago will support narratives that white and Asian American students are just more deserving of admissions slots when UChicago Empower doesn’t dramatically increase underrepresented student enrollment. This reality should give us pause before we start celebrating the new test-optional or need-based aid initiatives.³²

One of the lessons of this book is that it’s important not to confuse reform with disruptive institutional change. Reform preserves elite universities’ hierarchy of values and the measurement tools they use to define “elite.” Inclusion initiatives, then, have only been acceptable as long as they don’t disrupt these values. The problem is that institutions can’t reform their way out of a value system that produces and defends racial inequality. Disruptive institutional change for racial equity is different. It sees the university’s core values as the root of the problem. The goal, then, is to rethink the entire purpose and structure of elite institutions in order to create a truly inclusive university.

Some of the most disruptive ideas come from people who believe that advances in technology will revolutionize access by making the prototypical four-year college experience—that is, one confined to a campus—a relic of the past. The disruptive part isn’t that students will learn online—that’s already part of the higher education landscape. The disruptive piece of the vision is that new technology will end the monopoly colleges and universities have over what constitutes a degree. As universities and colleges put more of their coursework online and new technology offers better ways to evaluate and advise huge numbers of students in a single course, students will be able to tailor their own coursework, building a curriculum across multiple institutions that best serves each student’s life goals. Rather than living on a campus, students with similar goals or interests might join together in their own learning communities. They might live in places that offer experiences that will advance their goals. Employers will look at the list of courses taken—and the institutions that provided the courses—in determining the qualifications of prospective employees.³³

The prospect that advances in technology will allow postsecondary institutions—even the most elite institutions—the opportunity to add thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of students to their courses has the potential to advance accessibility. The most optimistic foresee the end of admissions offices. As Kevin Carney writes, people won’t apply to colleges in the future, they “will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.” In that case, the main obstacles will be whether a student can pay tuition and complete the rigorous coursework.³⁴

While some of these ideas, if implemented properly, have the potential to disrupt a historically discriminatory admissions system, the writers who advocate for technological disruptions are largely blind to race. They overlook a world where access to the types of technology necessary to participate in this new educational system is poorly distributed across racial and socioeconomic lines. The worst of this literature imagines a higher education industry where students will choose courses à la carte from nonprofit and for-profit and accredited and non-accredited institutions. Given the fact that for-profit and non-accredited institutions have preyed on low-income people of color, taking their money and leaving them without a meaningful education, should give us all pause about the future disruptions that new technology might bring. These writers also admit that the nation’s elite colleges will be the last to make transformative changes.

I only hope that writers envisioning how technology can disrupt higher education will start thinking more about race and equity.³⁵

Less disruptive, but more attuned to racial inequality, are writers who advocate for transforming the purpose of elite institutions. An institution’s purpose drives admissions decisions. Legal scholar Lani Guinier argues that “universities have drifted away from their public mission to create active citizens in a democratic society.” While elite universities like the University of Michigan place high-minded democratic ideals in their mission statements, their primary mission has been to preserve their status by admitting students with the highest test scores. According to Guinier, if universities were serious about training students to contribute to the future of democracy, standardized test scores and advanced placement scores wouldn’t play such a large role in admissions. Instead, universities would need to craft a new vision of merit that she calls “democratic merit.” This form of merit would require an admissions system that assesses students based on their potential ability to “serve the goals and contribute to the conditions of a thriving democracy for both their own good as well as for the collective good.”³⁶

However elite institutions redefine their purpose, Guinier’s vision shows the power in redefining the mission and priorities of an institution. Doing so offers opportunities to reconsider the concepts and mechanisms that perpetuate inequality—concepts and mechanisms that many institutional leaders have taken for granted and that can even seem natural. Disruptive change, then, doesn’t just call into question the SAT; it calls into question our entire understanding of who deserves access to elite institutions.

A key piece of this type of disruptive change would create new methods for measuring institutional quality and prestige. In Guinier’s formula, universities’ prestige would be measured by the degree to which they contribute to democracy. Clearly, this isn’t the only way to redefine the purpose of elite institutions in order to promote access and equity, but it’s important that any redefinition disconnects institutional prestige from the academic credentials of students the moment they apply. Imagine if we rated hospitals by the health of patients when they enter the door. We wouldn’t ask about the care patients received. We would simply give the hospitals who admitted the healthiest patients the highest rankings, while giving hospitals who admitted patients in critical condition the lowest rankings. This probably sounds like a useless rating system that should never be used to grant prestige to any medical institution. But it’s essentially the system we use to rank universities and colleges. Institutions achieve prestige by their admissions decisions, and we assume that great educational outcomes follow. It’s hard to imagine a truly inclusive higher education system without eliminating this ranking procedure, which continues to provide incentives for institutions to perpetuate the educational inequalities at the primary and secondary levels.³⁷

There are some recent positive signs that our ranking systems are beginning to change to encourage equity. U.S. News and World Report has started placing less weight on admissions selectivity and has introduced new social mobility categories—including schools’ Pell Grant recipients and graduation rates—in the rankings. U.S. News and World Report is still a long way from offering a ranking system that helps create disruptive change, but it’s creeping at a snail’s pace in that direction. More encouraging are alternative ranking systems. The Washington Monthly, for example, tries to rank colleges and universities “based on what they are doing for the country.” The ranking methodology places more weight on Pell Grant recipients, graduation rates, affordability, and the percentage of students who join service institutions, such as the Peace Corps. The Washington Monthly doesn’t include racial equity in its method—it should—but alternative ranking systems like this come much closer to Guinier’s vision.³⁸

As I write the final words of this book, anti–affirmative action cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill make the urgency for disruptive change even more pressing. It’s possible that the Supreme Court will ban affirmative action in all American universities, public and private, in the next five years. It’s a sobering thought. It’s even more sobering when you consider that affirmative action in higher education has been a tool of co-optation that preserved the institutional values that continued to privilege white middle- and upper-class students. If anti-affirmative action forces put this much effort into challenging practices that preserve racial disparities, imagine the forces that will coalesce to resist efforts to disrupt institutional values and create a truly fair and equitable system.

Disruptive change won’t be easy. The forces behind these anti–affirmative action cases will be the same forces that resist disruptive change in the name of inclusion. They will find allies in higher education leaders who have supported affirmative action but want to preserve the current hierarchy of values and criteria that measure institutional status. Disruptive change, then, will require a student movement, with allies outside the campus walls, that rivals that of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It will also have to offer ambitious visions for a new system. Activists won’t be able to simply call for more students and faculty of color. Activists will have to demand disruptive change, not more inclusion reforms that eventually lead to small increases in representation.

Disruptive change will also likely require pressure on politicians to provide financial incentives and consequences to help spark and maintain disruptive change. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler has highlighted how elite universities benefit from federal subsidies while helping to perpetuate inequality in the United States. Most of us understand that the federal government provides billions of dollars to universities in grants and student loans every year, but postsecondary institutions benefit from other government policies. The federal government allows our richest nonprofit universities to pay nothing in taxes, including on capital gains from their lucrative investments. Federal tax policy also incentivizes charitable donations to our already wealthy universities through individual tax breaks. These policies have allowed America’s top universities to accumulate enormous wealth. Harvard’s endowment grew 10 percent in the 2018 fiscal year to $39.2 billion. Yale’s endowment grew 11.3 percent to $29.4 billion. The University of Michigan’s endowment stands at $11.9 billion. It grew by $1 billion in the 2018 fiscal year. Colleges and universities benefit from these tax breaks and direct federal money under the assumption that these institutions provide a public good. Given the uninterrupted stream of federal money and tax breaks, the persistence of racial and socioeconomic inequality seems well within Congress’s definition of serving the public good. It shouldn’t be. The federal government has shown some resolve in providing consequences for for-profit institutions that take federal money and leave students in insurmountable debt with few job opportunities. Nonprofit public and private institutions that enroll few low-income and underrepresented students of color, though, haven’t received the same scrutiny. The federal government should offer incentives for institutions that implement disruptive change that advances inclusion through additional federal aid and grants. The federal government should also consider ending tax breaks, federal aid, and grants for institutions that continue to perpetuate racial and socioeconomic inequality. While tying aid to socioeconomic status is well within the Constitution, courts won’t accept a funding standard based on the number of underrepresented students on campus. Still, there are other, although less effective, ways of measuring inclusion. Racial climate studies, for example, could offer a useful tool to tie funding to institutions’ inclusion efforts. Whatever the standard, Congress must play a role in redefining the purpose of our elite colleges and universities.³⁹

All of this likely sounds too hard and unrealistic. But if black student activists have taught us anything, it’s to fight for what’s right even when that cause will likely fail. Sometimes we forget that failure is one of the most consistent features of activism. Forgetting that fact generates frustration and sometimes leads activists to give in to calls to be “realistic.” It’s important to remember that the job of activism isn’t simply to fight for what’s possible; it’s to get the world to reimagine what’s possible. Failure comes with the territory. The most important social movement victories in U.S. history haven’t come from activists who were “realistic.”

If there is a place to start disruptive change, it must start with the understanding that inequality is a choice. Elite universities use racial innocence to try to convince us otherwise. But if we agree that inequality is a choice, then we can hold universities accountable. We can demand choices that lead to equality. We can root out the values and mechanisms that University of Michigan activists called part of the “bones and sinews of the place.” It’s time for some new bones and sinews.