“You talk to the average man on the street and their image of the university is that it’s filled with all these radical, liberal folks, right?” Doug Houweling, the university’s vice provost for information technology, told a reporter. “You talk to the average university administrator and they’ll tell you the university is highly resistant to change, that it’s a very conservative organization. Well, what’s the truth?” Houweling gave this interview in 1989, not long after James Duderstadt took the reigns as UM’s eleventh president. Duderstadt was in the process of laying out the Michigan Mandate, one of the most ambitious racial inclusion initiatives in UM’s history. The initiative responded to black student activists who, in 1987, led a campus-wide protest that threatened to shut down university operations. The Michigan Mandate allocated unprecedented resources to repair UM’s racial climate and increase underrepresented minority students, faculty, and staff. Was the Mandate a sign of “radical, liberal folks” or a sign of a “conservative organization”?¹

Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza would have provided a quick answer to the question. Writing just a few years after Duderstadt announced the Mandate, D’Souza identified UM as part of the “vanguard of the revolution of minority victims,” along with universities like the University of California–Berkeley, Harvard University, and Howard University. What struck D’Souza most was that he believed the leaders of these institutions didn’t need much prodding from activists to support ambitious affirmative action and multicultural initiatives. The “victims revolution,” D’Souza thought, was a top-down revolution led by administrators, not a reluctant response to student activists. The University of Michigan was clearly a radical institution in D’Souza’s eyes.²

D’Souza, of course, greatly downplayed the importance of activist pressure and administrators’ resistance to student demands in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He also missed the purpose of the Michigan Mandate. The Mandate didn’t represent an institutional revolution; the Michigan Mandate represented a deliberate attempt to co-opt the student movement for racial justice on campus and gain administrative control of racial inclusion.

Although the Mandate raised black enrollment and redistributed millions of dollars to inclusion initiatives, it sustained some of the most important pieces of co-optation. UM officials continued to protect the admissions policies that targeted middle-class black students living outside cities. Officials also continued to privilege the goal of combating white students’ prejudice through interracial contact over addressing black students’ social alienation. Diversity continued to serve as a key intellectual foundation in sustaining these priorities.

The Michigan Mandate evolved out of black student protests that began during the winter of 1987. In January, Shapiro left on sabbatical, and James Duderstadt took over as acting president of the university. Duderstadt didn’t have a long background in the executive administration, only accepting the position of provost and executive vice president for academic affairs seven months earlier. The interim president didn’t worry, though. January and February were usually routine months for a president, he thought. Duderstadt told a reporter that he hoped no “earth shattering issues” unfolded before Shapiro returned in March. Duderstadt didn’t make it a month before the earth shattered.³

On January 27, a group of black women were meeting in a lounge in Couzens Hall, a campus dormitory, when they saw a piece of paper slide under the door. It was a facsimile of an Ohio hunting notice, which read, “Be it known that due to severe drought and fire this past season, and to decreased animal populations; the hunting of DEER, RABBIT, QUAIL and POSSUM, has been prohibited.… The government has provided by special decree for a substitute animal to be hunted so that no hunter will lose his skill during the season … there will be an OPEN SEASON ON PORCH MONKEYS. (Regionally known as: Jigaboos, Saucerlips, Jungle Bunnies and Spooks.)” The flyer then went on to list the rules and suggestions for how to hunt African Americans.⁴

The women in the lounge ran out into the hallway. The perpetrator had disappeared. “I read the letter and it hurt; it hurt deeply,” Leteshian Kennebrew recounted. Weeks later they learned that a nineteen-year-old white, first-year student and fellow resident in Couzens had produced the flyer.⁵

The flyer appeared in an environment ripe for another major black campus protest. Organizations with strong membership and leadership were already mobilized. And these organizations had spent years trying to push the administration to institute reforms through traditional channels. They had met with Niara Sudarkasa. They had appeared at regents meetings to air their grievances. Traditional channels led to little success. Duderstadt also faced an environment in which national media outlets were on high alert for individual acts of prejudice in higher education. In late 1986 and early 1987, national media outlets reported upswings in incidents of racism around the country. National coverage caught fire in October 1986, when a rash of racist incidents attracted reporters to the issue. At the Citadel, a South Carolina military academy, white cadets dressed as Ku Klux Klan members broke into a black cadet’s room and yelled racial slurs. Students at Smith College defaced the school’s minority cultural center with the phrases “Niggers, chinks and spics stop your complaining” and “Niggers go home.” Later that month, two black students at Smith found a note attached to their door that read: “We don’t want niggers on our floor. Leave tomorrow or die.” But the most reported story of the month involved a fight between white and black students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst following game seven of the World Series—a fight that left one black student unconscious. Because universities didn’t develop systems to record and report incidents of racism, it is difficult to measure whether racist incidents actually increased during the late 1980s. Nevertheless, the perception that the number of these incidents were rising made racial prejudice on college campuses the trending news story of the time. UM activists, then, wouldn’t have to work hard to bring the nation’s attention to Ann Arbor. If all these environmental factors were kindling, the Couzens flyer provided the first spark that led to a powerful student protest movement at UM.⁶

Barbara Ransby was ready to lead a campus protest when students found the flyer. The Detroit native and future history professor, renowned for her work on the black freedom movement, came to UM in 1984 to begin her graduate work. Since then, her name appeared in just about every antiracism initiative on campus. She became best known, though, for her fight to get the regents to divest from businesses profiting from South African apartheid. She founded the Free South Africa Coordinating Committee (FSACC) with fellow student Hector Delgado in 1985. It would have been difficult for any UM community member to avoid Ransby’s work. Her group built a large wooden shanty on the Diag, meant to bring attention to the housing conditions black families endured under apartheid.⁷

After the flyer incident, Ransby stood on the steps of the graduate library and told an audience of three hundred, “We want to embarrass Vice President Duderstadt for not taking a stronger stand against racism.” Connecting the university’s racial climate to black students’ academic performance, she told the audience that the cumulative effect of racist incidents at UM made it almost impossible for black students to get an education. Within a week, Ransby brought together a coalition of groups, including the FSAAC and the university’s NAACP chapter, into an organization called the United Coalition Against Racism (UCAR).⁸

Duderstadt tried to move quickly in order to limit UCAR’s momentum before its leaders could organize a powerful protest movement. The typical administrative response in these situations included forming a committee, hiring a new black administrator, or announcing funds for a new racial inclusion initiative. Duderstadt reached into the administrative toolbox and pulled out cash. He announced a $1 million initiative that he claimed would help increase minority employees and address campus racism.⁹

Any hope Duderstadt had that the new funds would limit UCAR’s support ended by mid-February. A tape of a radio show on UM’s WJJX—the “station that storms the dorms”—surfaced. The show aired just a few days after the Couzens incident, but the tape recording of the program didn’t circulate around campus until weeks later. The weekly program featured host Ted Sevransky, a sophomore who called himself “Tenacious Slack.” On February 4, a listener phoned in calling himself “Miami Mike.” The conversation that followed gave UCAR the momentum it needed:

MIAMI MIKE: What happens when you mix a Black and a groundhog?

SEVRANSKY: What?

MIAMI MIKE: Six more weeks of basketball season.

SEVRANSKY: That’s a pretty bad one. Hang on a second, let me go find the laughter soundtrack. Meanwhile you can go ahead and tell another one.

MIAMI MIKE: Why do Blacks always have sex with their mind. Because all of their pubic hairs are on their head. [laugh track plays] Oh, they loved that one.

SEVRANSKY: Yeah, they sure did. Alright. Here, try it again.

MIAMI MIKE: Ok hold on. I got to find a good one.

SEVRANSKY: Why? Are you looking at a book for this?

MIAMI MIKE: Ted. Me? Tenacious, come on!

SEVRANSKY: Oh. Silly me for even asking.” [Caller laughs] Any more?

MIAMI MIKE: Yeah. Who are the two most famous Black women in history?

SEVRANSKY: Who?

MIAMI MIKE: Aunt Jemima and motherfucker.

SEVRANSKY: Oh no. That was a bad thing to say. We’ll have to edit. Edit that please. Edit that. Edit that, please. Wait, we got to get the tapes. For those of you that heard that out there, remember that this is a family radio station. This is a phone caller. We did not personally … WJJX endorses none of the products. You know, the whole disclaimer thing.

MIAMI MIKE: This is funny.

[inaudible]

MIAMI MIKE: Why do Black people smell?

SEVRANSKY: Why?

MIAMI MIKE: So blind people can hate them too. [laugh track plays]

SEVRANSKY: This is disgusting ladies and gentlemen.

MIAMI MIKE: One more. One more. Wait.

SEVRANSKY: No. no. no. Racism is a bad thing.

MIAMI MIKE: What do you call a Black smurf?

SEVRANSKY: What?

MIAMI MIKE: A smigger. [laugh track plays]

SEVRANSKY: This is disgusting. This is a radio station. I can’t even listen to this.… This is disturbing. This institutionalized discrimination within the university. Here we have a radio station, a family radio station, and people call up and make racial jokes. I mean yeah, how many white people does it take to screw in a light bulb. I mean, you never hear that or anything like that. I mean, we are all a family here; this is supposed to be some type of bonding between fellow students at the university. It’s just so hard for me to comprehend; so hard for me to understand. It really kind makes me upset, you know, that this type of thing has to happen at a university as liberal and liberated as this. And I, Tenacious Slack, I am speaking out against racism. I say no racism in the classroom. Brothers and sisters we all can be one together.

Sevransky’s sarcasm at the end of the conversation showed more than an ignorance of the problems of racism. Sevransky actively mocked black student activists by using their concepts, such as “institutionalized discrimination.”¹⁰

On March 4, vowing to bring UM “kicking and screaming into the 20th century,” UCAR members read a list of twelve demands to two hundred people on the Diag:

1. Create an honorary degree for Nelson Mandela.
2. Increase Black enrollment and retention substantially.
3. Create an Office of Minority Affairs with a Supervisory Commission elected by the minority campus community.
4. Create a Financial Aid Appeals Board so that no student is excluded from Michigan for economic reasons.
5. Create a mandatory workshop on racism for all incoming students.
6. Create an orientation for incoming minority students.
7. Create tuition waivers for underrepresented and economically disadvantaged minority students.
8. Create a minority lounge and office in the Michigan Union.
9. Create a required course on racism and diversity for all University students.
10. Create a full, public and immediate investigation of all reported incidents of racial harassment and a publicized mechanism for reporting such incidents.
11. Full observance of the Martin Luther King Holiday[,] including closing the University.
12. The immediate removal of all those perpetrators of racist incidents from the dorms.¹¹

Then the demonstrators marched from the Diag to the Administration Building, where they read the demands in unison to Duderstadt. The six-foot, five-inch interim president towered over many of the demonstrators. He gave the students the type of well-worn response that they had heard many times before: racism was “not appropriate for this nation,” Duderstadt told UCAR members. “We have got to take actions and educate the majority in particular about the importance of respecting pluralism and diversity on campus.” UCAR was tired of this type of response, as it was usually a sign that administrators weren’t going to take any steps to make institutional reforms. “We did not come here to hear this,” one student told Duderstadt. “We made our statement here, we don’t want to hear anymore of this administrative jibberish. Either act now or you are going to see us in a different form.” Another student threatened a new Black Action Movement—alluding to the protest organization that shut down much of the university in 1970—if the demands were not met. UCAR gave Duderstadt two weeks to fulfill their demands.¹²

The threat black student activists posed in 1987 was new to the people in charge at UM. None of the university’s leaders were in administrative positions during the 1970 BAM strike. Executive leaders had become accustomed to weak and often unorganized black activism, which felt more like a nuisance than a threat. For the first time in seventeen years, administrators were looking at a protest organization that might be able to shut down university operations.¹³

UCAR’s cause gained national attention the next day. Representatives of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and WDIV—Detroit’s NBC affiliate—found seats among eight hundred people in the Michigan Union’s Grand Ballroom. Morris Hood, a state representative from Detroit and chair of the state’s higher education appropriations committee, was on campus to hear the testimony of black students about UM’s racial climate. Hood organized the hearing after the recording of Sevransky’s show emerged. Sixty-one people testified, including President Shapiro, who had returned from his sabbatical. Over the course of the hearing, Hood listened to story after story of racism. One black female student endured mammy jokes while she worked in the campus kitchen and was told on another occasion that she would be lynched if she didn’t pay housing fees. A black graduate student recounted an incident in which a white student physically attacked her young son and called him a “Black motherfucker.” A professor asked the same student, “Who are you calling yourselves this year?” The hearing lasted for four and a half hours.¹⁴

UCAR members likely would have appreciated the hearing years before, when testimony about racism represented a vital tool for a small, emerging movement that didn’t yet have the collective power to force change. Now UCAR was ready to move beyond testimony and deploy the tactics of a protest organization capable of shutting down university operations. In the weeks before the hearing, black activists were mindful that in the past, their meetings often became forums to tell stories of racism. “We don’t want to turn this into another testimonial of the racist incidents,” one student activist reminded participants. “Now we need to propose motions to the administration to decrease (racism).” Three hundred UCAR members stood up at the hearing and in unison read the twelve demands they had presented to Duderstadt.¹⁵

As administrators were sorting out how to respond to UCAR, another group emerged, calling themselves the Black Action Movement III (BAM III). The group felt that UCAR’s demands didn’t focus enough on the specific challenges and needs of black students. Although black students dominated UCAR, the group was multiracial, and the demands reflected the group’s composition. So BAM III made its own list of demands, which focused exclusively on black students:

1. We demand the establishment of a permanent and completely autonomous yearly budget of $35,000 for the Black Student Union.
2. We demand the immediate endowment of $150,000 for the William Monroe Trotter House to insure that the integrity of African-American culture will be preserved in spite of the vile climate of racism that persists at the University of Michigan.
3. We demand the University immediately grant tenure to all presently hired Black faculty, and develop an accelerated tenure program for all newly hired Black faculty. Furthermore, we demand an increase of Black faculty members, such that every department of the University has tenured Black professors.
4. We demand that the University’s Board of Regents and administration adopt a plan that appoints Blacks as department chairpersons or heads of 30 percent of all academic departments of the University’s schools and colleges.
5. We demand the immediate addition of a racial harassment clause in the University rules and regulations to punish institutionally those who perpetuate, motivate and participate in any type of racist activity.
6. Full participation of the Black Student Union executive board in the formulation and implementation of any reform, program or policy that implicitly or explicitly affects the Black community of the University or our community at large.
7. We demand President Shapiro’s $1 million initiative to improve the recruitment and retention of Black students be extended to a $5 million five-year initiative. At the end of the five-year period, the initiative will be evaluated and possibly extended indefinitely.
8. We demand the development of a permanent Black music program and Black affairs program at the University-owned, student-run, stations. These programs shall be produced, programmed and operated by Black students.
9. We demand that all University publications cease degrading and insulting the integrity of Black people by the use of lower case “b” when referring to the Black race.
10. We demand the uncompromised ratification of UCAR’s anti-racism proposals.
11. We demand total amnesty for all reprisals incurred by students during BAM III.¹⁶

By UCAR’s March 19 deadline, Shapiro had made only one concession: an honorary degree for Nelson Mandela. That night, UCAR and BAM III activists occupied the first floor of the Administration Building. Security officials scrambled to lock the stairwells and elevators so that students couldn’t access the upper floors. One hundred students prepared to stay overnight. They ordered pizza and listened to speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Some discussed whether they would lose their summer jobs if the police arrested them.¹⁷

Despite the threat that UCAR and BAM III posed, Shapiro refused to concede to more demands. The stalemate signaled the beginning of a prolonged battle. But student leaders knew they couldn’t keep up a long fight. It was already late March. The university’s term ended in April, and final exams were quickly approaching. UCAR and BAM III would lose much of their mobilizing force as students focused on finals and then left campus for the break. They looked to Jesse Jackson to speed up the negotiating process.

Jackson, the longtime civil rights activist, was just beginning his presidential campaign. UCAR had a direct connection to Jackson because the father of one of its members was Jackson’s lawyer. The presidential candidate arrived in Ann Arbor on March 28 and spent the day meeting with student activists and faculty to learn what was most important to them before the negotiations began. The next day, Jackson brought about twenty people with him—each representing different community and student groups—to meet with Shapiro, Duderstadt, and John D’Arms, dean of the graduate school. Jackson began the meeting by stating that he wanted the university to agree to a goal to increase black enrollment at UM to 24 percent of the student body within five years. Jackson chose that number because African Americans made up 24 percent of southeastern Michigan’s population. He then asked the representatives he brought with him to announce their demands. One black student announced that he wanted $35,000 for the Black Student Union. Another announced that he wanted an Office of Minority Affairs. Shapiro, Duderstadt, and D’Arms waited as all the people around the table announced their demands.¹⁸

The administrators had one advantage in the negotiations. The meeting started at 10 a.m., and Jackson had scheduled a rally on campus at 4 p.m., with the national media in attendance. If Jackson wanted to celebrate his skills in reconciling racial tensions on national television, he could not show up to the rally blaming racist white administrators for undermining negotiations. The administrators formed a plan to hold out for more favorable terms. The goal of 24 percent black enrollment was especially worrisome. Black enrollment hadn’t topped 7 percent in over a decade. In fact, Shapiro, Duderstadt, and D’Arms did not want to commit the university to a target percentage at all. They thought that was one of the major mistakes administrators made during the original BAM strike. However, members of Jackson’s entourage objected to any agreement that did not include a target for black enrollment. As the clock clicked closer to 4 o’clock, Jackson convinced them to go along with concessions that did not include specific targets. Instead, they allowed Shapiro to leave out a numerical target from the written concessions and simply announce in the press conference the university’s “aspiration” to increase black enrollment to reflect African Americans share of the state population—although left unstated, it was about 12 percent. Just as important, the statement left out any reference to socioeconomic status. UCAR’s original demands pressed for new financial aid policies that would broaden access of low-income underrepresented students. Clearly, Shapiro and Duderstadt didn’t want to reverse the affirmative action policy changes of the late 1970s that privileged middle-class, underrepresented students. The negotiations, in this respect, represented a clear victory for administrators.¹⁹

Jackson and the administrators agreed to six concessions, which administrators later referred to as the “Six-Point Plan.” The concessions included the establishment of a vice provost for minority affairs; $35,000 for the Black Student Union; funds for minority faculty development; plans and eventual targets for minority enrollment and faculty and staff hiring; development of a racial harassment policy; and the creation of an advisory committee on minority affairs to advise the university president. At the scheduled rally, Jackson brought Shapiro on stage with him, praising him for agreeing to their demands. Just minutes before, he was a villain on campus. Suddenly, he was standing before a large gathering of students, faculty, and Ann Arbor community members while Jackson and others involved in the negotiations praised him for his leadership.²⁰

One month later, Shapiro announced that he would leave UM to become the president of Princeton University. The events surrounding the UCAR/BAM III protest were not the only factors that pushed Shapiro to leave Michigan. Princeton had been courting Shapiro for a year, and he had been contemplating the move. The protest, though, did make him think seriously about whether Ann Arbor was the best place for him and his family. Criticism of his leadership from black politicians and radio hosts in Michigan made him question whether he could be “a good representative of the university anymore.” He later recounted, “ ‘You know, I don’t need to do this, I don’t have to put up with this.’ I viewed myself as trying to provide a social product for the state,” and he thought the black legislators’ efforts “to take advantage of a difficult ongoing situations to lay the burden of all the social pathology of this country on the university and on my shoulders” were unfair.²¹

As much as Shapiro liked to see himself as a victim of unfair critiques, he oversaw one of the worst periods of racial retrenchment in UM’s history. After a decade of policies that gutted many of BAM I’s victories, Shapiro left the university at the start of a new era of black student activism. Administrators learned from Shapiro’s failures when they again tried to wrestle control of inclusion from activists in the aftermath of the UCAR/BAM III concessions.

When Shapiro announced his resignation in April 1987, the weight of implementing the Six-Point Plan fell to Duderstadt. The provost saw the plan’s implementation as part of a much bigger strategy to co-opt activism. His initial strategy was to make highly visible policy changes that would demonstrate to the UM community that he was serious about addressing UCAR and BAM III’s concerns in order to minimize the groups’ support. Duderstadt’s general strategy section in his 1987 Diversity Agenda read, “Keep enough activities moving ahead to neutralize disruptions and provide the time for more comprehensive strategic action.” Only then, when Duderstadt didn’t have to worry about confrontational protest, could he implement his own vision of inclusion.²²

Duderstadt’s primary goal was to take back control of the racial inclusion agenda. Duderstadt believed that administrators should govern the purpose, details, and goals of inclusion programs. The alternative worried Duderstadt. The problem with letting students control the agenda, Duderstadt believed, was that it often led to concessions that administrators didn’t think were viable. There were many consequences when administrators conceded to goals that they believed were unfeasible, he thought. First, administrators were reluctant to hold people accountable for not meeting goals that the administrators believed weren’t attainable in the first place. Second, failing to meet unachievable goals only led to more student protests that demanded, in administrators’ eyes, more unachievable goals. Duderstadt wanted a plan that he believed in—a plan in which every agenda item, in his eyes, was attainable. Only then could he get people to buy in to his goals; only then could he hold people accountable.²³

The initiatives Duderstadt proposed greatly limited the vision of racial justice proposed by UCAR and BAM III. In student protesters’ eyes, there were consequences in allowing administrators to define what types of goals and programs were viable. At one point or another, administrators had considered almost every racial inclusion goal and program unfeasible before activism forced officials’ hand. Part of activists’ role was to push people in power to rethink what was possible. UCAR and BAM III activists weren’t willing to step aside and let Duderstadt define what racial inclusion would look like and what the university could achieve. Duderstadt, then, would have to work hard to limit activists’ power in shaping his racial inclusion plans.

Limiting UCAR and BAM III’s power was easier said than done. The group’s influence came from a widespread feeling on campus that racial justice was not a priority for university administrators. So Duderstadt went to work to fulfill the Six-Point Plan quickly. Just one month after the concessions, he announced that he had already responded to the first concession by creating the Office of Minority Affairs. He hired Charles Moody as vice provost to run the office with a $1.25 million independent budget. Creating a new office fit neatly into co-optation techniques, as expanding the inclusion bureaucracy represented a typical administrative response after protest. The $1.25 million independent budget, though, signaled that Duderstadt was going to go well beyond past administrations. Inclusion bureaucrats usually came into their positions with little to no money, which required them to write program proposals and ask for money from executive administrators. By fall 1987, Duderstadt also created a base budget line of $35,000 for the Black Student Union, made affirmative action efforts a part of the merit evaluations of deans and directors, and formed a presidential advisory committee on minority affairs.²⁴

Duderstadt saved his most visible policy innovation for faculty hiring. One of the UCAR/BAM III concessions read that a “budget incentive will be provided to attract and retain Black faculty and administrators.” Duderstadt created Target of Opportunity (TOP) funds, which made available a pool of money to recruit senior minority faculty members to the university. Departments, then, wouldn’t have to wait for a new faculty line to open up to recruit and hire minority faculty. Duderstadt told departments to search for senior minority faculty members at other universities, and he would provide the money to hire them at Michigan. Charles Moody wasn’t shy about the implications of this type of recruiting policy. “Raiding is natural.… Don’t be bashful,” Moody told a group of faculty members at a scheduled fireside chat.²⁵

Duderstadt was also mindful that administrators often announced ambitious programs and pools of money to solve problems, but they rarely produced results. Duderstadt wanted to show that TOP would produce the outcomes that students were looking for. So he made a pool of funds available immediately, and by the fall, three departments had used the money to make senior hires. During the 1987–88 fiscal year, Duderstadt announced that he would commit $1 million to TOP.²⁶

Duderstadt knew that UCAR, in particular, would return in the fall semester ready to press the administration to fulfill the organization’s demands that weren’t part of the Six-Point Plan. UCAR was the best organized group on campus in 1987. When the fall semester began, Barbara Ransby and her co-leaders began holding meetings, organizing new students, and developing their strategy. But Duderstadt felt he was in a good position, having introduced new inclusion policies during the summer.

As UCAR tried to influence the implementation of the 1987 concessions, one final piece of the Six-Point Plan compromised the organization’s broad support and helped Duderstadt gain control of inclusion. High on UCAR’s agenda was a racial harassment policy that held students accountable for racist speech. Shapiro had begun to craft a policy in his final months as president. The new interim president, Robben Fleming, finished and then introduced an early draft of the racial harassment policy at the regents meeting in January 1988. The proposal sparked outrage among some of UCAR’s strongest allies. Fleming’s code would penalize students who made “discriminatory remarks which seriously offend many individuals beyond the immediate victim” and gave the power of enforcement to the deans of each college. Critics of the policy claimed that the definition of harassment was so broad that it could be used to punish any student with whom the deans disagreed. The Michigan Daily editorial board published a front-page editorial on the subject, something that rarely happened in the history of the student newspaper. To the editorial board, the code represented a “cheap power grab” that threatened First Amendment rights and was designed to discipline student dissent, not end racism. The Michigan Student Assembly, a strong ally of UCAR on other issues, used similar arguments to oppose the policy. The regents sent Fleming back to work, asking for a policy that better protected First Amendment rights and took punishment power away from deans.²⁷

In April, the regents finally approved a revised racial harassment policy. The revised code didn’t temper critics. Opponents were so vocal and confrontational that the regents moved the meeting upstairs in the Administration Building, open only to the press. Security guards blocked the hallways and elevators as students tried to shove their way into the stairwells. The policy that the board approved created physical spaces and forums where the “broadest range of speech and expression will be tolerated,” short of physical violence and property destruction. These included the Diag, Regents Plaza, and the Michigan Daily. The policy also created protected spaces, where discriminatory harassment interfered with “an individual’s academic efforts,” such as “classroom buildings, libraries, research laboratories, [and] recreation and study centers.” In these spaces, a student could be punished for “any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origins, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap or Vietnam-era veteran status.” The new rules fell well short of UCAR’s vision of an effective racial harassment policy. Punishing people in power was as important to UCAR as disciplining students, but the policy neglected to include administrators and faculty members. The policy also failed to guarantee minority participation in the disciplining process. A year later, a court struck down the racial harassment code. An even weaker code replaced the rules that black activists were already unhappy with.²⁸

University housing officials also went to work on strengthening their own policies, as housing wasn’t a protected space in the board’s racial harassment policy. The housing office created a definition of harassment that was much broader than the policy approved by the regents, including anything that “creates a hostile or demeaning environment.” A student could violate the harassment code by excluding someone from a study group because of their racial or ethnic identity, displaying a confederate flag, or making racist comments. It included not only making discriminatory jokes but also laughing at them.²⁹

Duderstadt benefited from these speech codes. Of all the concessions included in the Six-Point Plan, it was clear that the racial harassment code was the most controversial. It worked against UCAR, peeling away its broad support and allowing Duderstadt to take back control of the racial inclusion agenda and avoid making additional concessions to protesters. The racial harassment code was also the only concession he played no part in crafting. This was especially important for Duderstadt, as he hoped to be UM’s next president. Fleming, the interim president, absorbed the criticism while Duderstadt interviewed for the job.

On June 10, 1988, the regents voted unanimously to appoint Duderstadt as the eleventh president of the University of Michigan. This represented a sad day for UCAR. On September 1, one of its main adversaries during the 1987 protest would officially take the reins of the University of Michigan. Duderstadt was the last person that UCAR believed could transform UM to the benefit of minority students.³⁰

Duderstadt, though, believed he was exactly the right person for the job. Ever since Shapiro had announced his resignation, Duderstadt had been working on a plan that represented his vision of inclusion. The plan, which started out as the Diversity Agenda and then the Michigan Plan, finally evolved into the Michigan Mandate. Duderstadt explained that he would pursue four objectives over the next five years. First, he wanted to “substantially increase” underrepresented minority tenure-track faculty members. Second, he wanted to increase the number of underrepresented students and improve retention. Third, he wanted to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in staff positions, especially leadership positions. Finally, he wanted to “foster a culturally diverse environment,” which could “significantly reduce the number of incidents of racism and prejudice.”³¹

The Michigan Mandate would prove to be the most ambitious centralized plan for racial inclusion in the university’s history. It also bore most of the marks of the co-optation techniques developed over the past thirty years.

Just as campus leaders had in the past following displays of activism, Duderstadt made clear that the university’s new inclusion programs would protect the university from activists’ disruptive vision of racial justice. Duderstadt made the diversity rationale the centerpiece of the Michigan Mandate to demonstrate how the Mandate would advance the university’s values and priorities. According to Duderstadt, the educational benefits of diversity made the heterogeneous student body that the Mandate would create vital for preserving the university’s excellence. Moreover, a diverse student body offered an opportunity to create a model multiracial community, which would serve the university’s interests in improving race relations and helping the United States to compete in a global economy. In UM’s hierarchy of priorities, preserving the university’s status and building a model multiracial community continued to trump expanding access and addressing black students’ social alienation.

Where Shapiro used the diversity rationale to justify declining black enrollment, Duderstadt used it to argue that a more aggressive affirmative action program would serve the university’s interests in preserving UM’s elite status. The Michigan Plan, an early draft of the Mandate, began with a “Fundamental Premise: Diversity is a necessary condition for the achievement of excellence.” “Our ability to achieve excellence in teaching, research, and service, in a future increasingly characterized by its pluralism,” the plan continued, “will be determined by the diversity of our campus community.” Duderstadt eventually put this point into the title of the Michigan Mandate, adding the subtitle “A Strategic Linking of Academic Excellence and Social Diversity.” The Mandate made the message clear: Duderstadt’s efforts to increase underrepresented minority students was in service of preserving UM’s elite status.³²

The Mandate also used diversity to show that new programs would help build a model multiracial community. As university presidents had been arguing for decades, he suggested that the university could be a site where students would learn to live and work in a multicultural world. Like Shapiro, he thought the model multiracial community could serve business interests, looking for students prepared to interact with clients across the globe. Duderstadt also thought the model multiracial community could help preserve a functional democracy in a nation that was becoming increasingly heterogeneous.³³

While Duderstadt showed more commitment to affirmative action than Shapiro, the diversity rationale continued to suppress black students’ greatest concerns. In Duderstadt’s public speeches and documents, affirmative action wasn’t about addressing inequality. Further, the model multiracial community wasn’t intended to address black students’ social alienation and reduce attrition rates. In this respect, the Mandate’s use of diversity fit well into the legacy of retrenchment.

But Duderstadt didn’t see the diversity rationale as a tool of retrenchment. The racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s was all the evidence Duderstadt needed to believe that social justice was no longer a driving principle within the UM community. With the exception of UCAR and a few other activist organizations on campus, declining black enrollment was met with apathy. Duderstadt believed that diversity language held the key to showing the UM community that ambitious racial inclusion programs were in the institution’s best interest. Even given the value Duderstadt placed on diversity in taming resistance, he believed he was acting in black students’ best interest in deemphasizing social justice and focusing on diversity to frame affirmative action.³⁴

Experts on institutional change reinforced Duderstadt’s ideas about the value of the diversity rationale. Early in his presidency, he surrounded himself with people who understood how to transform institutions. This informal group—which he called the “change group”—included officials like Charles Moody, Duderstadt’s vice provost for minority affairs. Moody brought almost two decades of experience working for more equitable institutions. After a career as both a teacher and an administrator in public schools, he earned his doctorate in education from Northwestern University. In 1970, UM hired him to take a new position as director of the Program for Educational Opportunity within UM’s School of Education, which UM created with federal funding to help public schools with desegregation. Others with expertise in institutional change joined Moody in the change group, including Mark Chesler, a sociologist who wrote extensively about how to transform organizations. Change group members warned Duderstadt about the internal resistance that would rise up against the Michigan Mandate. While they thought that diversity language wouldn’t solve resistance by itself, members of the group believed diversity’s ability to frame change in the self-interest of the university and its community was an important tool in gaining support.³⁵

Experts outside UM also confirmed Duderstadt’s views about the utility of diversity. In June 1987, Bailey Jackson and Edith Seashore arrived in Ann Arbor to lead a series of sensitivity training retreats for UM executive officers and selected faculty. The two consultants headed New Perspectives, Inc., a company that specialized in organizational change and diversity training. Duderstadt brought them to campus to help UM officials develop a long-term strategic plan for racial inclusion that would allow administrators to control the meaning and implementation of inclusion. These consultants sent UM officials a clear message about how to gain support for new racial inclusion initiatives: they needed to frame inclusion in the self-interest of everyone in the institution.³⁶

The strategy Jackson and Seashore presented to UM executive officers relied on assumptions about how universities functioned in the 1980s. They assumed, correctly, that corporations and universities increasingly looked similar. The advice they gave UM had developed out of institutional change techniques that diversity consultants had perfected in businesses, which brought assumptions about the limited power of social justice arguments in the 1980s. Jackson and Seashore suggested that institutional change came only when people within the institution believed it was in the best interest of the institution. They also came with an argument tailored to respond to the white backlash against affirmative action within businesses. According to Jackson, many whites would see inclusion initiatives and “fear they are losing their rights.” Whites at UM needed to believe racial inclusion would benefit them personally.³⁷

Despite Duderstadt’s belief that the diversity rationale held the key to gaining broad support for the Mandate, he reluctantly added tepid statements about social justice to the Mandate. He understood that there were constituencies on campus that wouldn’t respond favorably to the diversity rationale. When he laid out his initial plans for institutional transformation, he listed UCAR and the Black Student Union as constituencies that he needed to satisfy. To do this, he mixed diversity and social justice language. Early on, though, Duderstadt’s social justice message looked like an afterthought. An early draft included a weak social justice rationale, suggesting that “as a public institution, the University has a responsibility to increase the participation of underrepresented racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.” Statements like this weren’t enough to avoid criticism from black students and faculty. Shortly after Duderstadt released the Michigan Plan, UM’s Association of Black Professionals and Administrators sent Duderstadt a biting critique. “Diversity and pluralism,” the group wrote, “are terms that obscure the ethical and moral issues that underlie the causes of social inequality.” The group concluded that the plan needed to stress “justice” and “equality.”³⁸

This critique clearly had an impact. Duderstadt slowly included a stronger emphasis on social justice until the social justice rationale filled two pages of the Michigan Mandate. Those pages explained that “first and foremost, the University of Michigan’s commitment to affirmative action and equal opportunity is based on our fundamental social, institutional, and scholarly commitment to freedom, democracy, and social justice.” “Equity and social justice,” the Mandate continued, “are fundamental values of this institution and integral to its scholarly mission. They are the basic reasons for making a commitment to promoting diversity.”³⁹

Nevertheless, Duderstadt showed that he could maintain ambiguity while adding stronger social justice language—an important tactic of co-optation. The initial Michigan Mandate sought to, “in each of the next five years, achieve increases in the number of entering underrepresented minority enrollment.” The Mandate did reference plans for future concrete minority enrollment targets but concluded that these targets would eventually be set within each school and college. This brought ambiguity to the concessions Shapiro made to end the UCAR/BAM III protest. Although not part of the Six-Point Plan, Shapiro had verbally agreed that the university would aspire to increase black enrollment so that it matched African Americans’ representation in the state, which was about 12 percent in the late 1980s. Now Duderstadt replaced that agreement with a statement about vague “increases” in minority enrollment. Duderstadt also used “minority” strategically. Shapiro used the term in the 1980s to decenter black students when discussing enrollment. It represented a tool to avoid talking about the declining number of black students while celebrating the growing representation of other minority groups, such as Asian Americans. Duderstadt used the term “underrepresented minority,” which excluded Asian Americans, but he was still signaling to the university community that Hispanic, Native American, and black students were a coherent group. Black students had been fighting against this perspective for a decade. Measuring progress based on the number of underrepresented students meant that black student enrollment could decline as long as Hispanic and Native American enrollment rose.⁴⁰

Diversity and social justice, then, continued to work in harmony to administrators’ benefit. Stronger social justice statements never took the ambiguity out of diversity. In all the discussion about the importance of a diverse student body, there was no effort to define what a diverse student body looked like. How many black students were necessary to improve “teaching, research, and service”? How many Hispanic students? How many Native American students? There was also no discussion of social class or place. Did diversity require a mix of low-income and middle-class students? Did it require minority students from cities and suburbs? Historically, discussions of numerical representation and socioeconomic justice accompanied social justice language. But the ambiguous social justice statements allowed diversity to avoid these subjects.⁴¹

“I’m an individual that likes achievement,” Duderstadt told the regents just before they voted to hire him as president. “I’m results oriented.” Duderstadt often called himself a stereotypical engineer who focused on getting things done. He became the first president in UM’s history to hold an admissions director accountable for poor performance on affirmative action. But as much as Duderstadt valued accountability, he still took advantage of the ambiguity of diversity. Ambiguity kept discussions of social class and geography out of admissions discussions. It also meant that activists couldn’t hold Duderstadt accountable for failing to meet enrollment commitments. Duderstadt, then, strategically mixed accountability and ambiguity, allowing him to push officials to implement the Mandate’s policies while making it easier to tell a story of racial progress to the public.⁴²

Duderstadt’s change group advised him that framing the Mandate in diversity language was important but not enough to get university officials to carry out his initiatives. People at the top of the organization also needed to provide incentives and consequences for the people who would be carrying out the policy initiatives. This was what had been missing from all the past administrations. In order to get decision makers throughout UM to place the Mandate’s goals high on their list of priorities, Duderstadt created consequences for people who wouldn’t implement his vision. In the months before he became president, he sent a message to UM officials by removing people who he believed were obstacles to his ambitious plans. Cliff Sjogren stood at the top of his list. The great decline in black enrollment unfolded during Sjogren’s reign as undergraduate admissions director, and he put up a fight when senior administrators pushed him to change his policies. The difference between Duderstadt and his predecessors was that they were willing to accommodate Sjogren’s resistance. Duderstadt pushed him out, giving Sjogren the option to retire or be fired. Sjogren chose to retire.⁴³

Duderstadt replaced Cliff Sjogren with Richard Shaw. Shaw had been the associate director of admissions at the University of California–Berkeley since 1983. Duderstadt believed the California university had done a better job admitting underrepresented students than UM had, and he hoped that Shaw would bring some of Berkeley’s commitment to affirmative action to Michigan.⁴⁴ Shaw immediately hired Ted Spencer—a black admissions official who would eventually take over UM’s admissions office when Shaw left for Yale in 1992—to help him with his affirmative action efforts. Spencer came to UM from the Air Force Academy, where he oversaw minority recruitment and retention for more than a decade. During the period of UM’s struggle with affirmative action admissions, Spencer helped raise minority representation at the Air Force Academy—from 3.8 percent in 1976 to 17 percent in 1988.⁴⁵

While Duderstadt’s new mission to hold people accountable removed Sjogren and brought Shaw and Spencer to campus, the ambiguity of the Mandate helped co-opt UCAR’s vision. Recall that UCAR wanted the university to reaffirm its commitment to low-income, underrepresented students through new generous need-based financial aid policies. Duderstadt had no intention of returning to the affirmative action and financial aid practices of the 1960s and early 1970s. He didn’t bring Shaw and Spencer to UM to raise the number of low-income black students from Detroit. The Mandate called for an increase in black students; it gave no attention to the students’ social class or neighborhood. The singular focus on race, then, offered important ambiguity concerning the socioeconomic background and neighborhoods of students who would benefit from a more aggressive affirmative action program.

Not surprisingly, then, Shaw and Spencer kept most of the policies introduced in the late 1970s that put black students from urban areas at a great disadvantage. The two officials kept Sjogren’s grid system, which evaluated white and Asian students with one grid and underrepresented minority students with another. Using only applicants’ grade point averages and standardized test scores, admissions officers found the appropriate box on the grid that gave them an initial recommendation to admit, reject, or delay an application. In 1986, Sjogren decided to create a more systematic formula to calculate students’ credentials. He introduced the “SCUGA Factor.” Basically, SCUGA created different factors that readjusted an applicant’s high school GPA. For years Sjogren had considered a student’s high school curriculum and other factors to evaluate applicants’ high school performance. The new system simply created a rigid formula that counselors could use to take these factors into account and produce a high school GPA that had more meaning for admissions evaluations. The “S” in SCUGA stood for the “school factor.” An admissions counselor could raise a student’s high school GPA from 0.1 to 0.3 point, depending on whether a student went to a “very good,” an “unusually good,” or a “superior school.” “C” stood for the “curriculum factor,” in which counselors could raise a student’s GPA 0.1 or 0.2 point depending on the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses the student took. “U” stood for “unusually distinguishing characteristic factor,” which could lead a counselor to add 0.1 point to a GPA if a student published a written work or showed “unusual contribution to a social cause.” Initially, underrepresented minority students were not awarded the benefits of the unusual factor automatically. “G” referred to the “geographic factor,” which gave 0.1 point to students from underrepresented areas, such as northern Michigan, rural central and western Michigan, and some states in the South and West. Finally, “A” referred to the “alumni factor,” which added 0.1 point to the GPA of out-of-state students who had a grandparent, child, sibling, or spouse who was a UM alumnus.⁴⁶

A later study showed that all these factors, expect for the “U” category once underrepresented students were included, placed black, Hispanic, and Native American students at a disadvantage. Underrepresented applicants were disproportionately in schools that didn’t qualify for points in the “S” factor and didn’t offer enough advanced placement courses for students to win points in the “C” factor. For Michigan residents, the “G” factor gave points to students in overwhelmingly white areas. Finally, few underrepresented students qualified for the “A” factor, because UM’s alumni were overwhelmingly white. To compound these problems, standardized test scores of students usually correlated strongly with the type of curriculum offered in a school. So students who went to schools with a demanding, college-preparatory curriculum generally scored much higher on the SAT. In sum, by looking at both the SAT and the “S” and “C” factors, UM compounded the disadvantage that black students, especially those living in urban areas, faced in the admissions system.⁴⁷

Shaw and Spencer didn’t make many changes to Sjogren’s admissions policy. Both in-state and out-of-state underrepresented students continued to be evaluated using the same admissions grid. Much like Sjogren’s grid, Shaw’s system allowed underrepresented students who didn’t fall into the recommended admission or rejection grids additional time to prove their academic merits. Admissions officers called this a delayed decision. Essentially, admissions counselors waited for new standardized test scores or the student’s fall high school grades to make a final decision. One of the biggest changes that Shaw and Spencer initiated regarded these students who fell into the delayed category. The grids offered admissions counselors a tremendous amount of discretion in evaluating these students. Shaw and Spencer created more tools that could help students who fell into the delayed category prove their academic merit. First, they added an essay option. Second, they gave underrepresented students the opportunity to interview with an admissions counselor. Shaw and Spencer also modified SCUGA’s “unusual” category, raising all underrepresented students’ grade point averages by 0.1 point. Surprisingly, though, at least one important aspect of Sjogren’s grid was actually more generous to underrepresented students, allowing students to score lower on the SAT. Under Shaw’s system, the lowest SAT score that an underrepresented student could submit and still receive an admissions letter was 850. Under Sjogren, it was 750.⁴⁸

The most significant changes Shaw and Spencer introduced had nothing to do with admissions criteria, though. None of the minor modifications they made to the admissions grid reversed the policy changes that Sjogren implemented in the mid-1970s, which placed great weight on SAT scores and a college preparatory curriculum. The biggest difference between Sjogren and the new admissions leadership was the effort Shaw and Spencer put into expanding the pool of black applicants. They went to work transforming minority recruiting practices. In the past, the admissions office designated particular counselors to oversee minority recruiting. That meant that a small number of counselors had the burden of traveling the entire state—and the country once the admissions office emphasized out-of-state minority recruiting. All the other counselors were assigned to particular geographical areas without any minority recruiting responsibilities. Under Shaw and Spencer, every admissions counselor took on the responsibility of recruiting minority students. Importantly, they held admissions counselors accountable for the outcomes of their recruiting practices. Admissions leaders kept data on the minority enrollment of every school in each counselor’s geographic area and used that data to evaluate the minority applicant pool each counselor created. A counselor’s performance in persuading minority students to apply was incorporated into merit evaluations and could influence pay raises and promotions.⁴⁹

The Mandate also offered the resources necessary to carry out an ambitious recruiting campaign. The admissions office needed scholarship money and the financial resources to travel and recruit students. Duderstadt ensured that those resources were available to meet the Mandate’s goals. Unlike Sjogren, who often complained that he lacked the resources to increase underrepresented minority enrollment, Spencer and Shaw never felt that money was an obstacle to their affirmative action efforts.⁵⁰

The admissions office also benefited from the visibility of the Michigan Mandate. In recruiting efforts, admissions officials emphasized the university’s efforts to improve the racial climate for underrepresented students. Shaw remembers that the university’s minority faculty hiring initiative was especially important in making the university attractive to minority students. The close link between affirmative action hiring and admissions continued in the 1990s.⁵¹

Finally, Shaw and Spencer put new resources into repairing the university’s relationship with Detroit, which had been damaged during Sjogren’s tenure as admissions director. The university used the Wade H. McCree Jr. Incentive Scholarship Program as a tool to provide access for Detroit students. The scholarship program, which came from the President’s Council of State Universities, offered four-year scholarships to underrepresented minority students in the state who maintained a 3.0 grade point average in college preparatory courses. UM committed money from its general fund to support the program. The university also provided special recruiting visits to Ann Arbor for McCree scholarship winners, where prospective students attended UM classes and toured the campus.⁵²

Still, these new practices didn’t significantly improve access for Detroit’s low-income black students. A researcher later looked at all of UM’s admissions applications from 1995 to 1998. Despite efforts to improve UM’s relationship with Detroit, few students who attended predominantly black Detroit schools with high poverty rates applied to UM. At Northwestern High School, where over 99 percent of students were black and 50 percent qualified for free lunches, only 27 of 656 graduates applied to UM. At Cooley High School, where over 99 percent of students were black and 55 percent qualified for free lunches, only 17 of 866 graduates applied to UM. At Central High School, where over 99 percent of students were black and over 60 percent qualified for free lunches, only 2 of 407 graduates applied. At Kettering High School, where 98 percent of students were black and 56 percent qualified for free lunches, only 3 of 685 students applied. Not surprisingly, most of the Detroit public school applicants came from two high schools: Cass Tech and Renaissance. These two schools hosted far fewer students eligible for free lunch. Ninety-two percent of Renaissance students were black, but only 18 percent were eligible for free lunch. Black students represented 89 percent of Cass’s student body, and only 30 percent qualified for free lunch. One hundred thirty-seven Renaissance students sent applications to UM, and 121 were admitted. Three hundred sixty-four Cass students sent applications to UM, and 320 received acceptance letters. As much as UM hoped to repair its relationship with Detroit, Shaw and Spencer continued to recruit and admit students from the same two special-admit high schools in the city.⁵³

The ambiguity of the Mandate still allowed administrators to celebrate the outcomes of Shaw and Spencer’s efforts. Their practices led to unprecedented increases in black enrollment. By 1995, for the first time in UM’s history, over 10 percent of UM’s first-year class was black.⁵⁴ The next year, black students constituted over 9 percent of the entire undergraduate student body for the first time. With no attention to who these black students were, the Mandate appeared to reverse the racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. All the celebratory articles, however, missed how the Mandate preserved key pieces of retrenchment. Working-class black students living in Michigan’s cities still had little chance of admission and were still seen as threats to the quality of the institution.⁵⁵

Duderstadt’s vision of a model multiracial community also furthered the co-optation goals of the 1960s and 1970s. Black student activists wanted programs that would address their social alienation on campus. But the Mandate never saw black students’ social alienation as the most pressing priority in improving the racial climate. Instead, the model multiracial community wanted to address individual prejudice through interracial contact.

The Mandate’s model depended on long-held administrative views about challenging individual prejudices. Since the 1970s, administrators accepted the idea that cultural pluralism was compatible with racial and ethnic harmony. But UM administrators concluded that pluralism could only succeed under certain conditions. Most important, interracial contact was central to improving race relations. Most of these assumptions challenged the solutions to racism that black student activists proposed to improve the racial climate. Black activists didn’t oppose the idea that cultural expression could improve social relations, but that wasn’t their most important goal. For activists, addressing their social alienation on campus should take precedence over improving race relations. That’s why black students sometimes called for intraracial spaces and social gatherings despite the fact that administrators believed interracial contact held the key to improving race relations. If administrators wanted to improve race relations, black activists suggested, officials should take on the burden of training and disciplining white students to overcome their prejudice.⁵⁶

These same divisions played out in the Michigan Mandate. Duderstadt made clear that improving racial harmony was more important than addressing black students’ social alienation on campus. Like administrators before him, he saw interracial contact as the key component to making pluralism work. Duderstadt critiqued black students for what he called “self-segregation,” putting some of the blame for racial tensions on minority students. The only difference between Duderstadt and past administrators was the amount of money he was willing to devote to putting these ideas in place.⁵⁷

Despite Duderstadt’s commitment to solving prejudice through interracial contact, black student activists had some success in influencing efforts to improve the racial climate. These activists agreed that addressing white students’ prejudice was important, but they didn’t want to feel as though they had the primary burden to teach white students about racism. Activists wanted the university to take on that burden through a mandatory antiracism course. Because faculty oversaw the curriculum, students could circumvent Duderstadt. LSA faculty finally approved a mandatory course in 1990. To fulfill the requirement, a course needed to cover the “meaning of race, ethnicity, and racism”; “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality as it occurs in the United States or elsewhere”; and “comparisons of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, social class, or gender.”⁵⁸

Duderstadt, though, implemented his vision of a model multicultural community by funding new programs that sought to show the harm of intraracial spaces. Claude Steele, a UM psychologist, ran one of these initiatives. Steele and his brother Shelby became famous in the 1990s for their starkly different views about racial justice. Shelby found his public voice as a conservative critiquing “political correctness,” white guilt, and affirmative action, while Claude offered important evidence that supported the need for affirmative action. Claude Steele’s research focused on the negative impact of stigma on black students, and he was trying to develop environments that could counter that stigma on campuses. He worked with the presumption, as he wrote in his proposal to Duderstadt, that in an interracial educational setting, black students faced a “vulnerability to the judgment of racial inferiority.” This negative stigma, he hypothesized, led black students to “dis-identify with school as a protection against this vulnerability.” Essentially, stigma caused black students to underperform in the classroom.⁵⁹

Claude Steele’s research fit well with Duderstadt’s vision of a model multicultural community because it critiqued minority-specific support programs and ethnocentrism as contributors to the stigma attached to black students. Minority-specific programs offered the message that minority students were likely to struggle at UM, Steele suggested, while whites were not. He also saw ethnocentrism as a contributor to stigma. Importantly, though, this wasn’t just an issue for whites. In Steele’s proposal, black students bore some of the blame for isolating themselves and not breaking down white students’ assumptions about African Americans’ capabilities through social interaction. The proposal, then, critiqued black students’ efforts to create intraracial social spaces—spaces black students had formed, in part, as retention initiatives. Steele believed that these types of intraracial spaces actually fueled stigma and, in turn, fed black attrition rates.⁶⁰

As a solution, Steele proposed a living-learning community situated in a UM dorm to test his hypothesis. He wanted about 350 students—300 white and 50 black—to live and take some of their classes together. He chose this racial breakdown because it reflected the reality of a predominantly white campus while also providing a large enough black sample to offer statistically significant results. All the students would come from the same academic background—students who showed potential but would likely need academic support services to graduate. White students, then, were carefully selected so that they didn’t show stronger academic preparation than black students in the program, which Steele believed would mediate against stigma. Once in the program, the students would participate in intergroup relations courses and workshops that were supposed to create a “sophisticated social environment in which students are exposed to the contributions of diverse groups, the cost of ethnocentrism, and the advantages of open relations between groups.” Steele planned that students would stay in the program through their first two years at the university.⁶¹

Steele received Duderstadt’s financial support, and the program began in fall 1991 as the 21st Century Project. Two hundred sixty-seven LSA first-year students filled a wing of Mary Markley Hall. It became one of Duderstadt’s prized programs, which he used to show what a model multicultural community could look like.⁶²

Duderstadt funded another program with some of the same assumptions about intraracial spaces. The Program on Intergroup Relations, Conflict, and Community (IGRCC) began in 1988 with Duderstadt’s financial support. The program brought together social scientists and student affairs personnel to address prejudice on campus. IGRCC was voluntary, offering two credits to first-year students living in the university’s residence halls who wanted to participate.⁶³

IGRCC’s theoretical principles seemed tailored for the Michigan Mandate, as the program stressed the value of interracial contact. In a small room in Alice Lloyd Hall’s basement, small groups of twelve to sixteen students of different racial groups came together in weekly intergroup dialogues mediated by a facilitator. The dialogues were designed to expose conflicts between groups that led to prejudice and allow students to work through those conflicts.⁶⁴

This, too, became one of Duderstadt’s favorite examples of UM’s efforts to build a model multiracial community. Still, the IGRCC’s theoretical principles called into question many of the Michigan Mandate’s programs. The programs’ creators recognized that not all interracial contact was productive. One of the premises of the program was that “contact between members of different social identity groups … may be helpful in reducing prejudice …, but contact may also increase prejudice and discrimination.” To be productive, interracial contact needed to be carefully controlled and managed under a particular set of environmental conditions. This perspective never made it into Duderstadt’s centralized plans to improve race relations. The Mandate, in contrast, assumed that any interracial contact was productive for improving race relations.⁶⁵

Studies of the impact of the Mandate revealed the poor outcomes for black students. Social scientists developed a longitudinal study that measured the evolution of undergraduates’ racial attitudes over the course of four years. In 1990, UM first-year students would fill out the survey when they arrived on campus and then fill out the same survey four years later.⁶⁶ The Michigan Student Study, as it came to be known, showed that UM’s programs had a transformative impact on white students. For black students, though, social alienation continued to be a serious problem. Fifty-five percent of black students in the survey reported that it was difficult to feel “comfortable in the campus community—feeling as though I belong here.” In contrast, only 34 percent of Latinos, 22 percent of Asian Americans, and 21 percent of whites responded the same way.⁶⁷

These numbers confirmed black students’ critiques. The Mandate wasn’t designed to address black students’ social alienation.

There was much for UM officials to praise about the Mandate’s inclusion efforts. Black enrollment exploded. By 1995, for the first time in UM’s history, over 10 percent of UM’s first-year undergraduate students were black. The next year, black students constituted over 9 percent of the entire undergraduate student body for the first time. The Mandate, despite its flaws, reversed some of the racial retrenchment that marked Harold Shapiro’s presidency.⁶⁸

Nevertheless, the Michigan Mandate clearly fit into the legacy of co-optation. The Mandate sustained affirmative action policies that allowed few working-class black students from Michigan’s cities into the university. Moreover, the Mandate continued to privilege addressing white students’ prejudice over black students’ social alienation. Even as black enrollment numbers rose, some of the policies of retrenchment persisted.