By 1979, the devastating impact of Goodman’s and Sjogren’s policies were clear. Black enrollment was plummeting, and the preferred affirmative action recruiting grounds were shifting away from the state’s cities. The remaining vestiges of the black campus movement tried to push back. Black activists expressed their frustration and called on administrators to recommit to addressing the racial inequities rooted in urban areas. UM leaders weren’t willing to return to the affirmative action practices of the past, and they were ready to fight to preserve the new policies.

In this context, diversity—the idea that a racially heterogeneous student body improved education and prepared students for a multiracial democracy and global economy—became a tool to defend and sustain George Goodman’s and Cliff Sjogren’s policies. Diversity helped sever the purpose of affirmative action from addressing the inequality rooted in cities, offered ambiguous goals that helped officials avoid accountability, and advanced administrators’ interests in introducing a corporate model for the university. The diversity ideal, in other words, didn’t spark racial retrenchment. Instead, diversity became a tool to sustain the university’s policies of retrenchment.

Administrators still had to work to retain control over the meaning of diversity and ensure it supported Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies. When diversity took hold among administrators, black students and their allies tried to employ diversity language to undermine the policies of retrenchment. Administrators ensured that never happened.

A twenty-one-year-old black psychology student from Detroit was the first to call attention to the consequences of Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policy changes. Pam Gordon could see the demographic shifts unfolding. In 1979, Gordon and some of her peers began raising their voices. The new test was whether faculty and UM leaders were willing to stay committed to these policy changes despite their disastrous consequences for black students’ access.

Gordon served as the student government’s vice president for minority affairs. When she decided to challenge Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies, she stood in front of the university’s budget committee. Her speech represented a strong rebuke of the university’s desertion of the state’s cities and its commitment to racial justice. In her eyes, by abandoning the most vulnerable students in Michigan’s cities, UM was “perpetuating the poverty and ignorance which stifles our urban communities and causes them to deteriorate.” She laid out a vision that harked back to BAM’s idea of justice. Gordon also argued that the University of Michigan had a responsibility to admit students who would return to serve the state’s urban black communities. This was central to BAM’s goal of empowering black communities in Michigan. Gordon felt that the university failed to support this goal when admissions officers focused on black students living outside cities. In Gordon’s eyes, these weren’t the students who would use their training at UM to help the most vulnerable black communities. “One cannot realistically expect that minority students who were not raised in poor communities,” Gorman suggested, “who have not dealt with the complexities and insufficiencies that are part of day-to-day existence in them, will be willing to devote their skills to uplifting them.” In perhaps her most powerful statement, she told the budget committee that “any so-called affirmative action program which does not include human beings from these kinds of environments, where a brilliant mind has a greater chance of ending up in a penal or mental institution, than it does of reaching an institution of higher learning, is a superficial and fundamentally useless affirmative action program.”¹

Gordon also attacked Goodman’s and Sjogren’s interpretation of attrition. She understood that university officials were using attrition rates to justify admissions policies that excluded most black students in Detroit. Goodman and Sjogren offered an interpretation of attrition that focused on academic deficiency, while ignoring black students’ social alienation and the poor campus services available. Gordon had more faith in the academic potential of black students educated in discriminatory environments. A black student with a C average who attended “a low-rated public school like Central High in Detroit” didn’t leave the university before graduating because of academic deficiency, as Goodman and Sjogren claimed. Students like these experienced higher attrition rates, Gordon argued, because the university wasn’t committed to changing the social environment on campus and providing the proper resources for these students to succeed. Rather than addressing these issues, she implied that university officials wanted to admit students whose success didn’t hinge on institutional reform and hundreds of thousands of dollars in academic resources.²

The Black Student Union (BSU) shared Gordon’s concerns. In April 1979, soon after Gordon gave her speech in front of the budget committee, the BSU presented a proposal to the regents to review the university’s affirmative action policies. Chief among the BSU’s suggestions was that affirmative action practices should “attempt to attract a minority student body more representative of minority communities, especially that of inner cities.” The BSU asked how university officials expected to maintain the number of black students on campus “when it overlooks the majority of predominantly Black Detroit area high schools and concentrates on the more elite schools such as Cass Tech and predominantly white schools with only a few Black students.” Like Gordon, they were concerned that UM’s affirmative action policies ignored students from low-income backgrounds and were creating a black student community dominated by the middle class.³

The BSU also challenged Sjogren’s and Goodman’s efforts to blame black student attrition on academic deficiency. Like Gordon, the BSU offered an interpretation of attrition that focused on the negative impact of the university’s racial climate. If the university was serious about addressing these problems, the BSU contended, it might have reached BAM’s 10 percent goal.⁴

The Black Student Union’s presentation highlighted the changing power dynamics on campus in the late 1970s. The BSU wasn’t in a position to lead another BAM strike to challenge the university’s policies. Instead, BSU activists asked for a task force to investigate their critiques and hopefully make policy recommendations that would address their concerns. Given their weak position on campus, the BSU hoped to find allies within the university who could help their cause. The regents agreed to create a task force to address the BSU’s concerns. Black activists would have to wait almost two years for the task force’s report.⁵

George Goodman and Cliff Sjogren went on a public relations campaign to defend their policies in light of declining black enrollment. Goodman outlined what was at stake in challenging the BSU’s critiques. He started a line of argument that university officials had managed to keep just below the surface when they first presented plans to redistribute resources and focus on “good” black students. Goodman and Sjogren had also managed to avoid direct references to Detroit in the mid-1970s, when presenting their policy ideas. Gordon and the BSU’s critiques, though, pushed Detroit into the center of the conversation.

Goodman suggested that it would be unfair to admit students from most Detroit schools. He argued, “The quality of the Detroit schools has declined during the past ten years, and we can only still legitimately predict a high probability of success from students coming from Cass Tech.” He also added a new wrinkle to arguments about the small pool of “qualified” black students. As Goodman explained, bringing too many low-income black students created stereotypes of African Americans, marking all black students as poor and academically deficient. By recruiting “high ability,” often middle-class black students, the university could help change those stereotypes.⁶

This type of argument about stereotypes could have been taken directly out of the anti–affirmative action strategy book. It was the type of argument that allowed affirmative action opponents to appear as if they opposed affirmative action in black students’ interests, not because they wanted to preserve white privilege. It was one of Carl Cohen’s favorite arguments. In his writings, he argued that affirmative action stigmatized black students, injuring those who could gain admission without affirmative action.⁷

When Goodman gave a public talk about the state of black enrollment, he continued his attack on Detroit. He told the crowd that if he had to give advice to Detroit parents who wanted their children to go to the University of Michigan, he would tell them to get their kids ready by eighth grade to attend Cass Tech or Renaissance, which just recently joined Cass as the city’s second special-admit high school. UM still admitted at least four students each from other Detroit high schools, including Immaculata, Northwestern, Mumford, Central, Henry Ford, and Highland Park. Nevertheless, Goodman was confident that even these small numbers would continue to decline. Outside of Cass Tech and Renaissance, Goodman argued that there was “a whole lot of slippage” in academic standards. For Detroit students who applied to UM from other high schools, the “statistics clearly would not be in the student’s favor,” Goodman explained.⁸

Goodman repeated these same accusations to Steve Raphael, a journalist for Detroit News who was investigating the university’s declining commitment to recruiting black students from Detroit. Raphael challenged the OP director to explain the declining opportunities for black students at UM. “We owe it to the faculty not to admit dumb kids,” Goodman explained. “Dumb kids” was a harsh description that wouldn’t have been acceptable at UM just a few years before. A comment like that might have brought protests or a reprisal from an executive official. But the fact that Goodman could say this without consequences spoke to the new environment of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which officials didn’t fear black protest, and much of the UM community believed that the university’s status as an elite institution was at stake.⁹

Sjogren echoed these statements when he defended the policies in front of the Task Force on Minority Concerns—the task force appointed to review the BSU’s criticism of declining black enrollment.¹⁰ Sjogren claimed that the “deterioration of education in our major pool—the Detroit public schools” was largely responsible for declining black enrollment. Perhaps seeing the committee as a potential threat, Sjogren finally presented some evidence to back up his claims about the pool of “qualified” black students. He told the committee that Detroit offered no more than four hundred to five hundred minority students prepared to graduate from the University of Michigan. Of that number, he was able to enroll about ninety.¹¹

The data Sjogren drew on was problematic. To figure out the pool of potential black students in Detroit, UM’s admissions office used data gathered from a survey sent to black graduates from Detroit public high schools and Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores gathered from the College Board. The PSAT is essentially a preparatory SAT exam that students can take earlier in their high school career—a test that isn’t free and requires the necessary financial resources. From the survey data, Sjogren found that about 38 percent of the students were taking what he considered an “academic curriculum,” and 60 percent had a grade point average between 2.64 and 4.0. From the College Board, Sjogren found that 37 percent of black students in Michigan took the PSAT and scored at least 80 (equivalent of 800 on the SAT). He made the assumption that 37 percent of black Detroit students, then, would receive at least 80 on the PSAT. This meant that only 438 black high school graduates in Detroit were eligible for admission at UM. Sjogren offered no evidence that there was a strong correlation between black students’ PSAT and eventual SAT scores or that the black students who took the PSAT were representative of those who took the SAT.¹²

Sjogren also told the task force that his office raised admissions criteria for black students because of retention problems. Here he continued to claim that attrition was due solely to academic underpreparation. These arguments showed how easily he and Goodman eliminated the institutional knowledge on black student attrition, which showed that nonacademic factors, such as social alienation, caused attrition. He still offered no evidence to support the claim that academic failure represented the leading cause of attrition.¹³

The task force would spend the rest of 1980 evaluating affirmative action policies. Meanwhile, Sjogren and Goodman gained an important ally.

On January 1, 1980, Harold Shapiro became the University of Michigan’s next president. The nationally renowned economist with executive-level experience seemed like a logical choice to the regents. An economic downturn, coupled with declining state appropriations, put many of the university’s priorities in question. Shapiro was confident that he could maintain the university’s reputation through tough economic times. In choosing Shapiro, though, the regents empowered someone who had overseen the declining number of black students at the University of Michigan. Shapiro had served as vice president for academic affairs—the executive position that oversaw the admissions office—from 1977 to 1980.¹⁴

In his time as vice president for academic affairs, he showed that he had a high tolerance for racial disparities. He refused to hold the admissions office accountable, even when one of his assistants questioned the office’s commitment to affirmative action and pushed Sjogren to create new policies. It’s no surprise, then, that Shapiro sided with Goodman and Sjogren over the BSU when Shapiro became president. Shapiro outlined his position on affirmative action in front of an audience gathered to talk about the legacy of the BAM strike of 1970. It had been ten years since black student activists had shut down the university. Prominent BAM activists, faculty participants, and former administrators involved in the strike had gathered in Ann Arbor at the request of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies to remember the strike and to chart a new way forward to improve black students’ opportunities at UM. If any of these participants thought Shapiro’s administration represented a moment of opportunity, his speech showed otherwise.¹⁵

Shapiro offered a new intellectual framework for racially attentive admissions that would help support Goodman’s and Sjogren’s policies. Shapiro told the audience, “I think it would be desirable if no one here had any concept of affirmative action or any commitment to affirmative action.” Here he didn’t mean that it would be desirable if the university no longer used racially attentive admissions practices. Instead, he wanted to change how the university community understood the purpose and value of those policies. Shapiro explained that affirmative action policies were intended to “create an environment here on campus which reflects a good deal more cultural diversity and historical experience than has been the case in the first 150 years or so of the university’s existence.” This environment, Shapiro explained, would enrich the “intellectual experience of all students” at UM.¹⁶

Shapiro’s speech marked an important turning point for the University of Michigan. While the diversity ideal—the idea that a racially and ethnically heterogeneous student body produced educational benefits—had been used to support programs to improve race relations, it had been used sparingly to justify racially attentive admissions policies at the university. But beginning in the 1980s, the language of diversity began to consume discussions about affirmative action admissions.¹⁷

The increasing popularity of diversity so close to the Bakke decision makes it tempting to attribute the diversity rationale’s rise at UM to Powell’s famous written opinion in the case. Yet nothing suggests that Shapiro and other UM officials adopted the diversity rationale in response to Bakke. Nobody in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggested that UM needed to emphasize the educational benefits of diversity in order to comply with the ruling. As noted in chapter 6, administrators’ attention was focused on the mechanisms of using race to select students. Quotas were clearly unconstitutional. Since UM didn’t use quotas, the ruling didn’t produce much concern among UM officials.¹⁸

Instead, diversity became popular at UM because it helped support Goodman’s and Sjogren’s policies. Diversity helped sever the purpose of racially attentive admissions from addressing the inequality rooted in cities. Shapiro made it clear in his speech that the university no longer saw Detroit as the central recruiting ground for affirmative action. Instead, the purpose of diversity was to get black students who could serve the interests of the university. In this formulation, black students didn’t need to come from a particular place or social class. They simply needed high enough standardized test scores to preserve the quality of the university and be present on campus to improve white students’ education.¹⁹

Diversity also helped Shapiro modify how the university would measure racial inclusion. Shapiro shared Goodman’s and Sjogren’s pessimism about the pool of “qualified” black students. He told the audience gathered on the tenth anniversary of the BAM strike, “I don’t know … what realism there was in the ten percent goal.” The statement wasn’t a slip of the tongue. He later reiterated this claim in the same speech: “I don’t think if anyone thought about it that the 10 percent enrollment objective was realistic. I don’t know what is realistic in the next few years.” Shapiro saw the 10 percent black enrollment goal as a problem. It had hung over the administration like a black cloud since 1970. Every year, black enrollment numbers came out and officials had to explain why they had failed, yet again, to meet the BAM enrollment concession. No matter what new policies administrators implemented, no matter how much money they devoted to recruitment, the message was still the same: they had failed.²⁰

Shapiro thought that this assessment was unfair. He didn’t think that UM’s commitment to racial inclusion should be measured by a standard that he considered unrealistic. Rather than measuring the university’s commitment to inclusion against the 10 percent goal, Shapiro told the audience, “I think we’ve simply fallen short of what is a desirable goal for a great university.” It’s no coincidence that Shapiro never attached numbers to this statement. How many black students were necessary for a great university? Diversity became valuable because it wasn’t supposed to answer that question. It was supposed to be ambiguous. It was supposed to relieve the university of the inconvenient accountability of the BAM concessions.²¹

Diversity was also valuable because of its racial and ethnic ambiguity. The new language represented an effort to decenter black students in UM’s vision of racial inclusion. Shapiro rarely used the word “black” in his speech, preferring “minority” instead. At one point, he suggested that the BAM concessions created a 10 percent minority, rather than black, enrollment goal. This wasn’t simply the result of years of activism on behalf of Asian American, Hispanic, and Native American students to be recognized as legitimate beneficiaries of affirmative action. Instead, it represented an opportunity for UM officials to take credit for the growing numbers of Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American students on campus.²²

UM officials were desperate to tell a story of racial progress on campus in the early 1980s, and it was almost impossible to do that if black students were at the center of the story. A black story was a story about the university’s retrenchment, but a story about minority students looked different. Every year, the total number of nonblack minority students was on the rise. A combination of conscious and accidental practices led to rising numbers of Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American students in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although Asian Americans weren’t part of UM’s affirmative action admissions program, their rising numbers were partly due to conscious policy efforts. Privately, Sjogren wrote about his desire to create new resources for out-of-state recruitment and merit aid to enroll, in his words, “middle and upper income … Asian Americans.” It’s no surprise, then, that Asian Americans disproportionately benefited from the merit-based aid Sjogren introduced. Sjogren intended merit aid to work that way. Between 1975 and 1980, Asian American undergraduate enrollment rose from 245 to 556. Native American and Hispanic student numbers, in contrast, rose by accident. The admissions office didn’t introduce new programs that targeted these students in the late 1970s. But when the admissions office placed racial identification on applications, it gave Hispanic and Native American students access to affirmative action like they had never had before. When the Opportunity Program represented the university’s only affirmative action admissions tool, UM never devoted the same resources to in-state Hispanic and Native American recruiting as it did to recruiting black students. Hispanic and Native American communities within Michigan were also much smaller than they were in many other states. With the new application system, Hispanic and Native American students’ access to affirmative action no longer depended on their residential status and their knowledge of OP’s complicated admissions process. As a result, despite the policies that led black enrollment to plummet, undergraduate Hispanic student numbers rose from 157 in 1975 to 248 in 1980. During the same period, Native American enrollment rose from 38 to 107. A story of minority enrollment, then, allowed UM officials to tell a story of racial progress.²³

Finally, diversity helped Shapiro frame inclusion to fit into his new corporate model for the university. Shapiro was hired to lead the university through tough economic times. Declining state appropriations continued into the 1980s. Shapiro wanted to create an institution built for an era when the university couldn’t depend on the state for the majority of its budget. Even before he took office, he started talking about the possibility of major cuts—possibly the elimination of entire departments, offices, and initiatives. He sold this plan as “smaller but better.” Introducing budget cuts within the university wasn’t new. The university had seen tough economic times in the past and enforced sharp budget cuts. It was the market-based logic that Shapiro used to decide what to cut that represented a significant turning point for UM. As Donald Deskins, an associate dean of the Rackham Graduate School, noted, “The University is being run much more like a business.… The question is, what is the place of minorities in this businessman-like view of the University.”²⁴

This “businessman-like view” influenced the way Shapiro envisioned social problems. Recall that historically, rationales for special admissions programs included a two-step process. First, administrators defined a social problem that the university could address. Since the early 1960s, university officials justified racially attentive policies as an effort to address racial and socioeconomic inequalities, especially in urban America. Addressing racial inequality didn’t represent one of Shapiro’s core issues. Instead, Shapiro wanted to focus on an entirely different problem: he believed that the United States was unprepared to compete in an era of globalization. This problem, to him, was more pressing than racial inequality. Shapiro fit the purpose of racial inclusion into this framework. He saw a multiracial student body as a tool to train students in the racial and ethnic sensitivity necessary to do business in a global marketplace. Racial inclusion, then, became a tool to help the economic interests of the United States.²⁵

Shapiro’s modification to the second prong of the affirmative action rationale represented an even more dramatic transformation. Historically, the second piece of the affirmative action rationale showed how racially attentive policies didn’t harm the university’s status. But under Shapiro’s new formula, showing that racially attentive policies didn’t harm the university’s status wasn’t good enough. To justify racially attentive policies, proponents had to show how affirmative action added value to UM.²⁶

On the one hand, value could be measured based on whether academic units and program initiatives were vital to the quality and status of the University of Michigan. Diversity language helped show that racially attentive admission policies improved the quality of UM. As Shapiro explained, there were educational benefits in cultural diversity on campus and in the classroom. In Shapiro’s corporate model, though, value also meant the economic revenue that units or programs contributed to university coffers. As the university faced a world where it could rely less on state support, Shapiro looked for ways to substitute government funds for private money. He knew he would have to rely more on alumni donations. Still, donations would make only a small dent in the funding shortfall. Shapiro had his sights on corporate money. He wanted to turn Ann Arbor into the next technology hub—the next Palo Alto. Stanford University, which had created a thriving research park that linked the university to businesses, provided the model. Diversity fit into this campaign because the university was also selling access to a future workforce—a student body prepared for a new era of globalization. Educated in a diverse environment, these students were ready to help businesses compete in the global economy.²⁷

When Shapiro finished his speech, he didn’t receive a warm reception from a crowd ready to talk about and remember the BAM strike of 1970. One audience member immediately questioned his use of diversity as a rational for affirmative action. “I certainly take issue with your perspective that it is desirable for the university to admit minorities specifically for the reason of cultural diversity,” he told Shapiro. “I think the important reason we should have minority students at the university is precisely because it is an important social responsibility[,] not merely having a blend of cultures and mixtures of races.” Shapiro stepped back from his earlier statements and told the audience that he didn’t reject social justice as a reason to increase minority representation on campus. Instead, Shapiro claimed he was simply adding an additional justification.²⁸

Diversity, though, was clearly the rationale Shapiro preferred. In the years that followed, diversity began to eclipse social justice as the favored rationale of university administrators. Social justice never went away, but to keep social justice in line with admissions policies, social responsibility took on a different meaning in order to work seamlessly with diversity rhetoric and to support admissions policies that increasingly looked away from low-income black students living in cities.

“We should be attempting to increase the ethnic diversity of our campus,” the committee report read. It was 1981, and the committee appointed to evaluate the concerns of the Black Student Union had finally returned with its conclusions. The committee’s findings spelled bad news for black students attending high schools in Detroit. The committee recognized that the BSU was especially concerned about the declining enrollments of “inner-city Detroit residents.” But while task force members agreed with the BSU that the university should serve students “of all social classes,” they concluded, “it is our impression that students from lower social classes are less likely to be adequately prepared for academic work at this University.” Thus, the university “should do a better job with [the low-income students] it already admits before it seeks to recruit and admit students who are greater academic risks.” After a two-year investigation, the task force vindicated the practices of the admissions office and the Opportunity Program.²⁹

The committee report showed the impact of Sjogren and Goodman, who changed the way the university saw black student attrition. Fundamental to portraying black students from Detroit as risky and black students from suburban areas as talented was ignoring all the attrition data from the late 1960s and early 1970s that showed that Detroit students were not dropping out because of academic failure. Seeing attrition exclusively in academic terms was essential in juxtaposing smart middle-class students with risky low-income students.³⁰

The report also showed how officials preserved social justice rhetoric in the early 1980s, modifying it to fit with Shapiro’s diversity ideal. The report recognized that increasing the number of minority students on campus was important “because social justice demands that ethnic minority groups have the same access to higher education as does the majority and because such diversity” enriched the “educational opportunities of the majority.” To blend social justice and diversity, the report used an abstract definition of racial justice that was disconnected from geography. Throughout the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, officials focused on the need to address inequalities embedded in cities. But now officials focused more broadly on racial inequities—the national racial disparities in income, high school graduation rates, and college-going rates. This focus represented an understanding of inequality that grouped all African Americans together, ignoring the different experiences based on social class and place. Racial inequality existed. It was bad. And the university should admit more minority students to do something about it. This was the type of ambiguous social justice vision that melded easily with diversity rhetoric. Both diversity and social justice language could serve as tools to justify the university’s decision to limit access to working-class black students in Detroit.³¹

Still, the problem remained that black student enrollment was plummeting. By the time the committee issued its report, black undergraduate enrollment had fallen to 1,058 students (4.8 percent). By fall 1982, black enrollment fell by another 14 students. Administrators again turned to merit aid as the solution. The problem was that the existing merit aid programs didn’t serve black students well. Recall that in 1979, underrepresented minority students won 1.4 percent of Academic Recognition Scholarships, 6.8 percent of Regents-Alumni Scholarships, and 1.3 percent of Michigan Annual Giving Program scholarships. Robert Seltzer, assistant director of undergraduate admissions, thought he knew the answer to this problem. The university could fund one hundred (fifty in-state and fifty out-of-state) full-tuition merit scholarships specifically for underrepresented students. The university wouldn’t have to worry about attrition, he argued, because these students weren’t “risky.” Using the market ethos that Shapiro introduced, he sold the program by arguing that it “would not involve a significant increase in support service costs,” since these students had “better academic credentials.” In short, “good” minority students were especially attractive because they cost less to manage. The marketplace ethos helped to see low-income black students as too costly.³²

Seltzer’s vision finally found support in fall 1983, when black enrollment hit its lowest point since 1971. For the first time in a decade, fewer than one thousand black undergraduates had registered for classes at the University of Michigan. Seltzer’s Michigan Achievement Awards offered merit scholarships to in-state and out-of-state students. Data shows how the program shifted aid away from students in Detroit’s public schools. Of forty-nine students in LSA who were offered the award, five were black students from Detroit. Two of these students went to private high schools and two others went to Renaissance, one of Detroit’s special-admit high schools. Only one student went to a public Detroit high school that wasn’t a special-admit institution.³³

In 1984, another task force on undergraduate student aid discussed the consequences of devoting more of the university’s resources to merit-based aid rather than need-based aid. Again, the committee vindicated the practices initiated by Sjogren and Goodman. At the center of its analysis was an interpretation of low-income students as academic risks who hurt the quality of the university. “It is not easy,” the task force concluded, “to choose between” funding low-income and middle-income black students. But increasing merit aid was vital to “attract[ing] large numbers of good students … and the value of these students in preserving overall academic quality levels at UM will be important.” “The numbers of high ability undergraduates at UM are slipping at a noticeable rate,” the task force went on. “There is … an unusual risk in doing nothing.”³⁴

Even as black enrollment continued to plummet in the early 1980s, UM task forces defended Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies. “Bad” and “risky” became acceptable descriptions of Detroit’s black students, and university officials found a way to make diversity and social justice work in harmony to justify racial retrenchment.

For administrators, diversity was an intellectual rationale designed to sustain policies already in place. The ideal would have become useless to administrators if it became a justification for policies they disagreed with. Campus leaders, then, had to work hard in the 1980s to stymie efforts by black student activists and their allies to appropriate the diversity ideal in order to challenge the policies of retrenchment and advance a different vision of racial justice in higher education.

In February 1984, Niara Sudarkasa (formerly Gloria Marshall) joined the administration as associate vice president for academic affairs, a new position created to stem the tide of declining black enrollment and address the poor racial climate on campus. A decade earlier, the board of regents would have balked at giving Sudarkasa a position of influence. She had been one of the most vocal black faculty members during the BAM strike and had played an important role in the protest and negotiations. Sudarkasa almost lost her job as the result of her participation.³⁵

University leaders created Sudarkasa’s position as black student activists began to reorganize in the early 1980s. By fall 1982, the Black Student Union reemerged after having dissolved in 1979. The campus chapter of the NAACP also resurfaced after a seven-year hiatus. BAM III didn’t develop during the 1982–83 academic year, but administrators could see an emerging threat. In November 1982, BSU members held a teach-in on racism at the university. They invited Ed Fabre, a leader of the 1970 BAM strike, who called the teach-in “déjà vu.” Black students and professors discussed turning the teach-in into direct action. As black enrollment continued to decline and black student organizing gained strength, administrators eventually brought Sudarkasa into the administration.³⁶

It was a classic co-optation strategy. Not only were campus leaders trying to get black student activists to work for change within the inclusion bureaucracy, but they were also bringing a faculty ally, experienced in organizing student protest, into the administration. Executive administrators didn’t employ this tactic to allow activists to capture the institution and remake it in student activists’ vision. Rather, they invited activists into the bureaucracy because they believed that they would have more control over reform. The alternative was dealing with disruptive dissent, which could lead to concessions that administrators believed were unviable and violated the university’s priorities and values.

Sudarkasa knew as well as anyone the university’s long history of using black officials to stymie dissent. She had become an astute observer of university practices as she worked to reform the university with black students in the 1960s and 1970s. She knew that the university rarely gave black officials any power. Her position wasn’t any different. Associate vice president might sound powerful, but it was essentially an advisory position. She had no budget with which to implement programs. She had no power to fire anyone who didn’t implement her policy recommendations. But she still believed that she had the skills to work within these limitations and create significant institutional reforms that could stem the tide of declining black enrollment and faculty hires at the University of Michigan. More than that, she envisioned creating successful programs that universities across the country would emulate. It wouldn’t take long to realize that her optimism was misguided.³⁷

Just as many black officials had in the past, Sudarkasa challenged campus leaders. She was a harsh critic of the ambiguity of Shapiro’s diversity framework. She came into her position during a period when Shapiro and other officials doubted the probability of BAM’s 10 percent black enrollment goal. Shapiro suggested that the university should do away with the goal altogether and instead pursue a fuzzy ideal of a diverse student body, which included no numerical goals. Sudarkasa refused to accept Shapiro’s vision. She quickly made it clear that she would use her position to reach the BAM enrollment goal. Not only was the goal attainable, but she wanted to reach it within three to four years. In effect, Sudarkasa was trying to outline a new era of accountability. Racial inclusion efforts would be judged against the numerical goals that were supposed to be achieved within a defined timeline.³⁸

Sudarkasa also challenged Shapiro’s efforts to decenter black students in the university’s vision of racial inclusion. She didn’t ignore the rising number of nonblack minority students, but she was concerned that administrators were using Asian American enrollment, in particular, to hide the declining number of black students on campus. When discussing affirmative action, she emphasized that Asian American students were overrepresented, and their numbers shouldn’t be used to measure the success of racial inclusion programs.³⁹

In challenging administrators’ use of Asian American students, she brought the university into a new era—one that could see African Americans as unique while still acknowledging the challenges that Hispanic and Native American students also faced. She used the term “underrepresented minority”—a term that had been used in the past but still wasn’t widely adopted at UM. Black, Hispanic, and Native American students all held a special position because their share of the student population didn’t reflect their share of the state population. Still, according to Sudarkasa, even among underrepresented students, black students held a special place. No group was more underrepresented at UM than black students; thus, they deserved more resources and attention.⁴⁰

Her most difficult challenge, though, was restoring the university’s confidence in the academic capabilities of black students from Michigan’s cities. In Sudarkasa’s eyes, the only way to achieve the 10 percent black enrollment goal was to make Michigan’s cities the key recruiting grounds for black students again. To do this, she knew that she had to challenge Sjogren’s claims about the academic merits of black students in the state. When Sjogren finally presented some evidence to support his claims about the capabilities of black students in Michigan’s cities, the evidence came in the form of pool studies—in other words, studies that outlined the number of qualified black students that the admissions office could recruit. He used PSAT scores and high school grades to argue that few black students in the state qualified for admission at UM. Sudarkasa tried to counter Sjogren’s claims by producing her own pool study of Michigan’s black high school students. She started with the premise that “more weight should be given to the independent predictability of grade point averages and written evaluations by teachers.” To justify this conclusion, she tried to revive some of the institutional knowledge about black students’ performance that supported affirmative action in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, she emphasized that the SAT represented a poor tool to predict whether a black student could graduate from UM. The admissions office no longer commissioned social scientists to analyze the utility of standardized tests in predicting black students’ performance, so Sudarkasa looked to scholarship produced outside UM, citing two social scientists who called the SAT a “third-rate predictor of college performance” and concluded that the test was particularly unfair to minorities and low-income students. Their findings mirrored internal studies at UM completed in previous decades.⁴¹

When Sudarkasa created her pool study, then, she deemphasized the importance of standardized tests to identify potential UM students. Not surprisingly, Sudarkasa presented a much larger pool of qualified black students than had Sjogren. Using data on high school graduates in 1984, she found that of the 5,466 black students who took the ACT—a standardized test UM accepted as an alternative to the SAT—4,211 didn’t score high enough to qualify for admission at UM. The ACT made only 15 black students eligible as honor students, marked 254 as “qualified,” and deemed another 986 as “qualified with reservation.” That meant that test scores alone made 77 percent of the potential pool of black applicants unqualified. It was by far the highest rate of any racial group. The ACT deemed 53 percent of Hispanic and Native American students unqualified, as well as 28 percent of Asian Americans and 31 percent of whites. But if admissions officers looked at high school performance, a different picture emerged of the academic proficiency of black students. If admissions officers ignored standardized test scores, 389 black students became honor students, 1,348 became “qualified,” and another 1,741 became “qualified with reservation.” The “students apparently get the message that test scores are much more important admission criteria than grades,” Sudarkasa concluded, because of the 1,348 students whose grades put them in the “qualified” category, only 178 (13 percent) actually applied to UM. Of the black students whose grades put them in the “qualified with reservation” category, only 3 percent applied.⁴²

Rather than doing away with the diversity ideal, she believed she could use diversity to justify new policies that recommitted the university to the BAM goals and black students in Detroit. For Sudarkasa, arguing that “our pursuit of academic excellence is enhanced by the diversity of our student body” didn’t prohibit arguments about the university’s responsibility to working-class black students in Detroit. She never ruminated on diversity, offering a detailed definition of the word that included the diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic locations. Instead, she adopted administrators’ abstract language of diversity along with strong statements about the university’s social responsibility to suggest that UM should recruit black students from Detroit.⁴³

Campus leaders, of course, didn’t want people to think about the university’s commitment to Detroit when they heard the word “diversity.” Thus, to preserve their meaning of and purpose behind diversity, they had to limit Sudarkasa’s power to undermine Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies. They did so by protecting Sjogren from Sudarkasa’s criticism.

Sjogren openly mocked Sudarkasa’s goals. In a special LSA Blue Ribbon Commission meeting organized to review admissions policies, Sjogren continued to question whether Detroit was a viable recruiting ground for minority students. Sjogren told the committee members that the pool of in-state minorities was small because of the poor quality of the Detroit school system. Initially, Sudarkasa thought she could get Sjogren to change his stance. Sudarkasa was sitting in that meeting with Sjogren. As she sat silently waiting to confront the admissions director, she didn’t understand how little power she actually had over Sjogren. She knew that her role, despite the powerful sounding title of associate vice president, was merely an advisory position. She had no power to fire Sjogren. Her power came from Billy Frye, the vice president for academic affairs, and his willingness to support her and discipline the director of admissions. Sjogren needed to fear Frye in order for Sudarkasa to have any power over the admissions director. But Sjogren didn’t fear Frye, and Sudarkasa didn’t know it yet.⁴⁴

Recall that Frye began his rise up the administrative ranks after he was hired over Jewell Cobb as dean of LSA in 1975. Cobb was the black candidate who was initially offered the position, but Fleming and other administrative officials effectively undermined her selection in order to hire Frye. Frye proved a poor advocate for racial justice. He failed to create any consequences for officials, like Sjogren, who were responsible for racial retrenchment. Instead, he accepted tepid plans from the admissions office to reverse declining black enrollment.⁴⁵

This was the environment that Sudarkasa stepped into at the 1985 meeting where Sjogren was offering his analysis of the Detroit school system. After the meeting, she challenged his statements, questioning his assumptions about the lack of talented students in Detroit. Sjogren would have to expand his efforts to admit more students beyond Cass and Renaissance if the admissions office planned to meet the black enrollment goals, she told him.⁴⁶

Sjogren wasn’t accustomed to this type of attack from anyone in the administration. Sjogren fired back in a strongly worded letter to Sudarkasa. Her criticism was “unwarranted” and “unfair,” Sjogren contended, and made increasing black enrollment much more difficult. He suggested that she make an effort to understand how the admissions office actually functioned. He listed the recruiting initiatives that took place in every Detroit high school to show Sudarkasa that he had not given up on Detroit students. But then he repeated the same message that he had been spreading for a decade: Cass and Renaissance enrolled “high ability, serious students from Detroit,” while students from other schools had a history of attrition at UM.⁴⁷

Sudarkasa fired back. Sjogren could list as many Detroit recruiting events as he wanted, she told him, but “the record of declining Black enrollment from 1977 to 1983 speaks for itself.” In response to Sjogren’s “disappointment” over Sudarkasa’s remarks, she wrote that “if there is anyone who should be disappointed, it is I, who have been charged with providing leadership to the University in the area of increasing minority enrollment … and who found reason to believe … that the Director of Admissions espouses views that might be viewed as counterproductive to these efforts.” The last statement was supposed to remind Sjogren that she held an executive position on campus and that his job was to follow her leadership—not challenge it.⁴⁸

Sudarkasa expected Frye’s full support. What happened next surprised her. Frye did inform Sjogren that his letter to Sudarkasa was unacceptable and that the director of admissions shouldn’t talk about Detroit schools in that manner. But then Robert Holmes, Frye’s assistant vice president, worked with Sjogren to compose a letter of reconciliation to Sudarkasa. Sjogren wrote the original draft. He said that he would increase his efforts in Detroit, but he still wasn’t willing to let go of his original comments about “ill-prepared” students. For example, he wrote, “I am sure that you will agree with me … that the admission of ill-prepared students will not only be counterproductive to our goals, but will adversely affect the future lives of a great number of young people.” Holmes told Sjogren to strike this sentence from the draft because he wasn’t “hearing any more about ‘lowering standards.’ ” But then Holmes wrote that “I obviously agree with your statement,” but “I suggest that we keep it in reserve for a time, if ever, that it might be needed.” In essence, Holmes told Sjogren that the executive administration agreed with his analysis of “ill-prepared” Detroit students but simply asked him to stop saying it in public. This was hardly the type of change that Sudarkasa was looking for.⁴⁹

Frye also scolded Sudarkasa. He suggested that her communication with Sjogren threatened to undermine the administration’s relationship with the admissions office and, in turn, efforts to increase minority enrollment. If Sudarkasa couldn’t challenge the director of admissions, what power did she have to hold anyone accountable? What impact would any of her reform recommendations have if university officials could flaunt their opposition—in this case, with Sudarkasa in the audience—without any consequences?⁵⁰

Sudarkasa realized that she also wouldn’t get Shapiro’s support to push Sjogren to reform his policies. Sudarkasa had contact with Shapiro, as the president consulted her to craft public messages about black enrollment efforts and racial climate issues. Sudarkasa wrote statements for Shapiro that embraced diversity and tried to get Shapiro to reconsider his views about the Detroit school system. Rather than blaming Detroit schools for falling black enrollment, she wanted Shapiro to focus on the impact of the economic recession, which more than doubled black unemployment in the state, and decisions by legislators that cut federal and state financial aid. Essentially, she gave Shapiro the popular narrative of racial innocence that allowed UM to escape culpability for racial disparities without blaming the quality of the Detroit school system. But Shapiro ignored her counsel and continued to focus on the Detroit school system in public statements to explain low black enrollment. It represented the failure of all the work Sudarkasa had done to change perceptions of Detroit. Here was the president of the university repeating the same lines that Sjogren and Goodman had offered him in the late 1970s and early 1980s.⁵¹

Sudarkasa finally realized the true limits of her power. She wrote to Frye complaining that she was “not in charge with carrying out the programmatic initiatives to reach the minority enrollment goal.” She lamented that without the authority to hold anyone accountable, her role was basically to advise executive officers on ways to increase minority enrollment and assess the effectiveness of the university in those efforts. But Sudarkasa felt that she was “being put in the position of having to take personal responsibility for accomplishing the goals which the University has set, whereas this is not my role.” “I don’t have the authority to bring” Sjogren and other important policymakers on board, she continued. She made clear that only Frye and Shapiro could do that. Sudarkasa knew all these limitations when she took the position. Still, she believed that she would act with the support, and thus authority, of Frye. That didn’t turn out to be the case. Sudarkasa’s complaints echoed the sentiments of black officials in the early 1970s that accused the university of using black administrators as scapegoats and giving them no power.⁵²

When Sudarkasa ran into problems with Sjogren, she turned her attention to the university’s racial climate, which she knew posed problems for black student recruitment and retention. If Sudarkasa believed that initiatives to repair the racial climate would receive less resistance than her efforts to change admissions policies, she would be sorely disappointed. She soon found that she would face similar limitations on her power to lead institutional reform, despite her attempts to accommodate diversity rhetoric.

Sudarkasa took her position during another struggle over how to interpret the connection between the racial climate and black student attrition. A young black professor of sociology at UM, with a dual appointment in CAAS and sociology, tried to revive the institutional knowledge of the early 1970s that contended that the racial climate was to blame for black student attrition rates. Walter Allen arrived at the University of Michigan in fall 1979. His appointment speaks to the role of CAAS in bringing black professors to campus who would challenge institutional knowledge about black students. Allen immediately went to work, studying the experiences of black students on campus. During the winter term of 1980, he sent questionnaires to black undergraduate students. Allen concluded from the survey evidence that black student attrition at UM was rooted in “culture shock” and “social alienation,” not lack of academic preparation. This type of interpretation mirrored the social science studies of the early 1970s and challenged the administrative knowledge that dominated institutional decision making in the late 1970s and early 1980s.⁵³

Black students also told their stories to other researchers and journalists. Barry Beckham, a professor at Brown University, released The Black Student’s Guide to Colleges in 1982. UM’s profile included a quote from one black student who called relations between white and black students “the pits.” The 1984 edition of the book went even further, warning black students thinking of attending Michigan that they should be “prepared to combat possible culture shock and social alienation.” The New York Times offered a similar message, giving UM undergraduate Veronica Woolridge an opportunity to present her view of the institution. After three years at Michigan, she reported that she had only taken one class with a black instructor—a visiting professor from Detroit’s Wayne State University. There were so few black students, she continued, that black students had an “unwritten code” that they greet each other on campus, even when they didn’t know each other. She also described a flyer that appeared on campus the week before the article ran declaring April as “White Pride Time,” featuring “counciling [sic] sessions on how to deal with uppity niggers.” Publicity like this was particularly concerning for UM officials, who were trying to raise black enrollment.⁵⁴

Still, UM officials remained committed to the views about black student attrition that Sjogren and Goodman had created in the latter half of the 1970s. They continued to downplay the importance of black students’ social alienation by claiming that academic deficiency represented the key factor explaining attrition. Vice president of student services Henry Johnson made this clear when he told a reporter, “I’m concerned with what (Black) students need more than what they want.” “What they need,” he explained, “is a good academic support service.” “The key issue for keeping students here,” he continued, “is keeping them here academically. What keeps you here is not how comfortable you are outside of class, it’s whether you can cut it in class.” The fact that Johnson made these comments was all the more significant because he was the executive administrator who was supposed to oversee programs that addressed black students’ social alienation. If he didn’t see the connection between the university’s racial climate and attrition, who was going to address the issue?⁵⁵

Black student activists hoped that they would find a more receptive audience in Sudarkasa. Her early reports suggested that she would challenge the prevailing views of administrators. She argued that the poor racial climate at the University of Michigan contributed to black student attrition and declining black enrollment. The problem for black students was that Sudarkasa believed that increasing black enrollment and creating a “critical mass” of black students represented the best way to improve the racial climate. In order to recruit enough black students to create a “critical mass”—she never defined how many black students were necessary for “critical mass”—she believed that she needed to repair the image of the university as a hostile place for black students. In the short term, that meant suppressing black students’ public complaints about the racial climate.⁵⁶

Sudarkasa’s efforts to repair UM’s image put her at odds with black students who publicly testified about their experiences on campus. A 1985 Detroit Free Press article particularly irked administrators, including Sudarkasa. Cheryl Jordan, a black political science major in her senior year, told the reporter that “a lot of them (Whites) are very open about” racism, as “there are swastika signs on doors.” Another student reported that someone had written “kill niggers!” on a library carrel. Roderick Dean, president of the Black Student Union, added that he was “shocked” when he arrived at UM. “The first thing I noticed when I arrived on campus was the graffiti,” which was “much worse than the graffiti I saw in the South.”⁵⁷

Sudarkasa, along with other administrators, were furious when they read the Detroit Free Press article. Sudarkasa believed that the school was being unfairly targeted, since the racial climate on UM’s campus reflected a problem that existed on all predominantly white campuses across the country.⁵⁸ She didn’t reserve her criticism for the Detroit Free Press. Once the paper published the article, Charles Holman of the NAACP brought some of the black students interviewed for the article to meet with UM administrators, including Sudarkasa. Holman thought the meeting represented an opportunity to discuss institutional reform. Instead, Holman reported that Sudarkasa verbally attacked the black students. “She even attacked me verbally for bringing up the problem,” Holman explained. Then “she stormed out [of] the room.”⁵⁹

As much as campus leaders shared Sudarkasa’s concerns that negative portrayals of the racial climate hurt efforts to raise black enrollment, they also feared that these articles would hurt the university’s larger recruiting efforts. By the mid-1980s, UM officials began using diversity as a recruiting tool for white students. As officials fought for the “best” students in a competitive environment, they pitched UM as a place where students could get the unique experience of living with people of different backgrounds. They offered idyllic images of a contentious-free environment. Newspaper portrayals of a contentious racial climate threatened to compromise diversity as a marketing tool. Administrators’ lack of support for concrete proposals to improve the racial climate shows that they were more invested in positive portrayals of the racial climate than putting the necessary resources forward to improve black students’ experience on campus.⁶⁰

Despite her hopes that the media would stop covering black students’ experience on campus, press attention only increased. In the final months of 1985, Sudarkasa began meeting with minority students. Students accused the administration of not “paying enough attention to retention” by ignoring the university’s racial climate. They wanted Sudarkasa to create programs that would address campus racism and black students’ social alienation.⁶¹

In the aftermath of these meetings, Sudarkasa called for a program to improve the university’s racial climate that she called the Year of Understanding the Value of Diversity at the University and in Society. In the initial proposal, she framed the need for such a program as a minority student retention initiative. “My perception,” Sudarkasa concluded, “is that we urgently need to take the initiative in addressing this concern on the part of students.” “If we do not,” she stressed, “all the other initiatives we are taking in the area of minority student enrollment will be compromised.”⁶²

Again, Sudarkasa had faith that she could use diversity language to justify a program that addressed black students’ concerns. She pitched the Year of Understanding as an opportunity “to explore, understand, and reaffirm the value of diversity for strengthening the intellectual and cultural life of our campus.” The proposal harked back to 1972, when black students used diversity language to address social alienation and advocate for a living space dominated by black students. As with the 1972 proposal, Sudarkasa was trying to use diversity language to speak to administrators’ interests while addressing black activists’ concerns.⁶³

Because Sudarkasa had no budget or power to create student programming on her own, she had to get the support of Henry Johnson, the vice president of student services. Johnson headed the Committee on Diversity, which evaluated proposals like Sudarkasa’s. Johnson had long been critical of the idea that the university’s racial climate affected black student attrition rates. Not surprisingly, the final committee draft of the Year of Understanding stripped any reference to black students’ social alienation from the final proposal. Rather than framing the benefits of the program as a retention initiative, the committee recast the benefits as an opportunity to “celebrate the rich racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of our campus and society-at-large.” Framing the problem of the university’s racial climate in this way further severed the relationship between the racial climate and academic attrition.⁶⁴

Sudarkasa still tried to implement the program. She sent the proposal to Shapiro, hoping he would provide the money for the project. He didn’t. “I find the proposal thought provoking and instructive,” he wrote, but “I have decided to delay the full consideration of the proposal until the winter term.” He was already funding other projects, he wrote. Since Shapiro planned to go on sabbatical for much of the winter term, his letter didn’t give Sudarkasa much hope.⁶⁵

The fact that Sudarkasa failed to attain funding speaks to the power of administrators in resisting efforts to make diversity language serve black activists’ goals. Sudarkasa had faith that she could convince administrators to support new policies as long as she adopted their preferred intellectual framework. Diversity, however, wasn’t as malleable as Sudarkasa thought. It was only useful to administrators as long as it supported particular policies. Administrators fought hard to preserve their intended meaning and purpose for diversity.

When Shapiro rejected her proposal for the Year of Understanding, she once again reflected on the constraints placed on her. “My position is essentially an advisory one,” she wrote again, “with no direct responsibility for, or accountability from, units responsible for implementing policies that I recommend.” There were great expectations among minority officials when a senior black official was hired with what they thought was the authority to bring about change. “Given these expectations, it is no wonder then, that some staff have expressed disappointment over the dearth of programs being developed and administered from my office.” A one-person office without “any built-in authority” was destined to fail. She hinted that perhaps that was administrators’ intention when they created the position.⁶⁶

Sudarkasa offered her resignation in September 1986. She took a position as president of Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania. Shapiro wouldn’t have the opportunity to reconsider Sudarkasa’s Year of Understanding in the winter. When Sudarkasa left, Shapiro didn’t understand the level of discontent among the black students who remained at the university. He went on a scheduled sabbatical in January 1987 and left his temporary replacement with a powder keg that was ready to explode.⁶⁷

The diversity framework often gets blamed for the persistent inequality in higher education. This chapter clearly supports these critiques in showing that diversity contributed to racial retrenchment. But it also serves as a reminder that focusing too closely on diversity language can hide the underlying factors behind inequality. Diversity didn’t lead to racial disparities. It didn’t spark the policies that changed affirmative action practices and led UM recruiters away from Detroit. Diversity, instead, served as a tool to sustain the devastating policies for black students that were already in place. For those interested in challenging the policies of inequality, then, combating the diversity framework is only a first step. The motivations behind the policies for inequality are more deeply rooted and difficult to challenge than diversity language.

This chapter also questions critics who suggest that diversity disconnected social justice from inclusion. This is only partly true. Cleary administrators favored the diversity rationale over social justice beginning in the 1980s. But social justice language never disappeared. In fact, administrators found it easy to bend the meaning of social justice to fit the goals and purpose behind the diversity rationale. Again, for those interested in challenging inequality, the solution isn’t as easy as forcing universities to reframe affirmative action as a social justice initiative.