If the student activists who took over the Administration Building in 1975 knew what was going to unfold in the second half of the 1970s, they might have risked the disciplinary codes and returned to the tactics of the Black Action Movement. It would have been difficult in 1975, though, to imagine the racial retrenchment that was about to come. After all, even though black enrollment still fell short of the BAM concessions, black students’ share of the student body was still close to record numbers. Over the next eight years, almost all the enrollment gains made since BAM were reversed. During these years, black enrollment fell from 7.25 percent to 4.9 percent of UM’s student body by 1983.¹ Just as important, the economic backgrounds of black students at UM changed, as UM officials shifted their recruiting, admissions, and financial aid policies to focus on bringing middle-class black students from suburban areas around the country. Even as black enrollment began to rise again in the mid-1980s, UM would never again craft its affirmative action policies to target working-class students in Detroit.

The policies administrators introduced in the late 1970s revealed that the co-optation of racial justice was a long-term project that evolved to protect the university’s priorities as conditions changed. New fears about the future of the university’s elite status helped usher in new interpretations about the fate of cities and the merits of black students living within them. The declining power of black student activists also gave administrators more control over how the university would respond to the changing environment. By the end of the 1970s, the character of affirmative action looked nothing like BAM’s vision of racial justice.

Two university officials crafted and pitched new affirmative action policies, which ultimately led to the racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cliff Sjogren and George Goodman had only recently taken over important offices on campus. Sjogren became the director of undergraduate admissions in July 1973. Still, he was no novice. The forty-six-year-old director came to UM as an admissions counselor in 1964; the same year UM inaugurated the Opportunity Awards Program. He quickly moved up to assistant director, and then, when his mentor Clyde Vroman retired after almost twenty-five years at the helm, Sjogren took over. Goodman was another longtime university employee. He joined the admissions office as the admissions counselor for the Opportunity Program (then called the Opportunity Awards Program) in 1968. In 1973, he became the director of the program. The position brought him outside the admissions office for the first time. As director, he oversaw the supportive services for OP students and crafted the policies that governed the program.²

Goodman and Sjogren aren’t the actors that scholars typically associate with the backlash to the victories of the black freedom movement. Both UM officials believed that the university had a responsibility to address racial inequality through affirmative action admissions. Both took steps in their positions to advance affirmative action. Sjogren took a leadership role, using his resources when he became director to increase the number of minority admissions counselors. In Goodman’s case, he spent the first years of his career at UM as the only black admissions officer, taking on the responsibilities of recruiting and admitting OP students. No UM admissions official was more responsible for the boom in black enrollment in the late 1960s and early 1970s.³

Nevertheless, these were the two university officials most responsible for the racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. While both officials supported affirmative action, they were uncomfortable with the BAM concessions. Both were skeptical that UM could find enough “qualified” black students through OP—which focused primarily on Detroit students—to raise black enrollment to 10 percent of the student body. Goodman, in particular, took black students’ attrition rate more personally than others. As the OP admissions officer in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the attrition rate wasn’t a number; it represented the names and faces of black students. He wondered whether he was letting these students down. What were their lives like after they left UM? Would they have been better off at another university?⁴

Sjogren and Goodman had their own ideas about how to reform affirmative action admissions. Sjogren wanted to raise the admissions criteria for affirmative action while still raising black enrollment. He believed that he could do this by expanding affirmative action to include out-of-state students. The exclusion of out-of-state students was especially problematic in meeting the BAM goals because in the 1960s and 1970s, out-of-state undergraduate enrollment in LSA often fluctuated between 20 and 30 percent of the student body. This meant that the university had no affirmative action admissions process for a large contingent of its students, putting even more pressure on the in-state Opportunity Program to admit enough students to reach the BAM enrollment goal. Sjogren believed that this limitation forced his admissions office to recruit and admit too many black students who were academically underprepared and would likely leave UM before graduating. Expanding the pool of black students who were eligible for affirmative action, he thought, would allow UM to admit more black students who presented lower risks of attrition.⁵

Sjogren didn’t want just any out-of-state black student from any location and socioeconomic background. Although he never said it in public meetings in the mid-1970s, he wrote in internal correspondence about “a potential applicant pool of middle and upper income Blacks,” especially those outside the state of Michigan, that he would like to recruit if he had the funds. Sjogren saw potential in the growing population of black families living outside cities that escaped the harshest effects of the economic recession of the late 1970s and moved into suburban areas. In the early 1960s, when the university first implemented affirmative action admissions, only 2.5 million African Americans lived in suburban areas nationwide. By 1980, that number leaped to 6.1 million. Sjogren wanted to take advantage of that growth because he believed urban school districts were deteriorating and suburban districts better prepared black students for UM’s competitive environment.⁶

To recruit these students, who he believed were better prepared to compete at UM, Sjogren thought the university needed to devote more money to merit aid. OP offered generous financial aid packages, but the packages were based on financial need. Sjogren wanted to redistribute the university’s resources to recruit the black students with the highest standardized test scores and the most college preparatory coursework. Many of these students, he understood, were from middle- and upper-income families, who wouldn’t benefit as much from need-based financial aid.⁷

Sjogren’s ideas worked in harmony with Goodman’s vision for the future of OP. As director of the Opportunity Program, Goodman wanted to reform OP to improve retention. To Goodman, the program was too big to offer the type of support necessary to reduce academic attrition. Many of the OP students didn’t need or want academic counseling. But to reduce attrition rates, Goodman thought he needed to make academic counseling mandatory for all OP students. Goodman’s solution involved purging all students who didn’t need academic support and remaking OP into a program exclusively for students who he thought were at risk of leaving the university before graduation. He also wanted to create a Summer Bridge program for the OP students he thought posed the highest risk of leaving UM due to academic underpreparation. OP, then, would become smaller, and many black students would have to find a different admissions and funding mechanism. Goodman’s proposed changes benefited Sjogren, because reducing the size of OP, and the money needed for its generous financial aid packages, freed up funds for Sjogren’s merit-based scholarships.⁸

Still, there were clear obstacles in Sjogren’s and Goodman’s way. First and foremost, these policy changes required new affirmative action tools. If the number of OP students declined, the Opportunity Program could no longer represent the only affirmative action admissions mechanism for in-state students. And if Sjogren wanted to expand affirmative action to include out-of-state students, new tools for identifying and evaluating black students outside Michigan had to be put in place. Essentially, they needed ways to identify students’ race when counselors evaluated applications. The problem was that UM leaders had long resisted racial identification on applications. They were more comfortable with OP’s process, which allowed UM to claim that admissions officials focused on “disadvantaged” students, not black students. That changed in 1976, when university leaders agreed to add questions about racial and ethnic identity to admissions applications.⁹

Richard English, the associate vice president for academic affairs, was responsible for creating support for racial identification on admissions applications. English was one of the few African Americans in UM’s administration in the mid-1970s.¹⁰ It’s unclear whether English supported placing questions about racial identity on applications in order to implement Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies. Richard English, though, was also a strong advocate of Sjogren and Goodman’s proposed policies. By 1976, English believed that the admissions office had exhausted the pool of in-state black students who could graduate from UM. He knew that if the admissions office wanted to increase black enrollment, UM had to enroll more out-of-state black students. English advocated for more merit aid to recruit these students. Adding racial identity to applications proved vital to fulfilling these policy initiatives.¹¹

In internal correspondence, though, English framed the decision to place questions about race and ethnicity on applications as a federal compliance measure. Since the mid-1960s, administrators had been collecting data on the racial identity of students and employees. Throughout those years, administrators expressed great concern that by leaving racial identification off applications, they were providing incomplete and inaccurate racial data. The federal government’s pressure for data only increased in the mid-1970s. HEW began demanding data on the degrees the university conferred, broken down by students’ race, which required the university to track students throughout their time at UM.¹² At the same time, the consequences for not complying with HEW grew by the mid-1970s. As noted in chapter 4, losing federal contracts for not following federal affirmative action guidelines had become a real possibility by that time. This reality likely helped push UM officials to put racial identification on applications.¹³

Whatever pushed UM leaders to add racial identification to admissions applications, the decision meant that the admissions office would no longer have to rely on OP to pursue affirmative action admissions. Admissions officials could now identify the race and ethnic background of any student while making an admissions decision. Now admissions counselors could evaluate students who identified themselves as black, Hispanic, or Native American—not just the in-state students who checked the Opportunity Program box—with special admissions criteria.

As important as adding racial identification to applications was to carrying out Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies, the two officials still needed to convince executive administrators and enough faculty members to support their larger vision. Although the university’s decentralized structure gave Sjogren and Goodman much independence, they still had to deal with oversight. The admissions office had to answer directly to the vice president for academic affairs. Further, the Undergraduate Admissions Office was supposed to carry out the admissions goals of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, along with those of other, smaller colleges that admitted undergraduates. So any major admissions policy changes needed broad support.

To pitch their policy changes, Goodman and Sjogren led an intellectual assault on black students, especially those from Detroit—UM’s primary recruiting ground for black students. Goodman and Sjogren offered a new institutional knowledge that saw standardized tests as viable prediction tools for black students, viewed attrition solely as a sign of academic deficiency, and claimed that all but two public Detroit high schools poorly prepared black students for study at UM. Goodman summarized the situation bluntly. Although some Opportunity Program students enrolled in the Honors Program and graduated with distinction, “the average grades earned at the University during the freshmen year are generally below the University average,” and “an alarming number are below 2.0 [grade point average].” Goodman concluded, “To the extent that the rising attrition rate is due primarily to academic survival, a new approach is needed.”¹⁴ Sjogren agreed with Goodman. The admissions director argued that attrition presented the most significant obstacle to increasing minority enrollment. Just pointing out that attrition was a problem, of course, did not necessarily mean that Sjogren believed that academic deficiency was the culprit. Nevertheless, the solutions Sjogren presented for the attrition problem identified academic deficiency as the sole factor behind attrition. Sjogren claimed that executive administrators had two choices: raise admissions standards to admit minority students who were better academically prepared, or substantially increase academic support services.¹⁵

These claims flew in the face of a decade of institutional knowledge about the academic proficiency of black students. In the 1960s and early 1970s, in order to counter concerns that affirmative action would not hurt institutional quality, social scientists offered data that showed that traditional admissions tools poorly predicted black students’ performance and that black students’ higher attrition rates didn’t suggest that affirmative action brought poorly prepared black students to campus. Early 1970s research on black students at UM showed that half of OP students who left before graduation were in good academic standing. Social scientists also revealed that nonacademic factors, such as social alienation, were more responsible for attrition than was academic underpreparation. A 1975 internal study showed that academic underpreparation continued to be a poor explanation for black student attrition rates. In that year, 62 percent of black students who left before graduating were in good academic standing—an even higher percentage than the early 1970s studies reported. Despite all this research, Goodman and Sjogren framed black student attrition exclusively as a problem of academic underpreparation.¹⁶

Any plans to decenter Detroit in UM’s affirmative action efforts also challenged ten years of institutional practice and the common understanding of the purpose of affirmative action. For a decade, UM officials and activists had emphasized a vision of social justice rooted in addressing racial inequality in cities. But now Sjogren and Goodman were suggesting that cities could no longer be the primary recruiting grounds for affirmative action admissions. In the mid-1970s, Sjogren and Goodman didn’t publicly mention Detroit or highlight the fact that they wanted to focus on recruiting black students from outside the state’s cities. Nevertheless, when the two talked about getting “better” students and looking at new areas of recruitment, it was clear that they weren’t referring to new neighborhoods in Detroit, Flint, or Grand Rapids. The critique of the current pool of black students was a thinly veiled attack on black students in Michigan’s cities. But as much as these attacks on cities were veiled, there was at least one obvious sign that Sjogren planned to decenter cities in recruitment. In 1976, Sjogren closed the Grand Rapids Adjunct Admissions Office. While Detroit had always been the university’s primary recruiting ground for black students under OP, Grand Rapids served as a secondary site, much like Flint. The adjunct office allowed students to access admissions officers and get information and advice on the admissions process. Those services were no longer available once Sjogren began focusing on middle- and upper-income black students in the nation’s suburban areas.¹⁷

The lack of transparency clearly helped Sjogren and Goodman. As mentioned in chapter 4, UM officials didn’t release to the public the social science studies that showed most of the OP students who left UM before graduating were in good academic standing. These social scientists found that UM’s racial climate was more to blame for black student attrition than any lack of academic preparation. Consequently, UM faculty and students didn’t know that all of the available data contradicted Sjogren and Goodman’s claims.

Still, the claims that Sjogren and Goodman were making about black students represented an unprecedented attack from officials who were supposed to carry out affirmative action. What’s especially striking about this period is the relative ease Sjogren and Goodman enjoyed in attacking the quality of urban schools and suggesting that academic underpreparation explained black student attrition rates. Between 1975 and 1978, nothing in the historical record reveals a single person who questioned Sjogren’s and Goodman’s claims. Not in the faculty meeting minutes, where Sjogren and Goodman unveiled their policy proposals and critiques of black students’ preparation. Not in communications with executive administrators. Not in the student newspaper, which often pushed admissions officials to explain low black enrollment numbers in the past. All the evidence supports Sjogren’s claim that faculty had sent him a clear message in the mid-1970s: “Give us more minorities and smarter minorities.”¹⁸

To so radically change the characterization of black students, one might assume that Sjogren and Goodman must have commissioned numerous studies. Surely they must have found evidence that the academic preparation of Opportunity Program students had declined dramatically. Surely they must have found enough evidence to counter ten years of social science data on black students at UM. But they didn’t. There is no evidence that Sjogren and Goodman commissioned any new studies that suggested poor academic preparation explained black student attrition in the mid-1970s. They certainly didn’t present any new evidence from studies to faculty and administrators. In fact, they presented no evidence to support any of their claims. Nothing.¹⁹

And still, nobody raised their voice against Sjogren and Goodman. Nobody asked for evidence.

Notice how easily Goodman and Sjogren took over as the legitimate knowledge producers about black students. In a climate where social scientists’ research conflicted with the policy goals of university leaders, social science studies about black students’ performance on campus disappeared. There was a great imbalance in the types of evidence necessary to argue for and against the qualifications of black students. The people who fought against negative assumptions about black students’ academic capabilities needed data, data, and more data from social scientists. But in the mid-1970s, Sjogren and Goodman made arguments as if the declining quality of black students from the state’s cities was self-evident. No evidence was necessary.

Sjogren and Goodman also experienced little resistance when they proposed to redistribute need-based aid to support an ambitious merit-based program that would allow the university to attract out-of-state students. Putting money into merit-based programs represented a philosophical shift at UM. Before the mid-1970s, the prevailing assumption that guided recruitment was that while the university should aid students who could not afford to attend, the university should not “purchase good talent,” in financial aid director Thomas Butts’s words. In the eyes of UM officials, the quality of the faculty and the university’s overall reputation would attract the best student talent. In this formula, the only obstacle to getting the “best” students was making sure the brightest low-income students could afford to attend.²⁰

Sjogren and Goodman understood some of the consequences of their new policies before they went into effect. Before the two administrators made any decisions, Goodman investigated the potential impact his policy recommendations would have on OP. It was clear that the new criteria would force those low-income black students who scored too high on the SAT or graduated too high in their high school class, designating them as students who didn’t need OP’s academic services, to pay as much as $1,550 through loans and work study. These were low-income students who would have previously benefited from the Opportunity Program’s financial support, which typically covered expenses that a student’s financial aid package failed to cover. One staff member, Pat Wilson, raised the key question: “Will we lose bright, but poor minority students (who will not be coded as Opportunity Program applicants) because they will receive less grant funds from the University?” Wilson answered her own question: yes, but the “new procedure cannot be avoided, nor can we revert to the old procedure, at this point in time.” Sjogren and Goodman didn’t share this information with faculty when they proposed the policy changes, but it’s difficult to imagine that the faculty and other officials believed that redirecting need-based aid into merit-based scholarships wouldn’t hurt low-income students.²¹

Goodman and Sjogren didn’t propose these policies with the intention of lowering black enrollment. They believed that, at worst, their policies would maintain black enrollment because out-of-state black students would rise dramatically and make up for the decline in OP enrollment. At best, they believed their plan would finally fulfill the 10 percent enrollment goal. Still, their policies revealed that they were offering a new concept of racial inclusion that disconnected affirmative action from the working-class black students in the state. They wanted to use affirmative action to recruit middle-class students.

Explaining why Sjogren and Goodman received so little resistance offers an opportunity to explore the type of institutional environment that was especially ripe for racial retrenchment. In what moments were UM faculty members willing to accept new negative portrayals of the state’s black students? In what environments were they willing to take important resources away from students most in need of financial support?

Any explanation must begin with the university’s perceived crisis of quality that emerged in the mid-1970s. Beginning in 1974, Sjogren presented a gloomy picture of the university’s student body that would soon help change the character of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. He told the faculty that the average SAT scores of all admitted students—not just black students—were declining. When Sjogren surveyed the scope of the problem and reported to the faculty, he revealed that declining SAT scores were a national trend. Sjogren suggested that the pool of students ready to compete at an elite institution was declining and that it would decline even further in the future, when the last of the baby boomers graduated from high school. He sent the message that there would soon be a war among selective universities for this shrinking pool of “good” students, and only a handful of selective institutions would survive. The rest would lose their elite status.²²

The crisis of quality created an environment ripe for new critiques of black students’ preparation. For much of OP’s history, officials presented information about black students in an era when faculty members and administrators celebrated the overall quality of the university’s student body. It might seem counterintuitive to argue that affirmative action enjoyed its greatest support during moments when average SAT scores were rising. Nevertheless, challenges to the qualifications of black students were weakest when the UM community felt most confident that the university’s elite status was secure. The faculty’s support of—or at least complicity in—Sjogren’s and Goodman’s attacks on the qualifications of black students during a perceived crisis of quality, then, shouldn’t come as a surprise. Historically, when faculty members and administrators at UM believed that the future of the university’s elite status was in question, there was a well-supported effort to purge the most vulnerable students to solidify the university’s position. Recall from chapter 1 that a similar crisis in the 1950s resulted in a successful effort to paint previously “qualified” students as “mediocre” and threats to the future of the institution.²³

The political economy of the 1970s exacerbated these concerns. Beginning early in the decade, conservatives used the national recession and rising inflation to attack the costs of public institutions and social services. The cost of liberal policies, they argued, undermined businesses’ competitiveness in domestic and global markets. A new era of austerity was necessary. Public universities felt the consequences. In the 1960s, the state government provided 80 percent of the University of Michigan’s general fund operating budget. By the mid-1970s, state appropriations accounted for 66 percent of UM’s general fund operating budget. That number would only continue to decline.²⁴

UM officials raised tuition and fees to cover the funding gap. Rising tuition costs helped bring a market ethos into admissions logic. Sjogren claimed that UM was in a poor position to maintain its elite status in this environment. In the past, UM could compete with Ivy League schools for students without offering merit scholarships because generous state funding kept tuition at UM less than half the price of places like Harvard. UM didn’t need active recruiting programs for the “best” out-of-state students because of the university’s reputation and cheap tuition. But now, because of declining state appropriations, UM’s out-of-state tuition was approaching that of the Ivy League, and other elite universities were offering substantial merit scholarships. As Sjogren’s assistant director explained, UM now faced an “increasingly competitive marketplace for students” because schools offering merit scholarships for the limited pool of high-quality students had created a “buyer’s market.”²⁵ Sjogren suggested in faculty meetings that he could lower minimum SAT scores required for admission in order to sustain UM’s enrollment numbers. Essentially, Sjogren gave the faculty two options: lower admissions criteria and give up the university’s elite status or support his plan to use merit scholarships and out-of-state recruitment to fight for the “best” students in the country.²⁶

Essentially, generous state funding, which kept tuition low, allowed UM to focus its general fund financial aid resources on low-income students. When tuition was cheap enough for middle-class families to afford—and much lower than UM’s elite private competitors—UM officials never thought they had to choose between middle- and working-class students when determining how to distribute general fund financial aid resources. But declining state appropriations and rising tuition costs created questions about who was more deserving of financial resources. When tuition prices created obstacles for middle-class students’ access to UM—the students whom officials had long seen as essential to sustain UM’s quality—redistributing need-based aid to support merit aid found widespread support.

The changing political economy also made it easier to attack the credentials of black students living in Detroit. Critiques of black OP students took hold as the political economy of the 1970s revealed its devastating consequences for cities, especially those in the Northeast and Midwest. Deindustrialization and white flight moved the economic and political power centers to new locations in America. As cities became blacker and African Americans began winning important political races, whites went to great lengths to keep their beachheads of power and privilege autonomous from African Americans in cities. In this environment, Detroit became the symbol of urban decline narratives.²⁷

Two court cases in particular protected the educational privileges that white families created for their children.²⁸ Milliken v. Bradley directly concerned the city of Detroit. In 1970, the Detroit NAACP, along with parents of Detroit children, sued the state of Michigan, challenging policies that led to racial segregation in the city. The district court judge ordered an ambitious desegregation plan that reached outside Detroit’s borders into the surrounding suburbs. The desegregation plan included 53 suburban school districts and Detroit, requiring 295 school buses to transport students around the area. The plan would have pierced the beachheads of privilege that whites had created outside Detroit, giving black students in the city access to the resources of suburban schools at a time when Detroit’s resources were crumbling. White parents in these suburbs challenged the plan. In 1974, the Supreme Court finally ruled that the district court’s plan was unconstitutional. The court’s majority ruled that suburban districts had not engaged in racial discrimination and were not required to remedy racial inequality.²⁹

The year before, the Supreme Court ensured that states had no obligation to make sure that schools in places like Detroit had the same financial resources as those in suburban areas. The case originated in San Antonio, where the school district challenged school funding methods based on a city’s local property taxes. Property tax–based schemes simply meant that schools in wealthy areas were well funded, while schools in poor districts struggled financially. The school district wanted a state funding scheme in which all children, no matter the local property tax base, would receive equal funding. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court ruled that the “Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages.” Disparities in school funding were perfectly compatible with the Fourteenth Amendment, the court ruled, because they were not “so irrational as to be invidiously discriminatory.”³⁰

The two cases created a perfect recipe for a conservative state government in Michigan to implement new financial policies. These policies further protected the white beachheads of privilege that surrounded Detroit, as white parents guarded their children and tax dollars from the city’s school district. By 1973, Detroit’s schools were in financial trouble, as the school system faced a $70 million deficit. Rather than redistributing the tax dollars of wealthy suburban areas to help fund Detroit’s school system and avoid future deficits, as the Rodriguez case would have mandated, the state government provided loans to cover the deficit and appointed a financial officer to ensure that Detroit would learn to fund its schools within the limited city tax resources available. Managers of the Detroit school system made tough choices. Class sizes grew, and schools ran short of basic school resources, such as paper and textbooks. Some high schools cut college-preparation courses, such as advanced calculus. These cuts unfolded just as Sjogren began to place even more emphasis on advanced placement courses in UM’s admissions decisions.³¹

The fact that industry, tax dollars, and increasingly whites were moving outside city lines in the 1970s helped change what was at stake in addressing urban problems. When Detroit was no longer a political and industrial power base for whites, the social problem of large numbers of young, unemployed African Americans took on a different narrative. Young African Americans were simply seen as a threat to individuals’ security—not threats to the future of a place vital to the nation’s economic and political future. Rather than focusing on the policies that threatened the economic security of Detroit’s residents, pundits marked Detroit as a dangerous place that couldn’t be saved. The city found state and federal resources to bulk up its police force but found few resources to improve the education and employment opportunities for residents. As historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann argues, the tough-on-crime policies that emerged in the 1970s “helped absolve government of responsibility for marginalized people’s well-being and accountability to their voices.”³²

Growing attention to crime in urban America captured much of the press’s attention just as UM officials and faculty were debating the fate of policies that would affect black students. On August 15, 1976, almost two hundred young African Americans attacked concertgoers at Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit. Hundreds reported that they were assaulted and robbed. Then stories of gang members breaking store windows downtown were reported. The Cobo Hall incident came on the heels of other nationally publicized incidents of violence in Detroit, including a woman who was abducted and raped after her car suffered a flat tire on the highway, and thirty-two bus passengers who were held hostage and robbed during rush hour. Crime also framed portrayals of Detroit’s public schools: A teenage girl suffered a gunshot wound at the front door of Denby High School. A janitor was raped in a classroom at Cody High School. A Northeastern High School student was shot in the buttocks as he approached the school’s entrance. “The schools, like the city they serve, are learning to live with violence,” a Detroit Free Press journalist concluded.³³

The message in national media outlets was that although crime plagued many cities, Detroit was unique. By 1974, Detroit took on the unwanted reputation as the “murder capital of the world.” “I am outraged,” one Detroit writer concluded in the New York Times. “Young Black hoodlums control the streets. People are held up. Homes are broken into. People are murdered.” Detroit “may, in a real sense, be dead,” he concluded. “The first dead large city in the nation.”³⁴

Dead. Not broken. Dead.

This, of course, was an unfair characterization of Detroit. The city was filled with people fighting against the headwinds of a new political economy. Nevertheless, those people didn’t get to define national perception—and they didn’t get to influence the perception of officials at the University of Michigan.³⁵

These were the popular images of Detroit as UM faculty and administrators listened to Goodman’s and Sjogren’s policy proposals, which would change the character of affirmative action. The Detroit school system was cutting advanced preparation courses as it dealt with a budget shortfall. Students were getting shot in front of schools. All these images could have been justifications for a renewed commitment to Detroit students. But as the UM community feared the loss of elite status in a new, more competitive environment, faculty and administrators again chose to privilege status over racial justice.

If perceptions of Detroit helped support Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies, the declining power of black campus activism also made it easier to attack the academic merits of black students. The TWCC/BAM II protest represented the last gasp of the well-organized student protests for racial justice that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. UM’s history reveals a clear difference in the way university officials handled racial inclusion when they feared black student protest and when they didn’t. The threat of black student activism made officials think—not always successfully—about the consequences of the words they used to characterize black students and the initiatives they proposed. The lack of resistance Goodman and Sjogren experienced shows what could happen when university officials no longer feared the consequences of black campus protest.³⁶

Sjogren’s and Goodman’s intellectual assaults on UM’s black students gave opponents of affirmative action an opportunity to join in mainstream debates about racially attentive policies. One of these opponents was Carl Cohen. The philosophy professor was one of the only UM faculty members who publicly denounced affirmative action. Cohen must have known that his views about affirmative action were unpopular at UM. Even as faculty members supported Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policies, which would hurt Detroit students, faculty meeting minutes suggest that most faculty members believed these new policies would allow Sjogren and Goodman to increase black enrollment. The faculty’s message to Sjogren to “give us more minorities and smarter minorities” hardly represented Cohen’s anti–affirmative action views. But the environment of the 1970s still offered him opportunities to shape affirmative action practices.³⁷

While the new discussions that questioned black students’ academic capabilities energized Cohen, he was still a political realist. He wasn’t going to convince his colleagues and UM officials to eliminate racially attentive practices. Cohen was a regular at faculty meetings in the 1970s and was even on the LSA admissions committee in the late 1970s. He had plenty of opportunities to raise his voice against affirmative action. Only once, in a Senate Assembly meeting in 1976, did Cohen raise his voice against affirmative action, suggesting that merit scholarships should be based on ability, not race.³⁸

Instead, Cohen made a conscious choice to try to curtail affirmative action practices at UM rather than try to eliminate them. The debates over quality in the mid-1970s gave him the perfect opportunity to limit affirmative action. Cohen fanned the flames of the university’s declining status and the poor quality of students entering the university. Cohen let his colleagues make demands for more minority students without objection, but he continued to push them to call for “better” students. Sjogren and Goodman probably never needed Cohen’s help; there were enough faculty members who wanted minority students with higher standardized test scores to support the new policies. Nevertheless, the fact that Cohen was such an ever-present voice in these discussions showed that the mid-1970s offered space for affirmative action opponents to join mainstream discussions about the future of affirmative action. The absence of rhetoric calling for the end of affirmative action in UM’s faculty meetings, then, hides some of the anti–affirmative action sentiment that drove new affirmative action practices.³⁹

Cohen must have seen the mid-1970s as a moment of possibility. As he worked to modify UM’s affirmative action practices, he worked with Allan Bakke’s lawyer in the most important anti–affirmative action case of the decade. Allan Bakke, a white student, didn’t gain admission to the University of California–Davis Medical School and was suing on the grounds that the medical school discriminated against him on the basis of race. After the California Supreme Court ruled in Bakke’s favor, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. At that moment, Bakke’s lawyer, Reynold Colvin, came across Cohen’s published writings on affirmative action and was impressed. They exchanged phone calls and letters about the case. Cohen tried to modify Colvin’s strategy as the attorney prepared his briefs for the Supreme Court. Cohen worried about Colvin’s emphasis on the perniciousness of racial quotas. The University of California–Davis Medical School reserved 16 out of 100 seats in each incoming class for minority candidates. Cohen didn’t want Colvin to differentiate quotas from any other selection process that took race into account. They were all equally pernicious in Cohen’s mind. Emphasizing the problem of quotas, Cohen worried, would give the Supreme Court the opportunity to rule narrowly, striking down quotas but allowing other forms of affirmative action, such as UM’s system.⁴⁰

Of course, that’s exactly what happened. In a divided decision, Justice Lewis Powell broke the deadlock by finding a middle ground. His opinion struck down racial quotas but allowed other forms of affirmative action, as long as race was used as one of many factors in the admissions decision. Powell went further, concluding that universities could not use affirmative action to correct a long history of societal discrimination. Instead, they could use race as a factor in admissions to create the educational benefits of a diverse student body or to correct specific policies of discrimination within an institution.⁴¹

The Bakke decision didn’t frighten officials at the University of Michigan. UM officials interpreted the decision narrowly and paid little attention to the nuances of Powell’s opinion. All of their attention 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. As Theodore St. Antoine, dean of UM’s Law School, said after the ruling, “Affirmative action is still alive and kicking.”⁴²

Soon after the decision, UM’s admissions office created the most racially attentive affirmative action admissions system in the university’s history. By 1979, admissions officials evaluated students using a separate admissions grid for underrepresented minority applicants. Using only applicants’ grade point averages and standardized test scores, admissions officers found the appropriate box in the grid that gave them an initial recommendation to admit, reject, or delay an application. When the admissions office received an undergraduate application from a black, Hispanic, or Native American applicant—Asian Americans weren’t part of the affirmative action program—the admissions counselor placed an orange dot on the application, so they would know which grid to use. If an underrepresented minority student’s grades or SAT scores were lower than the minimum SAT score or high school grade point average that Sjogren identified as acceptable for admission, the admissions counselor placed a “Y” on the application, which indicated that the student might be eligible for the Opportunity Program. Generally, any minority student with a grade point average of 3.0 or above and an SAT score of at least 850 were admitted. Students with GPAs between 2.9 and 2.7 and SAT scores between 850 and 750 were evaluated to see if they were good candidates for the Opportunity Program and the Bridge Program. The grid offered only an admissions recommendation, which an admissions officer would evaluate more closely, so minority students could still receive a rejection letter even if their scores fell into an admission category. For example, if counselors determined that the students’ high school curriculum didn’t prepare the student for UM’s coursework, counselors could still reject the applicant. Nevertheless, when UM officials decided to place questions about race on applications, it gave Sjogren an opportunity to create a new system that evaluated all underrepresented minority applicants with a separate admissions grid.⁴³

The 1970s must have left Carl Cohen frustrated. Helping to raise admissions criteria at UM represented his only victory. As someone who felt that affirmative action was morally unjust, he now worked at a university that employed the most race-conscious affirmative action program in its history.

“Who Won?” asked a New York Times article in the aftermath of the Bakke decision. The case didn’t lend itself to easy analysis. There was no clear victor, and no clear loser. But the article tried to simplify the answer. The proponents of affirmative action won. Allan Bakke might have been admitted to medical school and quotas might be unconstitutional, but proponents of racially attentive admissions policies “gained the blessing of the Supreme Court.”⁴⁴

What didn’t appear in the New York Times’s report of the case was the struggle over affirmative action unfolding at places like the University of Michigan. Black enrollment started to decline slowly at institutions nationwide in the late 1970s. Despite the national attention he received, Allan Bakke didn’t turn out to be the greatest threat to racial equity at the University of Michigan in the 1970s. Some of the most important threats to racial equity at UM were sitting in the boardrooms and offices on campus.⁴⁵

As reporters flocked to the Supreme Court, UM officials and faculty members were about to face a new challenge. In the mid-1970s, when faculty and UM officials contemplated changes to affirmative action, the outcomes of Sjogren’s and Goodman’s policy changes were still uncertain. In fact, faculty members and high-level officials showed some optimism that these policy changes could sustain—and maybe even raise—black enrollment, even if those students might come from different places and socioeconomic backgrounds. But by the late 1970s, the policy outcomes were clear. Black enrollment was plummeting.⁴⁶

Part of the problem came from the decision to raise the minimum SAT and high school grade point average required for admission, while also placing more emphasis on a college preparatory curriculum in evaluating applicants. This had an immediate impact on admission rates. In 1973, the admission rate for first-year applicants to OP was 71.9 percent. Between 1978 and 1982, the admission rate for all black first-year applicants hovered between 38.2 and 41.7 percent. This isn’t a direct comparison, as not all black students applied through OP in the early 1970s, but about 70 percent of black students did gain admissions through OP in that era. Black enrollment, not surprisingly, fell as admission rates declined. In the fall of 1976, before the admissions policies took effect, 965 black undergraduate students enrolled in LSA. A year later, that number dropped to 872. In 1978, black enrollment rose slightly to 877, only to plummet to 805 in 1979. African American enrollment in LSA dropped every year thereafter until it reached 660 in 1983. A similar trend was unfolding across the university. In 1983, black enrollment at UM represented 4.9 percent of the student body, the lowest percentage since 1971.⁴⁷

The drop in black enrollment revealed that recruiting what Sjogren called “high quality” black students was more difficult than he had originally thought. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sjogren entered into a national recruiting battle for the black students with the highest standardized test scores. Just identifying these students presented a formidable obstacle. Sjogren put new resources into national databases. By 1977, the admissions office started buying from the College Board the names and contact information of minority students who self-reported grade point averages of 3.5 and scored at least 45 on the verbal section and 50 on the math section of the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT). The university also used the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, which linked universities with “highly qualified” black students through organized interview sessions in different cities. During the 1979–80 academic year, the university attended six of these sessions around the country, which gave recruiters about six hundred prospective students.⁴⁸

If finding “high quality” black students represented an obstacle, getting them to enroll at UM proved even more difficult. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Sjogren knew that he needed merit aid to recruit these students. By 1978, the admissions office used three merit-aid programs to recruit minority students: the Academic Recognition Scholarship, the Regents-Alumni Scholarship, and the Michigan Annual Giving Program. None of the programs were exclusively for minority students, but each were supposed to give special consideration to black, Hispanic, and Native American students. Nevertheless, these programs largely benefited white and Asian American applicants. In 1979, of the 1,300 students nominated for the Academic Recognition Scholarship, 19 (1.4 percent) were underrepresented minorities. Of the 626 students nominated for the Regents-Alumni Scholarship, 43 (6.8 percent) were underrepresented students. And of the 1,400 students nominated for the Michigan Annual Giving Program, 18 (1.3 percent) were underrepresented students.⁴⁹

These numbers reveal that Sjogren initiated the new affirmative action admissions practices before adequate financial aid policies were in place to support his focus on “high quality” black students who usually didn’t qualify for generous need-based financial aid packages. When an admissions staff member called twenty-eight black students from Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, who were admitted to UM but did not enroll, he found out who Michigan was competing with: Yale, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Brown, and Northwestern. When the staff member asked the students why they chose those schools over UM, most of the students responded that those schools offered more scholarship money.⁵⁰

Even as Sjogren’s efforts to recruit black students with high standardized test scores from outside the state stumbled, Goodman had initiated and still maintained policies that limited the size of the Opportunity Program. In 1971, 70 percent of the university’s black students enrolled in OP. By 1977, the ratio of black OP to black non-OP students was 63 to 38. By 1978, the ratio was 53 to 47. Together with Sjogren’s policy failures, Goodman’s reforms to OP caused black enrollment to plummet.⁵¹

Goodman’s policy changes effectively severed ties between the University of Michigan and its primary recruiting pool: working-class black students from Detroit. Reducing OP’s size not only threw many of these students into Sjogren’s new affirmative action admissions program, with its stronger emphasis on SAT scores and a college preparatory curriculum, but also cut those students off from important need-based aid at a time when federal financial aid was declining. Since its inception in 1972, the Pell Grant program had been the most important piece of federal funding for low-income students at UM. Between 1975 and 1990, the purchasing power of the maximum Pell Grant award declined dramatically. Other federal grants did not fill the gap. Instead, federally backed student loans filled in to help students pay for college.⁵²

Still, the Opportunity Program’s story reveals the problem with focusing too closely on federal financial aid in explaining why low-income students struggled to gain access to higher education institutions. Even before these cuts, federal grants never completely paid for working-class black students’ education at UM. With money from UM’s general fund, the Opportunity Program filled in the gap between federal dollars and the cost to attend UM. When Goodman cut the size of the program, the university’s general fund contributions to OP students’ financial aid declined from $2,861,924 in the 1974–75 academic year to $1,775,039 in 1978–79. Given the university’s changing priorities, the money the university saved on OP likely went into merit aid programs. Now with Goodman’s policy changes, low-income students who scored too high on the SAT to gain entrance to the Opportunity Program but not high enough to qualify for a merit scholarship did not have access to OP’s generous need-based package, taken in part from UM’s general fund. By 1982, more minority students from families making less than $6,000 (equivalent to the buying power of just over $16,000 in 2018) were enrolled outside the Opportunity Program than within it, forcing them to find other ways to finance their education. The fact that this happened at the same moment that Pell Grants were declining made the gap between federal grants and the cost of tuition even greater.⁵³

Ironically, Goodman’s policy changes helped finance a large number of middle-class students who enrolled in OP. It turned out that many of the students who applied to UM and scored low enough on the SAT to gain entrance into OP were actually middle-class black students from Michigan. In 1982, five students from families making over $52,000 ($138,964 adjusted for inflation); four students from families making between $46,000 and $51,999 ($122,930 and $138,961); eleven students from families making $40,000 to $45,999 ($106,895 to $122,927); nine students from families making $36,000 to $39,000 ($96,206 to $104,233); and twenty-four students from families making $30,000 to $35,999 ($90,172 to $96,203) took advantage of the financial benefits of the Opportunity Program. This meant that low-income black students who scored too high on the SAT to gain entrance through OP received less generous financial packages than middle-class OP students with lower SAT scores.⁵⁴

All these policy changes helped transform the makeup of black students at the University of Michigan. UM officials never exclusively recruited black students from working-class backgrounds, but the working-class black community in the state’s cities reaped most of the benefits of OP in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1968, for example, 71 percent of the fathers of OP students held unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. When Sjogren and Goodman shifted affirmative action admissions policies, the socioeconomic character of the black student body changed. In 1983, after five full classes of black students were recruited and admitted under the new admissions and financial aid policies, the median parental income of black students was $31,400 ($80,909 adjusted for inflation). Clearly, this wasn’t the same black student population that walked onto campus in 1968.⁵⁵

Co-optation was a long-term process that adapted to changing circumstances in order to align inclusion with the university’s more important values and priorities. As campus leaders perceived new threats to the future institutional status of the University of Michigan in the mid-1970s, officials created new inclusion practices that they argued would preserve UM’s elite reputation. In this context, UM officials transformed the purpose of affirmative action. No longer seeing affirmative action as a tool to address inequality in the state’s cities, officials crafted new admissions and financial aid policies that sought to recruit and admit largely middle-class black students from the nation’s suburbs. In the process, they led an intellectual assault on working-class black students living in cities like Detroit.

The declining power of the black campus movement provided the backdrop for these attacks. In a period in which administrators no longer feared organized protests, they had more power to shape the meaning and character of inclusion. Chapter 6 documents administrators’ efforts to sustain these policies as black students once again tried to organize and push for more equitable practices. Administrators turned to the language of diversity to justify and maintain the racial retrenchment.