Rise of the Black Campus Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-103
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Black Student ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
Successful Student ◽  
Black Campus Movement ◽  
Managerial Strategy ◽  
The University

This chapter looks at the rise of the black campus movement. University of Michigan (UM) leaders were not ready for black campus activism; they took comfort in the fact that black activism was still something unfolding off campus. That all changed in the late 1960s. Black activism that took over buildings and shut down classes threatened university operations. The black campus activists also offered more radical visions of inclusion than federal bureaucrats had. They wanted to create an institution that saw racial justice as the driving force of its mission. A new president led the University of Michigan through these protests. Arriving at the university in January of 1968, Robben Fleming introduced a new managerial strategy to co-opt activism. His efforts worked briefly to stem the tide of black student protests in the late 1960s, but they ultimately failed when Fleming did not provide the types of policies and initiatives that would satisfy activists. By 1970, black student activists organized the most successful student strike in the university's history, calling into question whether UM leaders could retain control of the meaning and character of racial inclusion.

Affirmative Action for Whom?

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Black Students ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
Suburban Areas ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The University

This chapter addresses the new affirmative action policies in the University of Michigan (UM), which ultimately led to the racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Almost all the enrollment gains made since the Black Action Movement (BAM) were reversed. During these years, black enrollment fell from 7.25 percent to 4.9 percent of UM's student body by 1983. 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. Ultimately, 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. 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.

The Origins of Affirmative Action

2020 ◽  
pp. 40-66
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Workplace Justice ◽  
Federal Contracts ◽  
The University

This chapter examines the origins of affirmative action in the University of Michigan (UM). The pressure that led to the university's first undergraduate affirmative action admissions program came from a federal bureaucrat and the president of the United States, who were both responding to black activism for workplace justice. Yet this pressure never threatened UM with the loss of lucrative federal contracts or potential court cases. UM adopted affirmative action in 1964 because people at the top of the institution wanted the university to change. This environment of weak federal coercion created a perfect recipe for co-optation. After the initial dose of federal pressure, UM officials took control of the purpose and character of affirmative action, creating a program that preserved the university's long-established priorities and values. It is no surprise, then, that between 1964 and 1967, black enrollment rose from only 0.5 to 1.65 percent of the student body. However, given that African Americans constituted more than 10 percent of the state population, affirmative action made a small dent in the racial disparities at UM.

Medicine In A Changing Society, by Lawrence Corey, M.D., Steven E. Saltman, M.D., and Michael F. Epstein, M.D. Saint Louis: The C. V. Mosby Company, 1972, 228 pp., $6.50

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 764-764
Author(s):  
Donald C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Saint Louis ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
School Of Public Health ◽  
Health Course ◽  
The University

Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight was a vintage year for student activists. Conflicts between students and faculty were the rule rather than the exception. When they occurred in medical schools they frequently focused on the teaching of the social and preventive aspects of medicine. Such was the case at the University of Michigan, where "frustration with the public health course" led students into an open confrontation with the School of Public Health. In the discussions which followed, a number of changes were agreed upon.

Successful student activism in contemporary Italian universities

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-358
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Cini
Keyword(s):  
Student Activism ◽  
Governance Structure ◽  
Revision Process ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
Successful Student ◽  
Amplifying Effect ◽  
University Leaders ◽  
Student Mobilization ◽  
The University

This article assesses the strategies that the Italian student activists adopted in order to influence the revision process of the governance structure of their universities in 2011. Which kind of strategy has enabled these activists to influence more successfully this process? I argue that the joint pressure of insiders and outsiders allows student activists to get their voice more effectively heard from the university leaders than when one of the two forms of pressure is absent. The ‘power of the streets’ exerted by the ‘outsiders’, combined with the institutional power of the ‘insiders’, produces a significant amplifying effect in the governing bodies. University leaders fear this kind of alliance, as they perceive that insiders with a strong tie with other actors are the expression of a collective voice that is difficult to neutralize. On the other hand, the outsiders are also aware that their collective strength is more likely to be translated into institutional power and action from their allies and/or representatives. To empirically probe this proposition, I have singled out three Italian universities (University of Turin, Sapienza of Rome, and Federico II of Naples), which witnessed high levels of student mobilization in the past years (2008–13), and where student activists and their organizations adopted the most different array of strategies. More specifically, while at the University of Turin the student activists were able to deploy simultaneously both forms of pressure, at the Federico II of Naples and Sapienza of Rome one of the two forms was lacking.

“How Can We Avoid a Columbia?”

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-180
Author(s):  
Ronald W. Schatz
Keyword(s):  
New Hampshire ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
University Of California ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Universities And Colleges ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Clark Kerr ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of New Hampshire

American universities were unprepared for the explosion of student protests on their campuses in the mid-1960s. Consequently, trustees of many leading universities appointed their industrial relations professors—the National War Labor Board vets and their protégés—as their new presidents, chancellors, and top deans. Clark Kerr botched the job at the University of California at Berkeley, but the Labor Board vets were more successful elsewhere. They not only mediated conflicts on their campuses but designed conflict-resolution systems that remain in place at universities and colleges throughout the nation. Their systems drew on the models they created with unions and management in the 1940s. This chapter explains the development by focusing on Robben Fleming at the University of Michigan, John McConnell at the University of New Hampshire, and John Dunlop at Harvard University.

Gratz v. Bollinger

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-242
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Undergraduate Admissions ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Selective Incorporation ◽  
The University

This chapter studies Gratz v. Bollinger, which challenged the racially attentive undergraduate admissions practices of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in the University of Michigan (UM). Grutter v. Bollinger, which challenged the Law School's admissions practices, was filed soon thereafter. These cases put UM on a crash course with the Supreme Court. The chapter then highlights UM's defense of affirmative action, showing how the university's co-optation of racial justice aligned with the rightward shift of the Supreme Court since the 1980s. UM leaders' preference for diversity over the social justice rationale, their discomfort with enrollment targets, their efforts to make affirmative action serve business interests, and their selective incorporation of social science that promoted the benefits of interracial contact all made UM's chances of swaying at least one conservative justice more likely.

Undermining Racial Justice

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Court Case ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Campus Leaders ◽  
The People ◽  
Supreme Court Case ◽  
The University

Over the last sixty years, administrators on college campuses nationwide have responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible. This bold argument is at the center of this book. Focusing on the University of Michigan, often a key talking point in national debates about racial justice thanks to the contentious Gratz v. Bollinger 2003 Supreme Court case, the book argues that UM leaders incorporated black student dissent selectively into the institution's policies, practices, and values. This strategy was used to prevent activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice. Despite knowing that racial disparities would likely continue, the book demonstrates that these administrators improbably saw themselves as champions of racial equity. What the book contends is not that good intentions resulted in unforeseen negative consequences, but that the people who created and maintained racial inequities at premier institutions of higher education across the United States firmly believed they had good intentions in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The case of the University of Michigan fits into a broader pattern at elite colleges and universities and is a cautionary tale for all in higher education. As the book illustrates, inclusion has always been a secondary priority, and, as a result, the policies of the late 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new and enduring era of racial retrenchment on campuses nationwide.

The Michigan Mandate

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-214
Author(s):  
Matthew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Black Students ◽  
White Students ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Underrepresented Minority ◽  
Underrepresented Minority Students ◽  
Interracial Contact ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
Admissions Policies ◽  
Racial Inclusion ◽  
The University

This chapter focuses on the Michigan Mandate, one of the most ambitious racial inclusion initiatives in the University of Michigan's (UM) history. The initiative responded to black student activists who, in 1987, led a campus-wide protest that threatened to shut down university operations. The Michigan Mandate allocated unprecedented resources to repair UM's racial climate and increase underrepresented minority students, faculty, and staff. However, the Mandate did not represent an institutional revolution; the Michigan Mandate represented a deliberate attempt to co-opt the student movement for racial justice on campus and gain administrative control of racial inclusion. Although the Mandate raised black enrollment and redistributed millions of dollars to inclusion initiatives, it sustained some of the most important pieces of co-optation. UM officials continued to protect the admissions policies that targeted middle-class black students living outside cities. Officials also continued to privilege the goal of combating white students' prejudice through interracial contact over addressing black students' social alienation. Diversity continued to serve as a key intellectual foundation in sustaining these priorities.

scholarly journals What Now for the Zimbabwean Student Demonstrator? Online Activism and Its Challenges for University Students in A COVID-19 Lockdown

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Bekithemba Dube ◽  
Baldwin Hove
Keyword(s):  
Student Activism ◽  
University Student ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
State Security ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
Theoretical Paper ◽  
The University ◽  
Geographical Space

University student activism is generally characterized by protests and demonstrations by students who are reacting to social, political, and economic challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized university student activism, and closed the geographical space for protests and demonstrations. The pandemic locked students out of the university campus, thus, rendering the traditional strategies of mass protests and demonstrations impossible. The COVID-19-induced lockdowns made it difficult, if not impossible, to mobilise for on-campus demonstrations and protests. It seems the pandemic is the last nail in the coffin of on-campus student protests. This theoretical paper uses a collective behaviour framework to explain the evolution of student activism in Zimbabwe, from the traditional on-campus politics to virtual activism. It discusses the challenges associated with cybernetic activism. The paper argues that, despite challenges, Zimbabwean university student activists need to migrate to a new world of digital technology and online activism. In the migration to online activism, students activists face a plethora of challenges. On top of the already existing obstacles, activists face new operational challenges related to trying to mobilise a constituency that has relocated to cyberspace. Student activists utilize the existing digital infrastructure to advance their politics, in spite of a hostile state security system and harsh economic environment, and other operational challenges. 

Novae in the Magellanic Clouds

1979 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 96-101
Author(s):  
J.A. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Large Magellanic Cloud ◽  
Magellanic Cloud ◽  
Magellanic Clouds ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spectroscopic Information ◽  
Objective Prism ◽  
The University ◽  
Small Cloud ◽  
Low Dispersion

During the past several years, a systematic search for novae in the Magellanic Clouds has been carried out at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The Curtis Schmidt telescope, on loan to CTIO from the University of Michigan is used to obtain plates every two weeks during the observing season. An objective prism is used on the telescope. This provides additional low-dispersion spectroscopic information when a nova is discovered. The plates cover an area of 5°x5°. One plate is sufficient to cover the Small Magellanic Cloud and four are taken of the Large Magellanic Cloud with an overlap so that the central bar is included on each plate. The methods used in the search have been described by Graham and Araya (1971). In the CTIO survey, 8 novae have been discovered in the Large Cloud but none in the Small Cloud. The survey was not carried out in 1974 or 1976. During 1974, one nova was discovered in the Small Cloud by MacConnell and Sanduleak (1974).

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