Sustaining Racial Retrenchment

This chapter describes how the University of Michigan (UM) leaders fought to preserve the new affirmative action 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 the new 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, did not 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 the new 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.

Rise of the Black Campus Movement

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.