The Origins of Diversity: Managing Race at the University of Michigan, 1963-2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Matthew Johnson August, 2011 Examining Committee Members: David Farber, Advisory Chair, History Beth Bailey, History Bryant Simon, History and American Studies Heather Thompson, History and African American Studies Kareem Johnson, Psychology ii ABSTRACT I make two arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that institutions and the people who managed them mattered in the fight for racial justice. At the University of Michigan, activists and state actors successfully pushed administrators to create new policies to increase minorities’ access to the University, but it was University presidents, admissions officers, housing officials, deans and faculty members who had to put the ideal of racial justice into practice. These institutional managers, many of whom had never participated in a civil rights protest, had to rethink admissions and recruiting policies, craft new curriculum and counseling services and create new programs to address racial tension. In short, this is the story of what happened when institutional managers at the University of Michigan put the civil rights movement through the meat grinder of implementation. The second argument concerns the origins of the concepts and practices of diversity. Scholars have shown that activists, politicians and federal bureaucrats were responsible for the origins of affirmative action. In other words, institutions that implemented race-conscious admissions or hiring practices reacted to both the activists who insisted that institutions had a social responsibility to use affirmative action to address the racial inequities in American society, and to the state actors who enforced this ideal. If activists and state actors invented affirmative action, I argue that institutional managers created the concept of diversity. At the University of Michigan, the concept of diversity emerged out of a long struggle to implement race-conscious policies and carry iii out the ideal that the University had a social responsibility to address racial inequity in the state of Michigan. iv Acknowledgments A dissertation is a collaborative effort and this one is no exception. At the University of Michigan, staff members at the Bentley Historical Library proved invaluable in finding important collections relevant to my dissertation. Furthermore, former and current University of Michigan faculty members, administrators and students graciously took time out of their busy lives to speak with me about issues of race on campus. Thank you James Duderstadt, Cliff Sjogren, Charles Moody, George Goodman, Mark Chesler, Lee Gill and Ronald Thompson. Dissertations are expensive endeavors and I would not have been able to complete this project without generous fellowships. I want to thank the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) for funding two research trips to Ann Arbor and for providing funding for an entire semester of writing with no teaching or grading responsibilities. I would also like to thank all of the participants in CHAT’s year-long seminar for providing helpful feedback on an important chapter of this dissertation. I will be forever thankful to the faculty members who took an interest in my intellectual growth. Two former mentors, Robert Griffith and Hal Rothman, recently passed away. They introduced me to the historian’s craft as an undergraduate and showed me that history is not just an intellectual pursuit. Hal sent me an email of encouragement before I started the PhD program at Temple even after he lost the ability to type it himself. I will never forget that. At Temple, special thanks goes to Andrew Isenberg and Arthur Schmidt who did not serve on my dissertation committee, but provided invaluable mentoring through my first years in the program. Thank you Bryant Simon for never letting me answer a tough question with a simple answer and for pushing v me to better define the actors in this dissertation. Heather Thompson joined my dissertation committee at a crucial juncture and helped me make tough decisions about the scope of this project. Without her guidance I would still be at the proposal stage of the dissertation process. Beth Bailey and David Farber split time as my advisor at Temple. Beth guided me through my comprehensive exams and David guided me through my dissertation. Together they taught me what it means to be a historian. During my five years at Temple, I was lucky to be in a competitive but friendly environment. I will miss the classroom conversations, impromptu dissertation workshops and quizzo nights. Thank you to the following graduate students who helped me think through complex problems in my dissertation and met me for lunch and beers: Timothy Cole, Claude Barnes, Holger Lowendorf, Ryan Edgington, Kate Scott, Dan Royles, Brenna O’Rourke, Ben Brandenberg, Josh Wolf, Susan Brandt, Carla Stephens, Kelly Shannon and Michele Louro. A special thanks goes to Abby Perkiss who has probably listened to more iterations of this dissertation than anyone else. If that was not enough, she introduced me to my partner, Alessandra. Alessandra and I met just months before I began writing the proposal for this dissertation. She has read every word that made it onto the following pages, and even many of those that did not. She has been everything that I could ask for: editor, friend, champion and partner. This dissertation is as much Alessandra’s as it is mine. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1 THE ORIGINS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ..........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 RACE, EQUITY AND QUALITY ............................................................26 CHATPER 3 MANAGING RACE AND SPACE ON CAMPUS ....................................77 CHAPTER 4 WHO SHOULD THE UNIVERSITY SERVE: RACE, CLASS AND ACCESS .................................................................................................................111 CHAPTER 5 IMPLEMENTING THE MIGHIGAN MANDATE .................................150 CHAPTER 6 DEFENDING DIVERSITY ......................................................................195 EPILOGUE MAKING RACE MATTER IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS .....225 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................236 vii INTRODUCTION Historians rarely depict managers of institutions as important actors in the civil rights movement. Most historians of the movement focus on activists marching down crowded streets or protesting outside universities and businesses; lawyers bringing lawsuits to fight racial discrimination; and politicians fighting over major pieces of civil rights legislation. When managers of institutions do appear, they often play bit roles as obstructionists to the goals of racial justice. 1 Institutional managers remain on the margins of historical accounts of the civil rights movement, but I contend that they played fundamental roles in the fight for racial justice in the United States. I make two arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that institutions and the people who managed them mattered in the fight for racial justice. At Michigan, activists and state actors successfully pushed administrators to create new policies to increase minorities’ access to the University, but it was University presidents, admissions officers, housing officials, deans and faculty members who had to put the ideal of racial justice into practice. These institutional managers, many of whom had never participated in a civil rights protest, had to rethink admissions and recruiting policies, craft new curriculum and counseling services and create new programs to address racial tension. In 1 Some examples works that portray institutional managers as obstructionists: Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Anthony Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Timothy Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Thomas Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945-1969,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2004): 145-173; Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). viii short, this is the story of what happened when institutional managers at the University of Michigan put the civil rights movement through the meat grinder of implementation. The second argument concerns the origins of the concepts and practices of diversity. Scholars have shown that activists, politicians and federal bureaucrats were responsible for the origins of affirmative action. In other words, institutions that