A 50 Year History of Social Diversity
At the University of Michigan

James J. Duderstadt
The Millennum Project
The University of Michigan

Copyright © 2015 The Millennium Project, The University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
The Millennium Project
The University of Michigan
2001 Duderstadt Center
2281 Bonisteel Boulevard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2094
http://milproj.dc.umich.edu
NOTE: The quilt on the cover was constructed from T-shirts relecting the
highly diverse student organizations of the University and presented to the
Duderstadts in 1996 to celebrate their presidency.

1

A 50 Year History of Social Diversity
at the University of Michigan
James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus
The University of Michigan was established in 1817
in the village of Detroit by an act of the Northwest Territorial government and inanced through the sale of Indian lands granted by the United States Congress. Since
it beneited from this territorial land grant, the new university was subject to the Enlightenment themes of the
Northwest Ordinance guaranteeing civil rights and religious freedom. Envisioned by the people of the Michigan Territory as truly public, Michigan became the irst
university in America to successfully resist sectarian
control. Buoyed by committed students, faculty, staf,
and the citizens of our state, the University of Michigan
has consistently been at the forefront of higher education, grappling with the diicult issues of plurality and
promoting equality.
In many ways, it was at the University of Michigan
that Thomas Jeferson’s statement of the principles of
the Enlightenment in his proposition for the nation,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men
are created equal”, was most fully embraced and realized. Whether characterized by gender, race, religion,
socioeconomic background, ethnicity, or nationality–
not to mention academic interests or political persuasion–the university has always taken great pride in the
diversity of its students, faculty, and programs.
Particularly notable here was the role of Michigan
President James Angell in articulating the importance
of Michigan’s commitment to provide “an uncommon
education for the common man” while challenging the
aristocratic notion of leaders of the colonial colleges
such as Charles Eliot of Harvard. Angell argued that
Americans should be given opportunities to develop
talent and character to the fullest. He portrayed the
state university as the bulwark against the aristocracy
of wealth. However the journey to achieve Angell’s vision of the University’s public purpose did not come
easily.

As with most of higher
education, the history of
diversity at Michigan has
been complex and often
contradictory. There have
been many times when
the institution seemed to
take a step forward, only
to be followed by two
steps backward. Michigan was one of the earliest universities to admit
African-Americans and
women in the late 19th
President James Angell
century. At our founding, we attracted students
from a broad range of European ethnic backgrounds.
In the early 1800s, the population of the state swelled
with new immigrants from the rest of the country and
across the European continent. It took pride in its large
enrollments of international students at a time when
the state itself was decidedly insular. By 1860, the Regents referred “with partiality,” to the “list of foreign
students drawn thither from every section of our country.” Forty-six percent of our students then came from
other states and foreign countries. Today more than one
hundred nations are represented at Michigan.
In contrast, our record regarding Native Americans
has been disappointing. In 1817, in the treaty of Fort
Meigs, local tribes became the irst major donors when
they ceded 1,920 acres of land for “a college at Detroit.”
A month later the Territorial Legislature formed the
“university of Michigania,” and accepted the land gift
in the college’s name. Today, although the number of
Native American students enrolled is very low, they
continue to make vital cultural and intellectual contributions to the University.

2
The irst African American students arrived on campus in 1868, without oicial notice. In the years following Reconstruction, however, discrimination increased.
Black students joined together to support each other
early in the century and staged restaurant sit-ins in the
1920s. It was not until the 1960s that racial unrest inally
exploded into campus-wide concerted action.
Michigan’s history with respect to gender is also
very mixed. Michigan was the irst large university in
America to admit women. At the time, the rest of the
nation looked on with a critical eye. Many were certain
that the “experiment” would fail. The irst women who
arrived in 1870 were true pioneers, the objects of intense
scrutiny and resentment. For many years, women had
separate and unequal access to facilities and organizations. Yet, in the remaining decades of the 19th Century,
the University of Michigan provided strong leadership
for the nation. Indeed, by 1898, the enrollment of women had increased to the point where they received 53
percent of Michigan’s undergraduate degrees. However, during the early part of the 20th Century, and even
more with the returning veterans after World War I, the
representation of women in the student body declined
signiicantly. It only began to climb again during the
1970s and 1980s and, for the irst time in almost a century, once again exceeded that of men in 1996. During the
past several decades, the University took a number of
steps to recruit, promote, and support women staf and
faculty, modifying University policies to better address
their needs. True equality has come slowly, driven by
the eforts of many courageous and energetic women.

1960-1970s
The University of Michigan faltered badly in its
public purpose of achieving a campus characterized by
the diversity of the society it served in the post-WWII
years. As minority enrollments languished and racial
tensions lared in the 1960s and 1970s, it was student
activism that inally stimulated action. Although the
University had made eforts to become a more diverse
institution, both black and white students, frustrated
by the slow movement, organized into the irst Black
Action Movement (BAM) in 1970, which demanded
that the University commit to achieving 10% black enrollments. The administration building was occupied

and students boycotted classes. Yet many positive advances came from this outpouring of student solidarity.
The number of African American faculty and students
on campus increased during the 1970s, new programs
were initiated and old programs were funded.
Yet after only a few years, minority enrollments began to fall once again and funding waned by the late
1970s. Two more student movements (BAM II and III)
formed in an efort to stimulate the University to once
again take a systematic look at the diicult problems
of race on campus. While the University renewed its
eforts to achieve diversity and the enrollment of underrepresented minorities began to increase, this soon
envolved into a largely bureaucratic efort based on
airmative action and equal opportunity policies, and
minority enrollments continued to decline. Although
there were occasional expressions of concern about the
lack of University progress on these fronts, these were
not suicient to reorder University priorities until the
late 1980s.

1980s
Throughout the 1980s there were increasing signs of
a reoccurrence of racial tensions on several of the more
politically active campuses across the country. Both UC
Berkeley and Columbia had experienced the irst signs
of a new generation of student activism along racial
lines. By the late l980s concern about minority afairs
had also appeared at Michigan through a movement
known as the Free South Africa Coordinating Committee, or FSACC, led by a small group of graduate
students in the social sciences. Although the group initially built most of their activism around the case for
divestment of University holdings in irms doing business in apartheid South Africa, there were a series of
other issues including demands that the University establish Martin Luther King Day as an oicial University
holiday, that it re-evaluate the manner in which tenure
was provided to minority faculty, and that it discard
the normal admissions requirements such as the use
of standardized test scores. Although such activism
continued at a fairly vocal level, it was stable and did
not escalate until a series of racist events occurred in
early l987. This activism was generally manifested in
occasional rallies on the Diag, angry testimony to the

3

Protest Shanties on the Diag
Regents at public comments sessions, or letters to the
editor of the Michigan Daily.
Nevertheless, there were other signs that all was not
well within the University. The University was subject
to occasional attacks from both of the Detroit newspapers about its lack of success in achieving racial diversity. It was clear that the efort to recruit minority students was not a top University priority in the late l970s
and early l980s, and minority student enrollment declined throughout this period. Furthermore, the number of minority faculty had leveled of and began to decline; indeed, there were losses of key minority faculty
throughout the l980s. This led to a growing sense of
frustration on the part of a number of minority faculty
and staf.
Early in l987, student activism shifted from divestment to focus instead on racism as its rallying cry.
FSACC was renamed the United Coalition Against Racism, or UCAR, and the rallies on the Diag began to address incidents of racism on campus. Coincidentally, the
number of charges of racist incidents began to increase,
including the appearance of racist lyers in dormitories
and complaints about racist slurs directed against minority students. Needless to say, these charges attracted
great attention from the Detroit papers, which had become almost ixated on the subject of racism because of
the increasing racial polarization of that city.

1990s
By the late 1980s, it had become apparent that the
university had made inadequate progress in its goal to
relect the rich diversity of our nation and our world

Protests in the President’s Oice
among its faculty, students and staf. In assessing this
situation, the new administration concluded that although the University had approached the challenge
of serving an increasingly diverse population with the
best of intentions, it simply had not developed and executed a plan capable of achieving sustainable results.
More signiicantly, we believed that achieving our
goals for a diverse campus would require a very major
change in the institution itself.
It was the long-term strategic focus of our planning
that proved to be critical, because universities do not
change quickly and easily any more than do the societies of which they are a part. Michigan would have to
leave behind many reactive and uncoordinated eforts
that had characterized its past and move toward a more
strategic approach designed to achieve long-term systemic change. Sacriices would be necessary as traditional roles and privileges were challenged. In particular, we understood the limitations of focusing only on
airmative action; that is, on access, retention, and representation. The key would be to focus instead on the
success of underrepresented minorities on our campus,
as students, as faculty, and as leaders. We believed that
without deeper, more fundamental institutional change
these eforts by themselves would inevitably fail–as
they had throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The challenge was to persuade the university community that there was a real stake for everyone in seizing the moment to chart a more diverse future. People
needed to believe that the gains to be achieved through
diversity would more than compensate for the necessary sacriices. The irst and most important step was to
link diversity and excellence as the two most compel-

4

Student Access and Success
Undergraduate Student Access
Wade McCree Incentive Scholarship
King/Chavez/Parks Program
Summer programs (e.g., DAPCEP)
College Day visitation for families
Tuition grants to all Native American students
from Michigan.
Special Undergraduate Programs
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program
21st Century Program
CRLT Programs
Leadership 2017
Oice of Academic Multicultural Initiatives
Graduate Student Support
Fully funding minority graduate support
Rackham Graduate Merit Fellowship Program
Special Programs
Tapped grass-roots creativity and energy using
$ 1 M/y Presidential Initiatives Funds tor
competitive proposals from faculty and
student groups.
Results
Enrollments:
83% increase in students of color (to 28%)
90% increase in underrep min (to 15%)
57% increase in AA (to 2,715 or 9.1%)
126% increase of Latinos (to 4.3%)
100% increase in Native Americans (to 1.1%)
Graduation rates for African Americans highest
among public universities.
UM ranked 27th in nation in minority BA/BS
8th for M.S. degrees, 7th for PhD degrees
1st in African American PhDs (non HBCU’s)
Graduate education
Increased minority fellowships by 118%
Of 734 Rackham Fellows in 1994,
51% were African American,
29% were Latino
Professional Schools:
Business: 12% AA, 28% color
Medicine: 11% AA, 39% color
Law: 10% AA, 21% color

Faculty
Target of Opportunity Program
Faculty Development (Faculty Awards Program for
minority faculty)
Cluster hiring
Creating a welcoming and supportive culture (networks, centers, surveys)
Enlarging candidate pool by increasing PhD enrollments
Results
+62% for African Americans (128)
+117% for Latinos (52)
+75% for Native Americans (7)
Senior academic leadership (URM): from 14 to 25
Staf
Demanded accountability in hiring and promotion
Human Resources and Airmative Action programs
Consultation and Conciliation Services
Results
Top managers: +100% (to 10% of management)
P&A: +80 (from 449 to 816)
More Generally
Building University-wide commitments
Oice of Minority Afairs, Vice-Provost for Minority Afairs
Demanding accountability
Included in compensation review
Included in budget review
Included in appointment review
Leadership
Half of Executiver Oicers were African American
Executive VP Medical Center (Rita Dumas)
Secretary of University (Harold Johnson)
VP Research (Homer Neal)
UM Flint Chancellor Charlie Nelms
UM Dearborn Chancellor James Renick
JJD’s Successor was African American (Homer Neal)

Some Actions and Results of the Michigan Mandate by 1996

5

Minority student enrollments (percentages)

African-American student enrollments (percentages)

Graduation rates of African-American student
cohorts six years afer initial entry

Number of minority tenured and tenure-track faculty

Number of university minority graduate fellowships

Number of African-American faculty

6

The Michigan Mandate: MLK Day Unity March, addressing student and alumni groups, Professor Bunyon
Bryant, Professor Charles Moody (with President Ford), Dean Rhetaugh Dumas, Associate Vice Provost
Lester Monts, toasting the heros of the successful Michigan Mandate.
ling goals before the institution, recognizing that these
goals were not only complementary but would be tightly linked in the multicultural society characterizing our
nation and the world in the future. As we moved ahead,
we began to refer to the plan as The Michigan Mandate:
A Strategic Linking of Academic Excellence and Social
Diversity.
Over the irst two years, hundreds of discussions
with groups both on and of campus were held. We
reached out to alumni, donors, and civic and political
leaders and groups, while meeting with countless student faculty and staf groups. Great care was taken to
convey the same message to everyone as a means of
establishing credibility and building trust among all
constituencies. Meetings were sometimes contentious,
often enlightening, but rarely acrimonious. Gradually

understanding increased and support grew. Although
the plan itself came from the administration, it would
be individuals and units that would devise most of the
detailed plans for carrying it forward. University publications, administrators’ speeches and meetings, Faculty
Senate deliberations, all carried the message: Diversity
would become the cornerstone in the University’s efforts to achieve excellence in teaching, research, and
service in the multicultural nation and world in which
it would exist.
The mission and goals of the Michigan Mandate
were stated quite simply: 1) To recognize that diversity and excellence are complementary and compelling
goals for the university and to make a irm commitment
to their achievement. 2) To commit to the recruitment,
support, and success of members of historically under-

7
represented groups among our students, faculty, staf,
and leadership. 3) To build on our campus an environment that sought, nourished, and sustained diversity
and pluralism and that valued and respected the dignity and worth of every individual.
Associated with these general goals were more speciic objectives:
1) Faculty recruitment and development: To substantially increase the number of tenure-track faculty in
each underrepresented minority group; to increase the
success of minority faculty in the achievement of professional fulillment, promotion, and tenure; to increase
the number of underrepresented minority faculty in
leadership positions.
2) Student recruitment, achievement, and outreach:
To achieve increases in the number of entering underrepresented minority students as well as in total
underrepresented minority enrollment; to establish
and achieve speciic minority enrollment targets in all
schools and colleges; to increase minority graduation
rates; to develop new programs to attract back to campus minority students who have withdrawn from our
academic programs; to design new and strengthen existing outreach programs that have demonstrable impact on the pool of minority applicants to undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.
3) Staf recruitment and development: To focus on
the achievement of airmative action goals in all job
categories; to increase the number of underrepresented
minorities in key University leadership positions; to
strengthen support systems and services for minority
staf.
4) Improving the environment for diversity: To foster a culturally diverse environment; to signiicantly reduce the number of incidents of racism and prejudice
on campus; to increase community-wide commitment
to diversity and involvement in diversity initiatives
among students, faculty, and staf; to broaden the base
of diversity initiatives; to assure the compatibility of
University policies, procedures, and practice with the
goal of a multicultural community; to improve communications and interactions with and among all groups;
and to provide more opportunities for minorities to
communicate their needs and experiences and to contribute directly to the change process.

A series of carefully focused strategic actions was
developed to move the University toward these objectives. These actions were framed by the values and
traditions of the University, an understanding of our
unique culture characterized by a high degree of faculty and unit freedom and autonomy, and animated
by a highly competitive and entrepreneurial spirit. The
strategy was both complex and pervasive, involving
not only a considerable commitment of resources (e.g.,
fully funding all inancial aid for minority graduate
students) but also some highly innovative programs.
To cite just one highly successful example, the University established what was called the Target of Opportunity Program aimed at increasing the number of
minority faculty at all ranks. Traditionally, university
faculties have been driven by a concern for academic
specialization within their respective disciplines. Too
often in recent years the University had seen faculty
searches that were literally “replacement” searches
rather than “enhancement” searches. To achieve the
goals of the Michigan Mandate, the University had to
free itself from the constraints of this traditional perspective. Therefore, the administration sent out the following message to the academic units: be vigorous and
creative in identifying minority teachers/scholars who
can enrich the activities of your unit. Do not be limited
by concerns relating to narrow specialization; do not be
concerned about the availability of a faculty slot within
the unit. The principal criterion for the recruitment of
a minority faculty member is whether the individual
can enhance the department. If so, resources will be
made available to recruit that person to the University
of Michigan.
By the mid 1990s Michigan could point to signiicant
progress in achieving diversity. The representation of
underrepresented minority students, faculty, and staf
more than doubled over the decade-long efort. But,
perhaps even more signiicantly, the success of underrepresented minorities at the University improved even
more remarkably, with graduation rates rising to the
highest level among public universities, promotion and
tenure success of minority faculty members becoming
comparable to their majority colleagues, and a growing number of appointments of minorities to leadership
positions in the University. The campus climate not
only became more accepting and supportive of diversi-

8

Listening, learning, planning, and selling the Michigan Agenda for Women
ty, but students and faculty began to come to Michigan
because of its growing reputation for a diverse campus.
Perhaps most signiicantly, as the campus became
more racially and ethnically diverse, the quality of the
students, faculty, and academic programs of the University increased to the highest level in the institution’s
history. This latter fact reinforced our contention that
the aspirations of diversity and excellence were not
only compatible but, in fact, highly correlated. By every
measure, the Michigan Mandate was a remarkable success, moving the University beyond the original goals
of a more diverse campus.
Even while pursuing the racial diversity goals of the
Michigan Mandate, we realized we could not ignore
another glaring inequity in campus life. If we meant to
embrace diversity in its full meaning, we had to attend
to the long-standing concerns of women faculty, students, and staf. Here, once again, it took time–and con-

siderable efort by many women colleagues to educate
the administration to the point where we began to understand that the university simply had not succeeded
in including and empowering women as full and equal
partners in all aspects of its life and leadership.
In faculty hiring and retention, despite the increasing pools of women in many ields, the number of new
hires of women had changed only slowly during the
late twentieth century in most research universities.
In some disciplines such as the physical sciences and
engineering, the shortages were particularly acute. We
continued to sufer from the “glass ceiling” phenomenon: that is, because of hidden prejudice women were
unable to break through to the ranks of senior faculty
and administrators, though no formal constraints prohibited their advancement. The proportion of women
decreased steadily as one moved up the academic ladder. Additionally, there appeared to be an increasing

9

Number of women faculty
tendency to hire women of the tenure track as postdoctoral scholars, lecturers, clinicians, or research scientists. The rigid division among various faculty appointments ofered little or no opportunity for these
women to move into tenured faculty positions.
Many of our concerns derived from the extreme concentration of women in positions of lower status and
power—as students, lower-pay staf, and junior faculty.
The most efective lever for change might well be a rapid increase in the number of women holding positions
of high status, visibility, and power. This would not
only change the balance of power in decision-making,
but it would also change the perception of who and
what matters in the university. Finally, we needed to
bring university policies and practices into better alignment with the needs and concerns of women students
in a number of areas including campus safety, student
housing, student life, inancial aid, and childcare.
To address these challenges, the university developed and executed a second strategic efort known as
the Michigan Agenda for Women. While the actions
proposed were intended to address the concerns of
women students, faculty, and staf, many of them beneited men as well. In developing the Michigan Agenda,
we knew that diferent strategies were necessary for
diferent parts of the university. Academic units varied
enormously in the degree to which women participated as faculty, staf, and students. What might work in
one area could fail miserably in another. Some ields,
such as the physical sciences, had very few women represented among their students and faculty. For them,
it was necessary to design and implement a strategy
which spanned the entire pipeline, from K-12 outreach

to undergraduate and graduate education, to faculty
recruiting and development. For others such as the
social sciences or law, there already was a strong pool
of women students, and the challenge became one of
attracting women from this pool into graduate and
professional studies and eventually into academe. Still
other units such as education and many departments
in humanities and sciences had strong participation of
women among students and junior faculty, but sufered
from low participation in the senior ranks and in leadership roles.
Like the Michigan Mandate, the vision was again
both simple yet compelling: that by the year 2000 the
university would become the leader among American
universities in promoting and achieving the success of
women as faculty, students, and staf. Again the president took on a highly personal role in this efort, meeting with hundreds of groups on and of campus, to listen to their concerns and invite their participation in the
initiative. Rapidly there was again signiicant progress
on many fronts for women students, faculty, and staf,
including the appointment of a number of senior women faculty and administrators as deans and executive
oicers, improvement in campus safety, and improvement of family care policies and child care resources.
In 1988 Michigan appointed its irst woman Dean of
LS&A, Edie Goldenberg, in 1993 our irst Vice Provost
for Health Afairs, Rhetaugh Dumas, and in 1997 our
irst woman provost, Nancy Cantor. Finally, in 2002, the
University of Michigan named its irst woman president, Mary Sue Coleman.
The University also took steps to eliminate those
factors that prevented other groups from participating
fully in its activities. For example, we extended our antidiscrimination policies to encompass sexual orientation
and extended staf beneits and housing opportunities
to same-sex couples. This was a particularly controversial action because it was strongly opposed not only by
the religious right but also by several of the University’s Regents. Yet, this was also an issue of equity, deeply
frustrating to many faculty, staf, and students, which
required attention.
Harold Shapiro had tried on several occasions to
persuade the regents to extend its anti-discrimination
policies to include the gay community, without success.
Finally, with a supportive, albeit short-lived, Demo-

10

cratic majority among the Regents, we decided to move
ahead rapidly to put in the policy while there was still
political support, no matter how slim. The anticipated
negative reaction was rapid and angry–an attempt by
the Legislature to deduct from our appropriation the estimated cost of the same-sex couple beneits (efectively
blocked by our constitutional autonomy), a personal
phone call to the president from our Republican governor (although it was a call he did not want to make,
and he did not insist upon any particular action), and a
concerted and successful efort to place two conservative Republican candidates on our Board of Regents in
the next election (resulting in the horror of a 4-4 divided
board during my last two years as president).
We were determined to defend this action, however,
as part of a broader strategy. We had become convinced
that the university had both a compelling interest in
and responsibility to create a welcoming community,
encouraging respect for diversity in all of the characteristics that can be used to describe humankind: age,
race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, political beliefs, economic background,
geographical background.

2000s
But, of course, this story does not end with the successful achievements of the Michigan Mandate in 1996
when a new president arrived. Beginning irst with
litigation in Texas (the Hopwood decision) and then
successful referendum eforts in California and Washington, conservative groups such as the Center for Individual Rights began to attack policies such as the use
of race in college admissions. Perhaps because of Michigan’s success with the Michigan Mandate, the University soon became a target for those groups seeking to
reverse airmative action with two cases iled against
the University in 1997, one challenging the admissions
policies of undergraduates, and the second challenging
those in our Law School.
Even as the Bollinger administration launched the
expensive legal battle to defend the use of race in college admissions, it discontinued most of the efective
policies and programs created by the Michigan Mandate, in part out of concern these might complicate the
litigation battle, but also because such action was no

A quilt assembled from student T-shirts relecting the
University’s diversity in 1998 presented by student
government to the Duderstadts.
longer a priority of the new administration . Indeed,
even the mention of the Michigan Mandate became a
forbidden phrase in its efort to erase the past.
As a consequence, the enrollment of underrepresented minorities began almost immediately to drop
at Michigan, eventually declining from 1997 to 2010 by
over 50% for African American students overall and by
as much as 80% in some of UM’s professional schools.
In 1996 half (5) of the Executive Oicers were minority,
but by the early 2000s, only one out of 11 executive oicers and one out of 18 deans in the new administration
were underrepresented minorities.
Although the 2003 Supreme Court decisions were
split, supporting the use of race in the admissions policies of our Law School and opposing the formula-based
approach used for undergraduate admissions, the most
important ruling in both cases stated, in the words of
the court: “Student body diversity is a compelling state
interest that can justify the use of race in university admission. When race-based action is necessary to further
a compelling governmental interest, such action does
not violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection so long as the narrow-tailoring requirement is also

11

The decline and fall of UM’s racial diversity with a new administration in the late 1990s.

Changes in minority enrollments over past four decades

12

A comparison of Michigan with other peer institutions demonstrates the catastrophic decline in minority
enrollments that began at UM in the late 1990s and continued for the next 15 years. (Atlantic, 2014)
satisied.” Hence, the Supreme Court decisions on the
Michigan cases reairmed those policies and practices
long used by most selective colleges and universities
throughout the United States. But more signiicantly, it
reairmed both the importance of diversity in higher
education and established the principle that, appropriately designed, race could be used as a factor in programs aimed at achieving diverse campuses. Hence the
battle was won, the principle was irmly established by
the highest court of the land. We had won. Or so we
thought…
While an important battle had been won with the
Supreme Court ruling, we soon learned that the war for
diversity in higher education was far from over. As university lawyers across the nation began to ponder over
the court ruling, they persuaded their institutions to accept a very narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court
decisions as the safest course. Actually, this pattern began to appear at the University of Michigan during the
early stages of the litigation process. Although the Supreme Court decision supported the use of airmative
action (if “narrowly tailored”), many universities began
to back away from programs aimed at recruitment, inancial aid, and academic enrichment for minority undergraduate students, either eliminating entirely such
programs or opening them up to non-minority students
from low-income households. Threats of further litigation by conservative groups have intensiied this retrenchment.

After the years of efort in building successful programs such as the Michigan Mandate and defending
the importance of diversity in higher education all
the way to the Supreme Court, the tentative nature of
the decision (“narrowly tailored race considerations”)
probably caused more harm than good by unleashing
the lawyers on our campuses to block successful eforts
to broaden educational opportunity and advance the
cause of social justice. Ironically, the uses of airmative
action (and programs that involved racial preference)
actually were not high on the agenda of the Michigan
Mandate. Rather our success involved commitment, engagement, and accountability for results.
Minority enrollments continued to decline at Michigan throughout the 2010s as the new priority became attracting large numbers of wealthy out-of-state students
capable of paying high tuition and generating the revenue to compensate for the loss of state support. No effort was made to resume those programs that had been
so successful in the 1990s under the Michigan Mandate.
As the charts above indicate, Michigan’s decline in diversity ranked among the most precipitous among its
peers during this period.
In 2006, Michigan voters approved a constitutional
referendum similar to that of California’s Proposition
209 to ban the use of airmative action in public institutions. Although most of the decline in minority enrollments had occurred by this time, this referendum
prevented Michigan colleges and universities from us-

13

Change in Minority Enrollments
Minority

1996

2015

Change

African Am 2,824

1,801

-36%

Hispanic

1,473

2,018

+37%

Native Am

227

92

-60%

Underrep

4,524

3,921

-14%

Change in Minority Percentages
Minority

aluent backgrounds capable of paying the high tuition
necessary to generate revenues to compensate for the
loss of state support. The University set aside its longstanding priority of “providing a uncommon education
for the common man”, instead attracting the “uncommonly rich” students, which had major impact on its
economic diversity.

Economic Diversity

1996

2015

Change

African Am 9.3%

4.8%

-48%

Hispanic

4.5%

5.4%

+20%

Native Am

0.7%

0.25%

-64%

Asian Am

11.6%

13.5%

+13%

Underrep

14.1%

10.1%

-32%

Fresh Afric

9.3%

5.1%

-45%

The drop in underrepresented minorities
over the past 20 years.
ing even the narrowly tailored prescriptions of the 2003
Supreme Court decision, and the decline in the enrollments of underrepresented minority students, erasing
most of the gains with the Michigan Mandate strategy
in the 1990s and returning this measure of diversity to
the levels of the 1960s. More speciically (as shown in
several charts depicting the enrollments of underrepresented minorities over the past 40 years, total African
American enrollments have dropped from a peak of
9.3% in 1996 to 4.8% in 2015, and the enrollments in key
professional schools such as Medicine, Law, and Business dropped from 10%-12% to less than 3%.
While the constitutional ban on the use of airmative action resulting from a public referendum in 2006
certainly hindered the recruiting of minority students,
the most precipitous drop in enrollments began long
before the state ban on airmative action. It clearly began when a new administration halted all of the programs of the Michigan Mandate, and then following
the 2003 Supreme Court decision, when it throttled
back pressures on the deans and directors on achieving diversity. While diversity was certainly given lip
service during the 2000s through a massive public relations efort, it most assuredly was not given priority for
speciic action or strong accountability. Instead the priority was given to a rapid expansion of students from

Throughout the last decade, there has been an increasing concern that many public universities, particularly lagship research universities such as Michigan,
were also losing the economic diversity that characterized their public purpose. A 2010 report by the Education Trust, Opportunity Adrift, stated: “Founded
to provide ‘an uncommon education for the common
man’, many lagship universities have drifted away
from their historic mission”. (Haycock, 2010) Analyzing measures such as access for low-income and underrepresented minority students and the relative success
of these groups in earning diplomas, they found that
the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana received the lowest overall marks for both progress and current performance among all major public
universities in these measures of public purpose. For
example, Michigan’s percentage of Pell Grant students
in its freshman class (the most common measure of access for low-income students) has fallen to 11%, well
below most other public universities including Michigan State (23%) and the University of California (32%);
it even lags behind several of the most expensive private universities including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. (Campbell, 2015)
Yet, another important measure of the degree to
which public universities fulill their important mission of providing educational opportunities to a broad
range of society is the degree to which they enroll irst
generation college students. It is disturbing that today
less than 6% of the University’s enrollment consists of
such students, compared to 16% by its public university peers and 14% of the enrollments of highly selective
private universities.
Of comparable concern is the signiicant drop in enrollments of underrepresented minority students, dropping from 17% of undergraduates in 1996 (including

14

Michigan’s ranking in Pell Grant students lags badly behind other public universities.
9.4% African American) to 10% in 2015 (4.4% African
American). Once Michigan’s professional schools were
leaders in minority enrollments (with Medicine, Business, and Law at 12% African American enrollments
in the 1990s); today they have fallen badly to levels of
5% or less. While the very recent decline may be attributable in part to the impact of the State of Michigan’s
Proposition 2 passed in 2007 that restricted the use of
airmative action, racial diversity on campus has actually been declining for well over a decade, suggesting more fundamental concerns about the University’s
commitment to diversity.
What was happening? To be sure, the State of Michigan ranks at the bottom of the states in the amount of
need-based inancial aid it provides to college students,
requiring the University to make these commitments

from its own internal funds. But it is also due to the decision made in the late 1990s to compensate for the loss
of state support by dramatically increasing enrollments
with a bias toward out-of-state students who generate
new revenues with high tuition. Clearly students who
can pay annual tuition-room & board at the out-of-state
rates of $60,000 come from highly aluent families. Indeed, the average family income of Michigan undergraduates now exceeds $150,000 per year, more characteristic of the “top 1%” than the “common man”.

Lessons Learned
It seems appropriate to end this chapter on the University’s public purpose with several conclusions: First,
we must always keep in mind that the University of

15

Two tragic realities: 1) Michigan tuition is determined largely by state support.
Michigan is a public university, created as the irst such
institution in a young nation, evolving in size, breadth,
and quality, but always committed to a truly public
purpose of “providing an uncommon education for the
common man”.
Today there is an even more urgent reason why the
University must once again elevate diversity to a higher
priority as it looks toward the future: the rapidly changing demographics of America. The populations of most
developed nations in North America, Europe, and Asia
are aging rapidly. In our nation today there are already
more people over the age of 65 than teenagers, and
this situation will continue for decades to come. Over
the next decade the percentage of the population over
60 will grow to over 30% to 40% in the United States,
and this aging population will increasingly shift social
priorities to the needs and desires of the elderly (e.g.,
retirement security, health care, safety from crime and
terrorism, and tax relief) rather than investing in the future through education and innovation.
However, the United States stands apart from the
aging populations of Europe and Asia for one very important reason: our openness to immigration. In fact,
over the past decade, immigration from Latin America
and Asia contributed 53% of the growth in the United
States population, exceeding that provided by births
(National Information Center, 2006). This is expected
to drive continued growth in our population from 300
million today to over 450 million by 2050, augmenting our aging population and stimulating productivity

with new and young workers. As it has been so many
times in its past, America is once again becoming a nation of immigrants, beneiting greatly from their energy, talents, and hope, even as such mobility changes the
ethnic character of our nation. By the year 2030 current
projections suggest that approximately 40% of Americans will be members of minority groups; by mid-century we will cease to have any single majority ethnic
group. By any measure, we are evolving rapidly into a
truly multicultural society with a remarkable cultural,
racial, and ethnic diversity. This demographic revolution is taking place within the context of the continuing
globalization of the world’s economy and society that
requires Americans to interact with people from every
country of the world.
The increasing diversity of the American population
with respect to culture, race, ethnicity, and nationality
is both one of our greatest strengths and most serious
challenges as a nation. A diverse population gives us
great vitality. However, the challenge of increasing diversity is complicated by social and economic factors.
Today, far from evolving toward one America, our society continues to be hindered by the segregation and
non-assimilation of minority and immigrant cultures.
If we do not create a nation that mobilizes the talents of
all of our citizens, we are destined for a diminished role
in the global community and increased social turbulence. Higher education plays an important role both in
identifying and developing this talent. And the University of Michigan faces once again a major challenge in

16

Two more tragic realities: 2) although the University makes a substantial commitment to need-based inancial aid,
it is unable to compensate for the absence of a meaningful state need-based inancial aid program in Michigan.
reclaiming its leadership in building a diverse campus.
Yet there is ample evidence today from states such
as California and Texas that a restriction to race-neutral
policies will drastically limit the ability of elite programs and institutions to relect diversity in any meaningful way. In fact, many of the approaches used by the
University of California in the wake of Proposition 209
have been considered by Michigan. The UC reached
out to low-performing high schools, making it possible for students achieving at top levels in these schools
would not be penalized in admission decisions for the
weaknesses of their schools. They changed its standardized test requirements to put primary emphasis
on achievements tests rather than aptitude tests. They
sought to look more carefully at applicants to identify
those who had overcome serious obstacles in preparing themselves for higher education. They worked with
K-12 schools and community colleges to strengthen the
preparation for under represented minority students.
They launched a major efort to let students, parents,
and counselors know about the opportunities UC provided in inancial aid, broadened applications, and
preparation for attendance.
Yet, as former UC President Richard Atkinson and
his colleagues concluded, “Today if we look at enrollment overall, racial and ethnic diversity at the University of California is in great trouble. A decade later, the
legacy of Proposition 209 is clear. Despite enormous efforts, we have failed badly to achieve the goal of a student body that encompasses California’s diverse popu-

lation. The evidence suggests that–without attention to
race and ethnicity–this goal will ultimately recede into
impossibility.” Today the University of Michigan provides further evidence from the collapse of its minority
enrollments of the diiculty of achieving a diverse campus in the wake of Proposal 2.
However, when one turns to economic diversity, the
University of California provides a sharp contrast to
the University of Michigan. Today 42% of all UC undergraduates receive Pell Grants, compared to 15% at UM.
46% of UC’s entering California residents come from
families where neither parent graduated from college,
compared to 5% for UM. Approximately 25% of undergraduates come from underrepresented minority populations (African American, Chicano/Latino, and Native American) compared to 10% at UM (although this
later comparison is due in part to the very large growth
in the Latino population of California). Key to the UC’s
success is achieving this remarkable economic diversity
have been two key factors: i) the important of the state’s
Cal Grant program providing need-based inancial aid
that essentially doubles the support of Pell Grant eligible students, and ii) a strategic relationship between
California’s community colleges and the University of
California, carefully articulated in the California master plan, that enables their associated degrees to serve
as stepping stones from secondary school into baccalaureate programs at UC. In sharp contrast, the State
of Michigan during the 2000s eliminated ALL state
need-based inancial aid. Furthermore, the autonomy

17

The majority of both in-state and out-of-state UM Freshman
now come from families with incomes greater than $150,000.
granted Michigan’s community colleges allows them to
focus more on providing more lucrative adult education programs in their communities rather than serving
as “junior colleges” to prepare students for admission
to university programs.
To be sure, rising tuition levels in Michigan’s public
universities have also been a factor. However this has
not been the fault of higher education in the state, since
there is strong evidence that the actual cost of its educational programs has increased only at the inlation rate.
Instead, the real blame for the increasing costs seen by
parents must fall on the State of Michigan, which has
dramatically cut its support of higher education. In fact,
a chart comparing state appropriations with University
tuition and fees demonstrates that almost all of the increase in the costs faced by students and parents has
been driven by the erosion of the state subsidy through
appropriations. Hence restoring the University’s economic diversity will require action along several fronts:
Of highest immediate priority is restoring a signiicant need-based inancial aid program at the state level
capable of augmenting the modest Pell Grants received
by low income students to enable them to attend college. Next, there needs to be serious efort to better

deine the mission of the state’s community colleges
in preparing students for further university education
and developing appropriate articulation agreements to
support this transition. Finally, it is absolutely essential
to the future of the State of Michigan and the welfare
of its people that it begin to restore adequate support
for higher education. Michigan’s ranking in the bottom
10% in its ranking of state support for higher education
is not only embarrassing but also indicative of why the
state’s economic performance today and in the future
will similarly lag the rest of the nation.
Hence restoring the University’s diversity will require not only a serious restructuring of Michigan’s inancial strategies, but even more important, a renewed
commitment to the fundamental public purpose that
has guided the University for almost two centuries.
While the University of Michigan’s concerted efort
to generate support from other patrons, particularly
through private giving and sponsored research, it simply must realize that these will never be suicient to
support a world-class university of this size, breadth, or
impact. Without substantial public support, it is unrealistic to expect that public universities can fulill their
public purpose.

18

Hence the highest priority should be to re-engage
with the people of Michigan to convince them of the
importance of investing in public higher education and
unleashing the constraints that prevent higher education from serving all of the people of this state. This
must become a primary responsibility of not only the
leadership of the University, but its Regents, faculty,
students, staf, alumni, and those Michigan citizens
who depend so heavily on the services provided by one
of the great universities of the world.
Returning again to President Atkinson’s analysis, he
suggests “We need a strategy that recognizes the continuing corrosive force of racial inequality but does not
stop there. We need a strategy grounded in the broad
American tradition of opportunity because opportunity is a value that Americans understand and support.
We need a strategy that makes it clear that our society
has a stake in ensuring that every American has an opportunity to succeed—and every American, in turn, has
a stake in our society. Race still matters. Yet we need to
move toward another kind of airmative action, one in
which the emphasis is on opportunity and the goal is
educational equity in the broadest possible sense. The
ultimate test of a democracy is its willingness to do
whatever it takes to create the aristocracy of talent that
Thomas Jeferson saw as indispensable to a free society.
It is a test we cannot aford to fail.”

The Road Ahead
Perhaps we need a bolder approach, similar to that
when in 1862 President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act
to create the land-grant colleges to serve both the working class and build an industrial nation. Or perhaps better yet, when President Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill in
1944 or President Johnson signed the Higher Education
Act in 1965. In this spirit, then, consider the following
three recommendations:
Learn Grants for the Millennium Generation
Many disadvantaged students (and parents) really do not see higher education as an option open to
them, but rather as a privilege for the more aluent.
As a result, these students do not have the incentive
to perform well in K-12 (nor do their parents have the

incentive to support them), hence falling behind early
or dropping out of the college-bound ranks. To provide
strong incentives, the idea would be to provide EVERY
student with a “529 college savings account”, a “LearnGrant”, when they begin kindergarten. Although this
account would be owned by the students, its funds
could only be used for postsecondary education upon
the successful completion of a high school college-preparatory program. Each year students (and their parents) would receive a statement of the accumulation in
their account, with a reminder that this is their money,
but it can only be used for their college education (or
other postsecondary education). An initial contribution of, say, $10,000 (say, a $5,000 federal grant with a
state $5,000 match) would accumulate over their K-12
education to an amount that when coupled with other
inancial aid would likely be suicient for their college
education at a public college or university.
Beyond serving as an important source of inancial
aid, the Learn Grants would in themselves be a critical incentive for succeeding in K-12 and preparing for
a college education. The program might be funded
from any of a number of sources, e.g., from a federal
plus state match, much of the federal revenue coming
from the auction of the digital spectrum. Learn Grants
would be provided to all students when entering K-12
(in order to earn broad political support) and could be
augmented with additional contributions from public,
private, or parental sources during their pre-college
years. As to cost, if we assume roughly 4.5 million children enter K-12 each year (the estimate for 2010), then
at $10,000 per student, this would cost $40 billion annually ($20 billion each to the states and the federal government). While such a sum is, in fact, immense, it is
about the cost of one year of K-12 education (or college
education, on the average). It also should be compared
to other public expenditures (Medicaid/Medicare, corrections, defense, and even student inancial aid). From
this broader perspective, it really doesn’t seem excessive when viewed as an investment in the future of the
nation.
Building a Society of Learning through a National
Commitment to Lifelong Learning
The nation would commit itself to the goal of pro-

19
viding universal access to lifelong learning opportunities to all its citizens, thereby enabling participation in
the world’s most advanced knowledge and learning society. While the ability to take advantage of educational
opportunity always depends on the need, aptitude, aspirations, and motivation of the student, it should not
depend on one’s socioeconomic status. Access to lifelong learning opportunities should be a CIVIL RIGHT
for all rather than a privilege for the few if the nation
is to achieve prosperity, security, and social well being
in the global, knowledge- and value-based economy of
the 21st century. Perhaps no other recommendation, if
implemented, would drive a greater transformation in
higher education in America, changing very dramatically whom it serves, how it is inanced, and how it is
provided. It would clearly transform higher education
into a resource capable of serving a 21st century nation
in a global, knowledge economy.
A Final Appeal to “Us”...the “Me” Generation
When we joined the University of Michigan community in the late 1960s, our parents’ generation was in
the inal stages of a massive efort to provide educational opportunities for all Americans. Returning veterans
funded through the GI bill had doubled college enrollments, particularly at large public universities such as
Michigan. The post-WWII research strategy developed
by the federal government was transforming lagship
institutions such as Michigan into research universities
responsible for most of the nation’s basic research. The
Truman Commission had proposed that all Americans
should have the opportunity of a college education,
and California responded with its Master Plan, which
would expand the opportunities for providing “an uncommon education for the common man” at great public universities such as the University of Michigan.
Our nation–and, indeed, the world–beneited greatly from these eforts both to provide the educational opportunity and new knowledge necessary for economic
prosperity, social well being, and national security. We
saw spectacular achievements such as sending men to
the Moon, decoding the human genome, and, of course,
creating the Internet and the digital age. Although our
generation of baby boomers beneited greatly from the
commitments of the “Greatest Generation”, our priori-

ties in the 1960s lay elsewhere–protesting the war in
Vietnam, ighting for civil rights, saving the environment, and, of course challenging the establishment.
Yet, fast-forwarding to today, ifty years later, our
generation has clearly failed to embrace the commitments made by our parents to educational opportunity.
The quality of our primary and secondary schools lags
many other nations as K-12 teaching has been transformed into a blue-collar profession. Over the past
decade, state support of our public universities has
dropped by roughly 35%, with the University of Michigan regarded as the poster child as its state appropriations dropped from 80% of our academic budget in
1960 to less than 8% in 2015. Perhaps most telling of
all, are the extraordinary inequities characterizing educational opportunity today. As one of our colleagues
has put it: “If you are poor and smart, today you have
only a one-in-ten chance of obtaining a college degree.
In contrast, if you are dumb and rich, your odds rise to
nine-in-ten!” Something has gone terribly wrong!
Both the tragedy and irony of this situation lows
from the realization that today our world has entered
a period of rapid and profound economic, social, and
political transformation driven by knowledge and innovation. It has become increasingly apparent that the
strength, prosperity, and welfare of region or nation
in a global knowledge economy will demand a highly
educated citizenry enabled by development of a strong
system of education at all levels. It will also require institutions with the ability to discover new knowledge,
develop innovative applications of these discoveries,
and transfer them into the marketplace through entrepreneurial activities.
Now more than ever, people see education as their
hope for leading meaningful and fulilling lives. Just
as a high school diploma became the passport to participation in the industrial age, today, a century later, a
college education has become the requirement for economic security in the age of knowledge. Furthermore,
with the ever-expanding knowledge base of many
ields, along with the longer life span and working
careers of our aging population, the need for intellectual retooling will become even more signiicant. Even
those with advanced degrees will soon ind that their
continued employability requires lifelong learning.
Education in America has been particularly respon-

20
sive to the changing needs of society during early periods of major transformation, e.g., the transition from
a frontier to an agrarian society, then to an industrial
society, through the Cold War tensions, and to today’s
global, knowledge-driven economy. As our society
changed, so too did the necessary skills and knowledge
of our citizens: from growing to making, from making
to serving, from serving to creating, and today from
creating to innovating. With each social transformation,
an increasingly sophisticated world required a higher
level of cognitive ability, from manual skills to knowledge management, analysis to synthesis, reductionism
to the integration of knowledge, invention to research,
and today innovation, and entrepreneurship.
So what can our generation do, the “me” generation–who as students protested during the 1960s and
1970s, demanded less government and lower taxes in
the 1980s and 1990s, and today are embracing the “Let’s
eat dessert irst since life is uncertain!” attitude even
while denying the impact that their way of life poses to
future generations–to address these challenges, much
as our parents and our ancestors did for us? Perhaps it
is time as we enter our “golden years” that we inally
step forward to accept a greater degree of generational
responsibility for the educational opportunities that we
provide our descendants. Perhaps it is time that we use
our inluence, our wisdom, and for many, our considerable wealth, to make our own bold commitments for
the educational resources that will be needed by future
generations.
Today a rapidly changing world demands a new
level of knowledge, skills, and abilities on the part of
our citizens. Just as in earlier critical moments in our
nation’s history when its prosperity and security was
achieved through broadening and enhancing educational opportunity, it is time once again to seek a bold
expansion of educational opportunity. But this time we
should set as the goal providing all American citizens
with universal access to lifelong learning opportunities,
thereby enabling participation in the world’s most advanced knowledge and learning society.
Let us suggest that perhaps it should be our generation’s legacy to ensure that our nation accepts a responsibility as a democratic society to provide all of its
citizens with the educational, learning, and training
opportunities they need and deserve, throughout their

lives, thereby enabling both individuals and the nation
itself to prosper in an ever more competitive global
economy. While the ability to take advantage of educational opportunity will always depend on the need,
aptitude, aspirations, and motivation of the student, it
should not depend on one’s socioeconomic status. Access to livelong learning opportunities should be a right
for all rather than a privilege for the few if the nation
is to achieve prosperity, security, and social well being
in the global, knowledge- and value-based economy of
the 21st century.

References
Duderstadt, James, The Michigan Mandate: A Strategic
Linking of Academic Excellence and Social Diversity
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1990)
http://milproj.dc.umich.edu/Michigan_Mandate/
index.html
Monts, Lester, The Michigan Mandate: A Seven Yea Progress Report 1987-1994 (University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, 1994
http://milproj.dc.umich.edu/Michigan_Mandate/
index.html
Duderstadt, James, “The Michigan Mandate: Looking
Forward” (Millennium Project, Ann Arbor 2007)
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/88302
Duderstadt, James, A University for the 21st Century
(University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000),
Chapter 9
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015050
166837;view=1up;seq=7
Duderstadt, James, “Diversity Management in American Universities”, Conference on Diversity Management in German Universities, Berlin, Germany,
2010

21

Several of the many awards received by the University
for its leadership role in achieving diversity

22

Appendices

1. Michigan Mandate Early History
2. The Michigan Mandate (Original Report)
3. Seven Year Progress Report
4. Ch 7 Diversity, A University for the 21st C
5. Diversity in American Universities
6. 2014 Total Minority Enrollments
7. 2014 School & College Minority Enrollments

23

Appendix A

The Early History of the Michigan Mandate
The Seeds for Instability
While many look back to the racial tensions and student unrest which erupted on the University of Michigan campus in the spring of l987 as the trigger event for
the institution’s renewed efort to build a multicultural
learning community, in fact, the real antecedents traced
back to earlier times. Although the University had
placed airmative action issues high on its agenda during the l970s, it was clear that the University’s focus on
this agenda had been distracted by a number of other
priorities during the l980s, not the least of which was
the extraordinary erosion in state support and the University’s eforts to deal with this situation. Throughout
the l970s and early l980s most quantitative indicators
of progress of airmative action objectives were declining–whether it be minority student enrollments or
the University’s ability to attract and retain minority
faculty. Although there were occasional expressions of
concern about the lack of University progress on these
fronts, this was not suicient to reorder University priorities until the late l980s.
Ongoing Student Activism
Michigan, like many other campuses, experienced
ongoing student activism around the issue of divestment in University holdings of companies with a presence in South Africa. Although the University had divested the bulk of its holdings during the mid-l980s in
response to state legislation, it had withheld $500,000
worth of such stocks so that it could contest the state
action in court in an efort to protect the principle of
institutional autonomy. This small holding was suicient to provide a target for various groups on campus

that wished to draw energy from the far more substantive divestment debates occurring on many other campuses–most notably private universities–in an efort to
sustain race-related activism in Ann Arbor.
By the late l980s this had coalesced into a movement
known as the Free South Africa Coordinating Committee, or FSACC, led by a small group of graduate students in the social sciences, including Barbara Ramsby,
Rod Lindzie, and Daniel Holliman. Although the group
built most of their activism around the case for divestment, there were a series of other issues including demands that the University establish Martin Luther King
Day as an oicial University holiday, that it re-evaluate
the manner in which tenure was provided to minority
faculty, and that it discard the normal admissions requirements such as the use of standardized test scores.
Although such activism continued at a fairly vocal level, it was stable and did not escalate until a series of
events occurred in early l987. This activism was generally manifested in occasional rallies on the Diag, angry
testimony to the Regents at public comments sessions,
or letters to the editor of the Michigan Daily.
Nevertheless, there were other signs that all was not
well within the University. The University was subject
to occasional attacks from both of the Detroit newspapers about its lack of success in airmative action. It
was clear that the efort to recruit minority students
was not a top University priority in the late l970s and
early l980s, and minority student enrollment declined
throughout this period. Furthermore, the number
of minority faculty had leveled of and began to decline; indeed, there were losses of key minority faculty
throughout the l980s. This led to a growing sense of
frustration on the part of a number of minority faculty
(e.g., Professors Alden Morris and Walter Allen).

24
Oice of Minority Afairs
In an efort to deal with this situation, Harold Shapiro and Billy Frye created a new position of Associate
Vice President for Academic Afairs to provide leadership in minority student and faculty recruiting and appointed Professor Niara Sudarkasa to this role. Professor Sudarkasa was deeply committed, strong willed,
and a strong scholar, but her activities were more effective at the state and national level. Her relationships
with faculty and students were limited, and her interactions with the staf tended to be volatile. Compounding
the situation was an ongoing turf battle between the
Oice of Minority Afairs and the Oice of Airmative
Action. The Director of Airmative Action, Virginia
Nordby, was seen by the minority community to be focused on women’s rather than minority issues. Further,
the personalities of Nordby and Sudarkasa led to frequent conlict.
Despite these factors, Dr. Sudarkasa managed to
turn around the decline in minority enrollments, and
for the irst time in almost a decade, minority enrollments began to slowly rise in l985 and l986–albeit at
a level far below that of the mid-l970s. Nevertheless,
there was continued and growing frustration in the lack
of progress in student recruiting and in faculty attrition.
Furthermore, there was a clear absence of senior faculty
leadership, coupled with a growing sense of frustration
on the part of staf. Indeed, it was clear that many staf
members were quietly “stirring the pot” behind the
scene in order to stir up student activism on a series of
issues related to race.
Early Signs of Racial Unrest
Although subsequent investigation provides little
evidence of an actual increase in the number of instances of overt racism on campus, it was nevertheless clear
that those instances that did occur were receiving somewhat higher visibility. There was increased concern
expressed about graiti on the walls and in the buildings. There was also occasional racial tension among
students within the residence halls. Ironically enough,
some of the most visible forms of racism occurred in
the Michigan Daily itself. Of particular note was an
extremely insensitive political cartoon portraying the

dangers of shopping in Detroit, illustrating white shoppers being held at gunpoint by a Black student wearing a tee shirt from a Detroit high school. This caused
great anger both on the campus and also in the Detroit
community. Further, the editorial positions taken by an
increasingly radical Daily opinion page staf tended to
fan the lames of racism on the campus.
The Role of the Press
The Michigan Daily was not alone in its role in fanning the lames of racial unrest. The University had
been subject to a series of hostile attacks by the Detroit
Free Press concerning its lack of progress in the airmative action area. Although the University did not have
much to be proud of in this area, the Detroit Free Press
articles were particularly provocative and raised many
concerns both on and of campus. Added to this was
the increasingly hostile stance toward the University
taken by the Ann Arbor News. The editor of the Ann
Arbor News, Brian Malone, had determined that one
of the best ways to sell newspapers was to beat up the
University on whatever issues could be found–or contrived. Few opportunities were lost in his eforts to criticize the University.
The media hostility was compounded by the University’s inadequate attention to building and sustaining a competent public relations capacity. Indeed, early
in his presidency, Harold Shapiro had combined the
University’s communication/public relations activity
with the Oice of Development. As a result, the entire
communications operation was being used primarily to
support the fund raising efort associated with the ongoing capital campaign. Hence, it had little capacity to
deal with responses to a hostile press, and the University was seriously exposed.

Put it all Together, and What Do You Have?
Trouble with a Capital “T”!
In summary, there were many factors that put the
University in an extremely vulnerable position with respect to racial unrest by late l986. Almost a decade of inadequate progress toward airmative action goals had
led to a high degree of frustration among students, faculty, and staf. A hostile press had become accustomed

25
to attacking the University across a broad front, from
in state/out state ratios to tuition to airmative action.
The University had placed a low priority on building
an adequate public relations efort, which left it defenseless against attacks from the media.
There were other systemic problems within the University. The absence of any student disciplinary policy
had left the University largely defenseless against student misbehavior. The faculty had largely abdicated
responsibility, both for the achievement of the University’s airmative action goals and for the behavior of students more generally. So too, there was poor
leadership in key parts of the University. For example,
with the loss of Tom Easthope, there was no capacity
in the Oice of Student Services to deal with student
problems as they arose. Throughout Student Services,
and particularly in Housing, there was an increasing
tendency to attempt to ignore or hide problems or issues when they arose. For example, when some of the
irst incidents of racial lyers began to occur, these were
not brought to the attention of higher authorities in the
University. There was a general tendency to attempt to
pass the buck up the administrative chain of command
on more sensitive issues as they arose. This, coupled
with inadequate staf capability and cumbersome regulations for student behavior in the residence halls, led
to a situation bound for trouble.
The external environment contributed to the rising
tensions on campus. Of particular signiicance here was
the increasing hostility of the Michigan State Legislature.
The two principal appropriations committees responsible for higher education were led by Senator William
Sederburg, a former Michigan State faculty member,
and Representative Morris Hood whose district included Wayne State University. Both Sederburg and Hood
were overtly hostile to the University of Michigan and
used every opportunity to disadvantage it in the appropriations process. Indeed, there was a complex interaction in which Senator Sederburg would frequently
manipulate Representative Hood into a violent attack
on the University. These attacks ranged over a series of
issues including the perception of rising non-resident
enrollments, rising tuition and fees, and an increasing
series of attacks on the University for its inadequate
eforts in the airmative action arena. The hostility of
the Legislature was compounded by an increasingly

passive role taken by Governor James Blanchard as he
veered away from higher education as a priority during
his second term and instead looked for devices (e.g., the
Michigan Education Trust) designed to delect growing
concerns about underfunding of higher education and
to keep the universities on the defensive.
However, putting these internal and external factors aside, it is clear that the most signiicant factor in
contributing to the series of instabilities which would
set in during early l986 was the fact that the University was simply “asleep at the wheel.” It had not given
high priority to airmative action activities. It did not
have the capacity to sense the growing racial tensions
on the campus. And it had not made an adequate investment in developing the resources that would give
it the capacity to interact with the external community.
The University had become quite vulnerable to a new
round of student activism along racial lines.
The National Climate
Throughout l986 there were increasing signs of racial tension on several of the more politically active
campuses across the country. Both Berkeley and Columbia had experienced the irst signs of a new generation of student activism along racial lines. There had
been actual racial conlict on some campuses, with the
most serious incident, resulting in actual physical violence, occurring earlier in the fall at the University of
Massachusetts. Hence, there was already strong awareness within the national media and increasingly on the
part of student activist groups of the growing racial tensions on the college campuses.
The Birth of the United Coalition Against Racism
Early in l987, the student activism shifted from divestment to focus instead on racism as its rallying cry.
FSACC was renamed the United Coalition Against Racism, or UCAR, and the rallies on the Diag began to address incidents of racism on campus. Coincidentally, the
number of charges of racist incidents began to increase,
including the appearance of racist lyers in dormitories
and complaints about racist slurs directed against minority students. Needless to say, these charges attracted
great attention from the Detroit papers, which had be-

26

Increasing activism concerning UM racial diversity

27
come almost ixated on the subject of racism because
of the increasing racial polarization of that city. So too,
both the Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News gave
headline attention to any charge of a racist incident,
whether substantiated or not.
Parenthetically, there does not seem to be any evidence that the number of racial incidents on campus
had increased signiicantly during the late 1980s. However, those instances that did occur–or were claimed to
have occurred–attracted far more visibility and became
the focal point of student activism. Most of these incidents were associated with the residence halls. Here,
once again, the inability–or unwillingness–of residence
hall staf to accept responsibility for the handling of
these issues in a timely fashion led to much of the diiculty. In efect, the staf of the Oice of Student Services
efectively isolated the administration of the University
from an adequate understanding of or capacity to address these incidents.
The fact that Harold Shapiro was on sabbatical leave
and Duderstadt was acting president compounded the
diiculties because, as acting president, Duderstadt
had little capacity to give strong marching orders to
other vice presidents to deal with racial incidents as
they were reported. As a result, the University administration had precious little capacity to deal with the
growing tensions on the campus.
The Radio Station Incident
Smoldering racial tensions broke into lames in
early l988. The trigger event used by student activists–primarily UCAR–was an incident in which an
inexperienced disc jockey on the student-run closedcircuit radio station invited callers to tell their most
ofensive jokes, and a series of racially and gender offensive jokes were told on the air. Although the incident itself occurred in early January, it was not singled
out and brought to the attention of the University until
the public comments session of the Regents meeting
in late February. This meeting was chaired by Harold
Shapiro who had returned briely from his sabbatical in
New York. During the public comments session, UCAR
representatives played a tape of the ofensive material.
The intensely racist and obscene nature of the material
shocked all those present at the Regents meeting and

triggered strong reaction in the press.
The University responded immediately by shutting
down the radio station and launching an investigation
into the incident. However, it is also clear that there
were broader issues involved. For example, it later
became evident that the radio station incident really
represented a sophomoric attempt to imitate a similar
incident which had occurred several months earlier on
a Washington radio station to probe the limits of broadcast freedom. The fact that the radio station broadcast
had occurred in early January and was not singled out
by activist groups until late February, suggested that
the announcement of this incident was a very carefully
planned and staged event, designed to get maximum
publicity in the media.
The Hood Hearings
Although the radio station is generally singled out
as the trigger event in the series of racial protests that
would occur throughout the spring of l988, in truth
the most damaging event was a public hearing held
on campus by state representative Morris Hood. As
noted earlier, Representative Hood chaired the Higher
Education Appropriation Committee in the Michigan
House of Representatives. He had been hostile toward
the University for some time. Therefore, it was natural
that student activists aimed at disrupting the University would develop a direct relationship with Hood in
an attempt to draw him into their eforts. For some time
Hood had been attacking the University on a variety
of issues including tuition constraints and non-resident
enrollments, egged on to some degree by another hostile legislator, Senator Sederburg.
Representative Hood picked up the new charge of
racism associated with the radio station incident with a
vengeance and immediately announced that his intent
to hold public hearings of his Higher Education Appropriation Committee on the Michigan campus to determine the extent of the racism. Although many were
aware of the circus environment this event would create, none of the University’s friends in the state legislature, including in particular Speaker of the House Gary
Owen, were willing or capable of talking Hood out of
his intent. Furthermore, Governor Blanchard also was
unwilling to play any active role in heading this of.

28
In view of Hood’s powerful position in the Legislature, the University believed it had no choice but to
allow Hood and his committee to hold hearings on
campus, and hence it could only turn its attention to
damage control. The University agreed to allow the
hearings to be held in the Michigan Union Ballroom so
that a large crowd could attend. Furthermore, in working with the staf of the appropriations subcommittee,
it assembled a schedule of testimony before the committee, led of by Harold Shapiro, followed by Virginia
Nordby and Henry Johnson.
In his opening remarks, however, Hood took everyone by surprise by stating his belief that the University was a racist institution and that he wanted to hear
testimony only from Black students, faculty, and staf.
Hence, the agreed-upon agenda went out the window,
and instead what ensued was a circus of open-mike
criticisms of the University from people with every
conceivable axe to grind. Of particular note were a series of vicious personal attacks directed at Harold Shapiro, including actual threats of violence directed toward
both Shapiro and his family. Other members of Hood’s
appropriations committee sat passively, either unable
or unwilling to bring this circus atmosphere under control.
Disruption of Regents Meetings
Throughout much of the year activist groups had
been using the public comments of Regents meetings
as a focal point for disruption. Because of the widespread press coverage of this portion of Regents meetings, it was ideal for obtaining maximum media coverage for various activist agendas. As the various activist
groups became more and more aggressive, they soon
found that they could bring signiicant pressure to
bear by packing the actual Regents board room itself,
surrounding the Regents table, and intimidating the
Regents and others who might wish to talk at public
comments through menacing behavior. For this reason,
it was decided to shift the March Regents meeting to
a larger space, the Michigan League ballroom, where
crowd control would be more easily achieved.
Throughout the days leading up to the March Regents meeting and following the Hood hearings, rallies
continued on campus led both by UCAR and a new

group, known as BAM-III, which portrayed itself as a
new Black power coalition intent on reactivating the
agenda of the earlier Black Action Movements of the
l970s. This was a somewhat more militant group that
proposed a separatist agenda for the University along
racial lines. This group played a major role in the disruption of the March Regent’ meeting.
Midway during the Thursday afternoon meeting,
during a break in the proceedings, Black activists proceeded to take over the Regents meeting by seating
themselves at the Regents table, disrupting the meeting, and forcing the Regents to shift the meeting elsewhere. As the Regents left the meeting, they were surrounded by a number of activist students who harassed
them as they walked across the campus. In an efort to
deal with this behavior, Harold Shapiro and several of
the Regents agreed to meet with leaders of the BAM-III
and UCAR groups. However, this meeting simply provided some of the more radical student leaders with an
opportunity to verbally harass Shapiro and members
of the Board and build further visibility in the press for
their element. Hence, when it became apparent that
public theater rather than dialog was the intent of the
activist groups, Shapiro adjourned the meeting and
stated his willingness to meet at a later point in private.
The Jessie Jackson Visit
Due to widespread media coverage, the events on
the Michigan campus were receiving broader national
coverage. Hence, it was clear that it was only a matter
of time before components of campus were drawn directly into the campus activities. And sure enough, the
University soon received word that Jessie Jackson intended to visit the campus to meet with various groups
and to try to play a role in negotiating between various
activist groups and the University. In retrospect it was
learned that activist members had used family connections to communicate directly with Jackson. However,
because Jackson was heavily involved in the early stages of his presidential campaign, and Michigan would
provide an excellent forum, it was not at all surprising
that he would choose to visit Michigan as “a peacemaker.” Although the University would have preferred
to have headed of the Jackson visit, it had little choice
but to accept his visit to the campus. The University

29

Jesse Jackson visit, negotiations, and address at Hill Auditorium
had less than twenty-four hours notice of the timing of
the Jackson visit, and thus there was little that could be
done to head it of.
Jackson arrived on Sunday afternoon and spent
much of Sunday night meeting with a number of activist groups, both on campus and of. By this time student
leadership had managed to activate a number of community groups both within Ann Arbor and the city of
Detroit, and many of these were involved in discussions
with Jackson. Early the next morning the President’s
Oice received notice that Jackson wished to meet with
Harold Shapiro at l0:00 a.m. There was no indication as
to the nature of this meeting. Harold Shapiro agreed to
meet with Jackson. Duderstadt suggested he and Dean
John D’Arms join Shapiro in the meeting just in case
there was a broader agenda.
This was a fortunate decision because when Jackson
showed up, he was accompanied by a dozen representatives from various groups, including a number of individuals from of-campus. He was also accompanied
by a large press contingent who were fully prepared
to camp outside the door of the President’s Conference Room to report on the meeting. Jackson and those
who accompanied him then moved into the President’s
Conference Room to meet with Shapiro, D’Arms, and
Duderstadt.
Jackson began by announcing that he wanted to negotiate for the various groups represented by his entourage. His initial goal was to force the University to
agree to a target of 24% Black enrollment within ive
years–24% being the percentage for southeastern Mich-

igan. He then went around the table and asked each
member of his group to state what their highest priority
demand was of the University. For example, the Black
Action Movement indicated that their highest priority
demand was for $35,000 for the Black Student Union.
UCAR demanded the establishment of an Oice of Minority Afairs “with an independent budget”. A Black
faculty member demanded funds to support his personal research. And so on, running through the speciic
demands of each group.
Following this opening set of demands, there ensued was a very tense set of negotiations throughout
the remainder of the morning, through lunch, and into
the afternoon. At periodic intervals during the meeting,
Jackson would move into the adjacent room for of-line
comments with Harold and then return to the meeting.
During one of these occasions he was joined by Elliot
Hall, a prominent Detroit attorney, and father of Lannis
Hall, one of the student leaders involved in the UCAR
movement (and probably the link that brought Jackson
to campus.)
The discussion around the table was a diicult one.
Harold Shapiro was exhausted throughout much of
marathon session due to the overload of the preceding
weeks. Duderstadt and D’Arms had to carry much of
the load. The discussion was particularly diicult because it was clear that many of the groups around the
table were primarily after their own special interests–
including several of the faculty members. Jackson was
fully prepared to stay as long as it would take to wear
the University leadership down.

30
But here the University had one major advantage:
Jackson had scheduled a major rally in Hill Auditorium
at 4:00 p.m. which would be covered by the national
media. Duderstadt and D’Arms knew that Jackson had
to come out of the negotiations with some visible results
to hold up at this meeting, if he was to maintain his
credibility as a peacemaker/negotiator. Hence, Duderstadt and D’Arms developed a strategy to hold out for
a more reasonable agreement and hope that time would
work for them. As the time of the Hill Auditorium rally
approached, Duderstadt and D’Arms took the lead in
preparing a draft agreement and making certain that
the language was worded in such a way that it did not
commit the University in speciic numbers, as had the
BAM I agreements in the early l970s (the l0% Black enrollment agreement of the 1970s).
For example, they insisted on including the phrase,
“aspiration” for proportionate representation consistent with federal policies rather than speciic numbers.
As it became apparent that the University was not going to agree to speciic numerical targets, a number of
members of Jackson’s entourage began to object. However, Jackson realized that it was important that he have
some agreement, and therefore he told them that it was
the best they could get under the circumstances and
that they should accept it. The eventual agreement was
known as the Six Point Plan since it had six basic elements including:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

An agreement to establish a Vice Provost for Minority Afairs with an oice and a budget;
$35,000 of annual support for the Black Student
Union;
Support funds for minority faculty development;
The establishment of speciic plans and targets
for each component of the University;
The development of a racial harassment policy
The establishment of an advisory committee on
minority afairs to work with the president of
the University.

The agreement began with a carefully worded sentence drafted by Duderstadt and D’Arms to relect the
aspiration of the University to move toward the same
proportionate representation targets characterizing na-

tional airmative action policies.
Shortly before 4:00 the group adjourned and Jackson and Shapiro, surrounded by reporters and cameras,
walked over to Hill Auditorium. Hill Auditorium was
packed with large numbers of students and other onlookers struggling to get inside the building. On the
stage of Hill Auditorium were dozens of groups and
individuals, representing much of the Black leadership
of southeastern Michigan along with selected members
of the University’s Board of Regents. Harold Shapiro
spoke irst and described the agreement so that Jackson would not have the opportunity to distort it in
his own presentation. Jackson’s own presentation was
more a sermon than an address, lasting almost an hour,
and rambling through his standard themes. Indeed, he
eventually ended up exciting the crowd with slogans
such as “up with hope, down with dope.” Afterwards
he swept of the campus and on to his next set of public
appearances associated with his presidential campaign.
President Shapiro’s Decision to Leave
The events of the winter term–the Hood hearings on
campus, the disruption of the Regents meeting, and the
Jackson visit–had already put great pressure on President Shapiro. The Shapiros had just returned from a
sabbatical leave and were still readjusting to campus
life. The personal attacks were particularly unfair, since
Shapiro had long had a deep commitment to equity and
social justice. Yet, despite his eforts, several of the activist groups aimed much of their anger at the leadership of the University in their attempt to gain visibility
for their agenda
Earlier in the year Shapiro had been approached by
Princeton University, irst about the possible leadership
of the Institute for Advanced Studies and then concerning the presidency of the university itself. He had responded on both occasions that he was not interested in
leaving the University of Michigan. However, the series
of events during early l988, including the unfair personal attacks by activist groups, became increasingly
burdensome. Therefore, when Princeton approached
once again later in the spring, Shapiro agreed to begin
discussions with them and eventually reached agreement to become President of Princeton University. In
late April, shortly before University Commencement,

31
Shapiro informed the Regents and Executive Oicers
of the University of his intent to leave. This was announced shortly before University Commencement.
Some Observations
Once again, certain themes are apparent from the
University’s experience during this diicult period.
The University was clearly unprepared to cope with
this new outbreak of student activism and campus disruption. There was inadequate involvement of staf on
campus capable–or more to the point, willing–to become involved; there was inadequate capability to deal
with the media; there was a marked absence of linkages to various external communities who might have
helped, particularly to the Black community; and there
was a lack of team work that could link leadership of
the University together to deal with such a crisis.
What were the trigger events for the activism and
disruption? To be sure, there were the racial incidences
themselves. Here it should be noted that while some of
these did occur and were due no doubt to the racism
which more generally characterizes American society,
there also was some evidence that several of the racial
incidents, such as the distribution of racist lyers, were
actually planted by the activist groups themselves. Furthermore, the timing for bringing to the University’s
attention the radio station incident, occurring as it did
almost six weeks after the incident itself, indicated that
this too was used in a highly opportunistic fashion to
disrupt the University.
Nevertheless, it was also clear that these incidents
and the way that they were portrayed by groups in and
of themselves were not the real events that destabilized
the University. Rather, if one had to point to a single
incident it would be the hearings held by Representative Hood on campus. These hearings, which took on a
McCarthyesque character, victimized the campus and
its leadership while triggering enormous media attention. The damage done by this legislative interference
in the afairs of the University was very deep and demonstrates in a rather convincing fashion the havoc that
irresponsible government oicials can cause to the fragile nature of a university.
The Jesse Jackson visit, while disruptive and damaging to the University as a media event, albeit help-

ful to “candidate” Jackson, did serve two useful purposes. It provided a certain catharsis for the University
community, and it pulled together the various activist
groups under a single umbrella so that the University
could interact with them more efectively.

32

Listening and Learning...

33
The Six Point Plan
During the weeks following the traumatic events
of March, the University campus was relatively quiet.
Although there continued to be a good deal of sabrerattling by various activist groups, jockeying among
themselves for power and visibility, there were no further events that pulled together these coalitions. Once
again they began to diverge as a consequence of their
widely varying agendas. This gave the University an
opportunity to begin to consider in more detail the implications of the Six Point Plan, agreed to publicly in
the Jackson negotiations, and to develop a longer term
strategy.
With Harold Shapiro’s announcement of his decision to leave the University it was clear that the mantle
of leadership for these issues passed immediately to
Duderstadt as Provost of the University. To be sure this
was made somewhat more complex by Shapiro’s decision to stay on as a lame-duck president until the end of
l988 before moving to Princeton. This gave Duderstadt
the very complex challenge of providing adequately
strong leadership from behind the scenes as Provost of
the University.
The irst order of business was to fulill the University’s obligations under the Six Point Plan agreement.
A key item was completing the search for the new Vice
Provost for Minority Afairs. This was an extremely dificult search because it had to deal with a very complex
set of political forces–from the perspective of student
activists, other minority communities, faculty perception, and so forth. Duderstadt decided to handle the
search by personally chairing the search committee. He
selected a committee designed to have maximum credibility to the broader University community and proceeded to move ahead with a series of early morning
breakfast meetings on a weekly basis throughout the
search process.
It was clear from the very early stage that the list of
candidates with the necessary credibility to all constituencies was extremely limited. Indeed, one candidate
stood out from the beginning, Professor Charles Moody
of the School of Education, who combined the necessary credibility with the various student groups along
with the external minority communities through his
leadership in airmative action issues related to K-l2

education. Furthermore, Moody had a close relationship with Black leadership at the national level. Hence,
the search moved quickly and resulted in the selection
of Moody as the new Vice Provost for Minority Afairs.
The second issue of major concern was the lack of
credibility of the Director of Airmative Action, Virginia Nordby, with broad elements of the Black community. The hostility between Nordby and Niara Sudarkasa was well known. In fact, Nordby was blamed by
the Black community for many of its own frustrations.
It became clear that a change was necessary, and Duderstadt undertook the diicult task of negotiating irst
with Shapiro and then with interim president Robben
Fleming to ind an appropriate and politically acceptable mechanism to allow new leadership for the Oice
of Airmative Action. Other aspects of the Six Point
Plan were somewhat easier to handle. The President’s
Advisory Committee on Minority Afairs was deferred
for implementation until the fall. A Faculty Development Fund was implemented to assist in minority
faculty development and retention, and the Graduate
School was assigned the lead role in providing necessary support to minority faculty.
Despite these actions, it was clear that the University was still very vulnerable to instabilities ignited from
time to time by the politics swirling about the agendas
of various groups of activists. UCAR continued its effort to expand its power base and kept returning to a
long list of demands they had put before the University
at an earlier stage. This list was essentially identical to
similar lists that were put in front of a number of other
universities as part of a nationwide efort. It included a
number of intentionally extreme proposals such as calling for the granting of immediate tenure to all Black
faculty, the movement to an open admissions policy for
students of color, and so forth.
In the face of this continuing activism, it became
clear that the key challenge before the University was
to somehow regain control of the agenda. That is, the
University had to take a number of steps so that it began to deine the agenda and the issues for debate in the
months ahead. This task was particularly diicult since
Shapiro was clearly viewed as a lame duck president,
and hence any leadership would have to be provided
from the Provost’s oice. It also meant that other executive oicers would have to be brought into alignment

34
with the strategy without the beneit of “presidential
authority.”
Finally, it was also clear that the University did not
have an infrastructure in place needed for this efort.
The public relations staf was essentially non-existent;
the staf in student services, particularly Housing, was
not only of marginal competence but actually working
at cross-purposes to the University administration, and
there were inadequate communication links with the
leadership of the Black communities in southeastern
Michigan. The challenge, therefore, was to develop and
put into place an efective strategy to regain control of
the agenda and to begin to move ahead with a longterm strategic plan, but to do it from a “behind-thescenes” chief executive oicer sitting in the Provost’s
Oice.
Executive Oicer Retreats
The irst step was to gain a better understanding of
what the real issues were. To this end, Duderstadt arranged a series of Executive Oicer retreats involving
all of the executive oicers of the University and then
eventually broadening to include the deans. At the outset, facilitators were brought in such as Bailey Johnson
of the University of Massachusetts and Mark Chesler, of
the University’s Center for Conlict Resolution. These
day-long retreats, while sometimes painful, were quite
useful in pulling together a team. Although these sessions were led irst by Provost Duderstadt and then in
collaboration with Charles Moody, they did involve the
presence of Harold Shapiro. In passing, it was clear that
Shapiro found these sessions particularly diicult. He
conveyed his frustration from time-to-time about the
lack of support that the broader University had given
him during the period of personal attack earlier in the
year surrounding the Hood hearings.
The second technique used to regain control of the
agenda involved a major internal public relations campaign built around the University Record. Duderstadt
ordered the University Record to develop a second regular weekly edition highlighting all of the University’s
eforts in the airmative action area. Although these
issues frequently contained information about earlier
programs, they did convey a sense of movement. Parenthetically, it should be noted that the existing com-

munications staf was very strongly opposed to this effort. In an efort to reach across executive oicer lines,
Duderstadt had to use his authority as the University’s
chief budget oicer to threaten the communications
staf with the loss of their budget if they did not accede
to his requests. In retrospect, this efort to recapture
control of the communications dialog was one of the
most important steps taken during the early stages.
The Change Group and Strategic Planning
It was clear at the outset that moving through the
Six Point Plan, building teamwork through retreats,
and launching a major public relations efort, while
important, would simply buy time and would not address the longer-term issues. What Duderstadt realized
at an early stage was that the real key to making progress was to recognize that it would involve a process
of organizational change. His own earlier experience in
the University’s College of Engineering had given him
great skepticism for the bureaucracies–organizations,
policies, and procedures–that characterized the traditional airmative action and equal opportunity programs conducted by institutions such as the University.
In fact, he suspected that such programs were installed
in the l970s in an efort to transfer the responsibility for
minority representation and minority concerns away
from the leadership of the institution to bureaucratic
structures so that it would become out of sight, out of
mind. And indeed during the l980s, this efort clearly
fell from among the higher priorities of the University,
thereby leading eventually to the diiculties that arose
in the late l980s.
Recognizing that progress would involve an organizational change process, Duderstadt pulled together
an informal group of individuals, known simply as
the “Change Group”, who had expertise in organizational change from both the public and private sector.
Charles Moody added not only his keen understanding of many of these diversity challenges faced by the
University, but he also had important relationship with
student and faculty minority groups. Included in this
group were individuals with extensive experience in
driving change in comples organizations, such as Joe
White, former Vice President for Human Resources at
Cummins Engine and then associate dean of the Busi-

35

Charles Moody

Mark Chesler

Harold Johnson

John D’Arms

Niara Sudarkasa

Joseph White

Rhetaugh Dumas

Charles Vest

Shirley Clarkson

36
ness School; Mark Chesler, head of the Center for Conlict Resolution; Chuck Vest, dean of the College of Engineering, who had worked closely with Duderstadt in
achieving a similar organizational change process in
the College of Engineering. Of particular importance
was the role of Shirley Clarkson, assistant to the President and former projects manager for the Center for African and Afro-American Studies, who did much of the
drafting of the Michigan Mandate.
Second, Duderstadt also recognized that what had
to be done was to develop and implement a highly strategic approach in which very clear objectives were set
and highly focused actions were taken to move toward
these objectives. Finally, Duderstadt realized that it was
absolutely essential to regain control of the agenda and
to move away from the University’s tendency to simply react to each incident triggered by student activist
groups. Hence, an efective strategic plan in and of itself would not work without an accompanying public
relations efort capable of regaining the support of both
the internal and external communities. To this end, the
strategic planning efort began to evolve under the code
name the “Michigan Plan.” However when a highly
publicized, but considerably less ambitious efort, was
launched at the University of Wisconsin known as
the “Madison Plan”, Shirley Clarkson coined the new
name, the Michigan Mandate, to avoid confusion.

The Michigan Mandate: Early Design
The Change Group worked throughout the spring
and into the summer to develop the broad outlines
of what would later become known as the Michigan
Mandate. It recognized early on that the real goal was
institutional change. The objective was to develop a
preliminary version of a plan, a new agenda, a vision
of the future of the University of Michigan that would
respond more efectively to two of the principal challenges before us in the 2lst century: irst, the fact that
our nation was rapidly becoming more ethnically and
racially pluralistic; and second, the growing interdependence of the global community, which called for
greater knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of
human history than ever before needed in our history.
Duderstadt, working closely with Shirley Clarkson, assumed personal responsibility for the design, articula-

tion, and implementation of the plan.
The purpose of the plan was to change the institution to remove all institutional barriers to full participation in the life of the University and the educational
opportunities it ofered for peoples of all races, creeds,
ethnic groups, and national origins. But it was also recognized at the outset that the strategic plan would really become only a road map. It was intended to set out
a direction and point to a destination, but the journey
itself would be a long one, and much of the landscape
through which the University would travel was still to
be discovered. As the efort evolved, it attempted to
deal with two themes that heretofore had appeared to
be incompatible: community and pluralism. The goal of
the efort was to strengthen every part of the University
community by increasing, acknowledging, learning
from, and celebrating the ever-increasing human diversity of the nation and the world.
It was also recognized at the outset that the plan
would be organic and evolving in such a way as to
facilitate the involvement of both the University community itself and the broader external community. The
challenge was to construct a process that would engage
the various constituencies of the institution, relecting
their opinions and experience. Indeed, the plan would
provide the framework for a continuing dialogue about
the very nature of the institution. In this sense, the
Change Group was engaged in developing a dynamic
process and not a inished product.
In their discussions, the Change Group became
convinced that the University’s ability to achieve and
sustain a campus community recognized for its racial,
cultural, and ethnic diversity would in large part determine the University’s capacity to successfully serve the
state, the nation, and the world in the challenging times
before us. The group became convinced that this diversity would become the cornerstone in the University’s
eforts to achieve excellence in teaching, research, and
service in the multicultural nation and world in which
it would exist.
In this sense then, the plan, which was to become
known as the Michigan Mandate, was developed as
a framework for building a multicultural community
that would be a model for society at large. More speciically, the purpose of the Mandate was to guide the
University of Michigan in creating a community that:

37

i) supported the aspirations and achievements of all
individuals, regardless of race, creed, national origin,
or gender;
ii) embodied and transmitted those fundamental
academic and civic values that bonded us together as a
scholarly community and as part of a democratic society, while at the same time it;
iii) valued, respected, and indeed drew its intellectual strength from the rich diversity of peoples of diferent races, cultures, religions, nationalities, and beliefs.
But the Change Group also recognized that institutions do not change quickly and easily any more than
do the societies of which they are a part. To move toward the goal of diversity the University would have to
leave behind those current reactive and coordinated efforts that had characterized its past and move toward a
more strategic approach designed to achieve long-term
systemic change. In particular, it recognized the limitations of those eforts that focused only on airmative
action; that is, on access, retention, and representation.
It believed that without deeper and more fundamental
institutional change, these eforts by themselves would
inevitably fail–as they had throughout the l970s and
l980s. While such airmative action eforts should be
continued, what was really the focal point would be to
achieve a more permanent and fundamental change in
the character of the institution itself.
To make progress in achieving such a change, it was
recognized that the irst and vital step was to link diversity and excellence as the two most compelling goals
before the institution, recognizing that these goals were
not only complementary but would be tightly linked
in the multicultural society characterizing our nation
and the world in the years ahead. The challenge was
to broaden its vision, to draw strength from its diferences, and to learn from new voices, new perspective
and diferent experiences of the world.
In these eforts the University would have to take
the long view that would require patient and persistent leadership. Progress would also require sustained
vigilance and hard work as well as a great deal of help
and support. The plan would have to build on the best

that we already had. The challenge was to persuade
the community that there is a real stake for everyone in
seizing this moment to chart a more diverse future, that
the gains to be achieved would more than compensate
for the necessary sacriices.
It was also recognized at the outset that there would
be many mistakes in the early stages. There would be
setbacks and disappointments. The important point
was to make a commitment for the long range and not
be distracted from this vision.
This long range viewpoint would be particularly
important in the face of activist groups because of the
ongoing pressures to serve one special interest group or
another or to take a particular stance on a narrow issue
or agenda. Indeed, many, both on and of the campus,
tended to view the presence or absence or nature of
such responses as a sequence of litmus tests that measured the extent of University commitments.
While the inevitable pressures were understandable, the plan would succeed only if the University
leadership insisted on operating at a long-term strategic rather than on a short-term reactive level. It was essential to keep one’s eyes focused on the prize ahead
and resist eforts to react to every issue that arose. In
this sense then while commitment and support within
and outside the University community were necessary
ingredients for success, it could not succeed alone as
the University had learned in the past two decades.
It was essential to have a strategy, a plan designed to
guide institutional change.
The goals in developing the Michigan Mandate were
to: i) develop a carefully designed strategic process for
achieving, using, and cherishing diversity, ii) achieve a
community strongly committed in philosophy to our
objectives, and iii) allocate the necessary resources to
accomplish this task. A plan was sought that featured
clear, concise and simple goals, proposed speciic actions and evaluation mechanisms, and relected extensive interaction with and direct comment from a variety
of constituencies and individuals to ensure responsiveness to the plan. It was also decided that once the basic
outlines of the plan were developed, a broad process of
consultation would be launched to engage groups both
on and of campus.
The mission and goals of the Michigan Mandate
were quite simple:

38

Philosophy: To recognize that diversity and excellence are complementary and compelling goals for the
University and to make a irm commitment to their
achievement.
Representation: to commit to the recruitment, support, and success of members of historically underrepresented groups among our students, faculty, staf, and
leadership.
Environment: to build on our campus an environment that seeks, nourishes, and sustains diversity and
pluralism and in which the dignity and worth of every
individual is valued and respected.
Associated with these general goals were more speciic objectives:
Faculty recruiting and development: to substantially increase the number of tenure track faculty in each
underrepresented minority group; to increase the success of minority faculty in the achievement of professional fulillment, promotion, and tenure; to increase
the number of underrepresented minority faculty in
leadership positions.
Student recruiting achievement and outreach:
achieve increases in the number of entering underrepresented minority students as well as in total underrepresented minority enrollment; establish and achieve
speciic minority enrollment targets in all schools and
colleges; increase minority graduation rates; develop
new programs to attract back to campus minority students who have withdrawn from our academic programs; to design new and strengthen existing outreach
programs that have demonstrable impact on the pool
of minority applicants to undergraduate, graduate, and
professional programs.
Staf recruiting and development: to focus on the
achievement of airmative action goals in all job categories; to increase the number of underrepresented
minorities in key University leadership positions; to
strengthen support systems and services for minority
staf.

Improving the environment for diversity: to foster
a cultural and diverse environment; to signiicantly reduce the number of incidents of racism and prejudice
on campus; to increase community-wide commitment
to diversity and involvement in diversity initiatives
among students, faculty, and staf; to broaden the base
of diversity initiatives, for example, by including comparative perspectives drawn from international studies
and experiences; to ensure the compatibility of University policies, procedures, and practice with the goal of a
multicultural community; to improve communications
and interactions with and among all groups; and to provide more opportunities for minorities to communicate
their needs and experiences and to contribute directly
to the change process.
Over the course of the next several months a series
of carefully focused strategic actions were developed
to move the University toward these objectives. These
strategic actions were framed by the values and traditions of the University, an understanding of our unique
culture, and imaginative and innovative thinking.
A good example of this approach was the Target of
Opportunity faculty recruitment program. Traditionally, university faculties have been driven by a concern
for academic specializations within their respective disciplines. This is fundamentally laudable and certainly
has fostered the exceptional strength and disciplinary
character that we see in universities across the country;
it also can be constraining. Too often in recent years the
University had seen faculty searches that are literally
“replacement” searches rather than “enhancement”
searches.
To achieve the goals of the Michigan Mandate, it
was recognized that the University had to free itself
from the constraints of this traditional perspective.
Therefore, the central administration sent out the following message to the academic units: be vigorous and
creative in identifying minority teachers/scholars who
can enrich the activities of your unit. Do not be limited
by concerns relating to narrow specialization; do not be
concerned about the availability of a faculty slot within
the unit. The principal criterion for the recruitment of
a minority faculty member is whether the individual
can enhance the department. If so, resources will be

39
made available to recruit that person to the University
of Michigan.
In this way some important academic barriers for
minority recruitment were removed. Those departments that were able to identify candidates found
rapidly that their vitality was not only enhanced, but
their numbers were enlarged. The Target of Opportunity program was an example of idealism joining selfinterest; it also provided an example of breaking down
the barriers.
The Michigan Mandate plan evolved throughout
the spring and summer of l987. Although much of the
strategy had been developed by the fall, only a few of
the strategic actions could be put into place because of
the interim nature of the University leadership–with
Harold Shapiro in a lame duck status, Robben Fleming
waiting in the wings as interim, and a rather diicult
and contentious presidential search underway on the
part of the Board of Regents. Nevertheless, in an efort
to gain control of the agenda, the decision was made to
continue with special editions of the University Record,
both to demonstrate the University’s progress toward
fulillment of the Six Point Plan and also to highlight
some of the more innovative programs associated with
the as-yet-to-be announced Michigan Mandate. Media
consultants were retained (Walt Harrison) to provide
more direct access to the national media. To build the
necessary foundation for implementation of the plan,
Duderstadt began to include components of the underlying philosophy of the Michigan Mandate in his own
public addresses.
Student Activism
Although the University was successful in regaining some control of the agenda, student activist groups
continued their eforts to trigger student unrest and
disrupt the campus. While BAM III rapidly dissolved,
UCAR, characterized by a much stronger and adept
leadership, continued to search for opportunities to reignite racial tensions on the campus.
And, as with the radio station incident, they eventually found a suitable target: Dean Peter Steiner of
the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. While
Steiner was widely regarded as one of the University’s
strongest and most efective deans, his rather forthright

style occasionally made him an easy victim for student
activists. The particular incident seized on by UCAR
actually occurred during a conidential meeting with
LS&A department chairs early in the fall term of l987.
In his efort to urge departments to become far more
aggressive in airmative action eforts, Steiner stressed
the importance of recognizing the unique character of
the University of Michigan. In particular, he stressed
the importance of upholding the standards of the University of Michigan rather than returning to the tragic
open-door admission policies of the l970s, which although it had been successful in attracting large numbers of minority students, had turned into a revolving
door as many of those admitted failed to succeed and
graduate. Included in this discussion was Steiner’s use
of the soon-to-be-famous phrase that the objective of
the University of Michigan was not to attract minority
students “locking to the University” but rather to recruit students who had demonstrated the capacity to
succeed at the institution.
Although the group meeting in executive session
with Steiner was primarily comprised of department
chairs, the Sociology Department had sent a substitute, Professor Alden Morris. Morris had been working
with a number of the students actively involved in the
UCAR movement. He quickly leaked the substance of
the Steiner remarks to UCAR. The UCAR leadership
realized that they were suddenly presented with the
incident they needed to regain control of the agenda.
Throughout the remainder of the fall, UCAR carefully
planned their eforts, and immediately following the
winter holidays in early January (some three months
after the Steiner remarks), UCAR held a series of press
conferences condemning Steiner’s remarks and demanding both his apology and his resignation. Unfortunately, Steiner decided to meet publicly with those
concerned and was taken of balance when a large
contingent of UCAR students arrived with the press.
This resulted in yet another confrontation that began to
draw in other elements, in particular Charles Moody,
who went on record strongly criticizing Steiner.
This situation was made more diicult by the bitter relationship that developed between Steiner and
Moody, which tended to fan the racial tensions on the
campus. Both Interim President Fleming and Provost
Duderstadt worked for weeks behind the scenes to re-

40
pair the rift between Steiner and Moody. Both issued
statements supporting Steiner but at the same time urging greater sensitivity as the University pushed ahead
on its commitments to diversity.
Throughout the remainder of the winter term UCAR
launched occasional sorties designed to trigger incidents that would allow it to build its power base. Indeed, it seems clear in retrospect that some of the more
radical elements of UCAR actually seeded “racist” incidents from time to time in their eforts to regain control.
However, two things were beginning to happen
which were eroding the power base of student activism. First, the early elements of the Michigan Mandate
plan were beginning to work, and this progress was
evident to the University community. But beyond that,
UCAR began to ind itself divided over the issue of a
student harassment policy proposed by Interim President Fleming.
The Student Harassment Policy
In late summer of l987 it was announced that former President Robben Fleming had agreed to serve as
interim president of the University until such time as
the Board of Regents selected permanent leadership.
Throughout the fall term Fleming prepared for this
transition by meeting with a great many people across
the campus. From his earlier experiences in the l970s,
Fleming was well aware of the diiculty in dealing with
the political environment surrounding racial tensions.
In particular, he recognized that the Six Point Plan committed the University to develop policies to deal with
the issue of racism and racial harassment on campus.
Furthermore, he also recognized that in the absence of
a more general student discipline policy–a student code
of nonacademic conduct–the campus would remain
quite vulnerable to those who might commit racist acts
in part to challenge the system.
After extensive consultation, Fleming spent the winter holidays drafting a prototype student harassment
policy–on his own typewriter. Shortly after he took ofice as interim president in January, Fleming ran this
initial draft by a number of individuals, including the
executive oicers of the University as well as some of
his colleagues in the Law School. After this initial review, he then put out the draft policy in public form

before the University in January and invited all members of the University to provide their input so that a
inal version of the policy could be completed and implemented by late spring or summer. Virginia Nordby,
Director of the Oice of Airmative Action, played the
lead role in collecting and implementing the revisions.
The public announcement of the draft had several
interesting efects. First, it did put at ease a number of
members of the minority community who felt somewhat at risk because of the absence of any student
policies in this area. Furthermore, it honored the University’s commitment to have moved forward with
policies concerning racial harassment. However, some
of the more activist students on the Michigan Student
Assembly and the Michigan Daily attempted to stir up
the fears that the Fleming draft harassment policy was
only the irst step toward a more comprehensive code
for non-academic student conduct. In fact, MSA leadership attempted to disrupt the January and February Regents meetings, using the harassment policy as the fuel
for a “no-code” efort. Interestingly enough, the Fleming policy efectively divided the more radical student
activists from the mainstream of the minority student
groups since the latter had pushed hard for just such a
harassment policy.
As is typical of any such broadly consultative process, as more and more groups became involved, the
policy began to take on a life of its own. While many
members of the University community did their best to
respond with the best of intentions, there were of course
others who viewed the policy as a potential tool to advance their own special interests and sought modiications to this end. After a good deal of further debate,
a inal form of the policy was prepared and Fleming
took this to the Board of Regents for action in April. After extensive discussion, the policy was adopted by the
Board of Regents and went into efect.
It was recognized at the outset that the implementation of any harassment policy would be a complex
issue, in part due to the fact that most other institutions had already moved down this path. Indeed, many
other institutions had simply used a slight broadening
of their existing student conduct codes to accomplish
the same action. However, a few other institutions were
seriously considering taking steps similar to those at
Michigan, and hence they were watching Michigan

41
with some interest. It was clear that beyond the development of the policy itself, the implementation process
would require the development of extensive training
and administrative structures. Of particular importance was the implementation of the policy within the
residence hall environment.
In retrospect, it should have been anticipated that
the policy would be abused to some degree, both in its
development and in its implementation. The Oice of
Airmative Action, which was given the lead in developing materials explaining the policy and developing
implementation procedures, moved ahead without adequate oversight. As a result, many of the materials that
were developed clearly overextended the original intent of the policy. Furthermore, a number of special interest groups began to get involved in the implementation of the policy. What resulted began to acquire all of
the tones of today’s “political correctness” debate–that
is, in which groups would tend to justify extreme constraints on student behavior, including speech, using
the harassment policy as an excuse even though upon
more careful reading it was clear that the harassment
policy was suiciently narrowly drawn that it would
not apply to these situations.
Hence, it was only a matter of time before someone
would bring suit against the University claiming that
the policy violated irst amendment rights. These initial suits were enjoined by the American Civil Liberties
Union and began to work their way through the court
system.
Within the University administration, Fleming and
the legal staf continued to believe that the policy itself was probably constitutional. Indeed, it was quite
similar to policies adopted at other institutions such as
the University of Pennsylvania. However, they viewed
with some alarm the increasingly cumbersome process
that was being developed to apply the policy. Furthermore, it became increasingly clear that the policy was
subject to considerable misuse and abuse by those who
either misunderstood its intent, or, worse yet, those who
understood its intent but wished to distort and extend
it to push their own special interest agendas. Hence, the
University administration became more and more concerned that the policy was evolving into a Frankenstein
monster. Unfortunately, they also recognized that a major efort to modify or even replace the policy would be

diicult politically since it would almost certainly trigger another round of protests around racial lines.
There were also deinite misgivings as the legal tests
of the policy evolved. For example, the national leadership of the ACLU was rather embarrassed that their
Michigan chapter had taken on such aggressive opposition to the policy. Indeed, preliminary contacts were
made on the part of the national ACLU to convince the
Michigan ACLU to back-of of this efort–without success. A second complication was the fact that the case
was assigned to Judge Avern Cohn, an outspoken critic
of the University. Cohn indicated at the very earliest
moment that he believed the University “guilty of sin”
and felt that his court would demonstrate it. In a sense,
he made it clear at the outset that his mind was made
up on the issue before the trial proceeded.
As it became more apparent that Judge Cohn would
rule against the policy on First Amendment grounds,
the University faced the decision as to whether to appeal a negative decision. Within some quarters of the
University there was conidence that the policy itself
was suiciently narrowly drawn that we would eventually be able to win. However, it was also felt that the
policy was quite cumbersome and subject to misapplication. Hence, the University administration decided
to take advantage of what it anticipated as a negative
court ruling to eliminate the policy and begin again.
The actual court decision came down in September
of l988 during the irst month of the presidency of James
Duderstadt. In anticipation of this action, Duderstadt
had asked the new General Counsel of the University,
Elsa Cole, to draft a far narrower policy based on the
“ighting words” principle that would clearly stand
the First Amendment test. In particular, he asked that
the policy be directed at speciic individual harassment
rather than the broader speech implications of the earlier policy. Hence, when Judge Cohn inally struck down
the original policy, Duderstadt immediately moved to
use his presidential powers under Regents Bylaw 2.0l
to put into place the far narrower “ighting words” policy so that the campus would continue to have some
safeguards in place to counter the absence of a more
general student disciplinary policy. He managed to obtain the Regents support for this use of the presidential
power, although it is unlikely that the Regents would
have voted for such a policy themselves. While most

42

Minority student enrollments (percentages)

African-American student enrollments (percentages)

Graduation rates of African-American student
cohorts six years afer initial entry

Number of minority tenured and tenure-track faculty

Number of university minority graduate fellowships

Number of African-American faculty

43
Regents understood the vulnerability of the campus,
they were also comfortable in letting Duderstadt take
the heat on this issue.
The new restricted policy was supported by most
of the opponents of the Fleming policy, including the
ACLU. The substitute policy went into place without
any further contest. In fact, in subsequent months many
other institutions adopted similar restricted harassment policies based on the “ighting words” concept.
Nevertheless, Duderstadt intentionally included the
language “interim” in enacting the policy because of
his belief that further review would be necessary–not
only of the policy itself, but whether there was even a
need for an harassment policy. Such reviews occurred
roughly one year later, and reached the conclusion that
the policy would remain in its restricted form with an
interim title on an indeinite basis, subject to ongoing
review.

The Michigan Mandate: Action Agenda
Early Strategies
With the selection of James Duderstadt as the eleventh president of the University in June of l988, he immediately turned his attention to moving forward in
a much more visible fashion with the implementation
of the Michigan Mandate, the key strategy which had
been developed during the previous year to make the
University a model of a multicultural learning community. By working closely with both the original Change
Group and broader elements of the University’s leadership, a plan was developed which would involve
extensive consultation to put into place the remaining
elements of the plan during the year ahead.
Building a Support Base
Key to the success of the Michigan Mandate was
the engagement of as many individuals and groups as
possible, both on and of the campus. It was recognized
at the outset that success would be determined largely
by grass roots involvement. Hence, it was important to
build commitment and awareness by creating a process
in which a variety of diferent groups were involved in
reining of the Michigan Mandate plan.

Of particular concern here was the importance of
determining and controlling an agenda that would be
focused on strategic objectives. It was recognized at the
outset that there was a danger in that various special interest groups would attempt to distort or even disrupt
the Michigan Mandate in order to establish their own
particular priorities. Hence, control of the agenda was
recognized as a critical element of success, and a strong
public relations/media based campaign was designed
with this as its objective.
At the beginning of the fall term, Duderstadt began to implement this plan through a series of major
addresses to on-campus groups, including the Senate
Assembly, the deans, various schools and colleges,
various student groups, and alumni. Of particular importance here were presentations to a number of ethnic
groups, including Black student groups and faculty,
Hispanic students and faculty, a number of minority
staf groups, and so forth. Duderstadt spent a great deal
of time meeting with leaders of external communities
to explain to them the nature of the Michigan Mandate,
including the key leadership in cities such as Detroit,
Flint, Lansing, and Saginaw, various alumni groups,
various church groups, and so forth.
Within the University an efort was made to build
the key teams necessary to move forward with the
Michigan Mandate. This involved at the outset a series
of retreats involving the leadership of the University–
executive oicers and deans–but also the more active
use of the President’s Advisory Committee on Minority Afairs, and the Vice Provost’s Advisory Committee on Minority Afairs. Throughout the course of the
year the Michigan Mandate became efectively woven
into the objectives of the University. There were many
examples of key actions taken by the University that
played important roles in maintaining the momentum
of the Michigan Mandate. For example, the decision by
the University to declare Martin Luther King Jr. day
as a time for education and relection on the University’s role in a multicultural society became particularly
important. Here it should be recalled that one of the
principal demands of activist groups for several years
have been to declare Martin Luther King day an oicial
University holiday. Instead, the University moved to
identify Martin Luther King Jr. day as an opportunity
for educational commitment in which classes would

44
be replaced by a variety of other learning experiences
including retreats, seminars, and numerous lectures.
The Board of Regents agreed to support this particular
strategy.
A second example occurred when the University
managed to negotiate with the Michigan Attorney General an agreement that would allow it to sell its remaining $500,000 worth of stock holdings in companies with
South African interests. Here the key issue was whether
the Attorney General would continue to push to challenge the University’s autonomy or drop the case following the ruling by the Court of Appeals upholding the University’s autonomy. The Attorney General
agreed to drop the case, and the University was then
free to go ahead and complete divestment.
The focus of the initial phase of the Mandate was
primarily on issues of representation. That is, it focused
on building a more representative presence of minority
groups among its students, faculty, staf, and leadership. It went beyond this, however, and also sought to
put into place policies and procedures and programs
to assist these groups in achieving success at the University.
Signs of Progress
The broad array of steps taken during the early
phases of the Michigan Mandate began to have an impact almost immediately. Over the course of the next
three years, the University made very signiicant progress toward the goals set out by the Michigan Mandate.
From top to bottom University decisions began to be
made with the goals of diversity as their priority. Indeed, throughout the nation other universities began
to use the Michigan Mandate as a model in their own
planning.
Several of the key highlights of this period of the
Michigan Mandate included:
l. An increase of 39 percent in minority enrollments
over the irst three years of the Michigan Mandate, resulting in the largest number of students of color in the
University’s history, 6,044 or l8.2 percent of enrollment.
2. The University achieved the largest number of
Hispanic, Native American, and Asian students at all

levels–undergraduate, graduate, and professional–in
its history. Indeed, Black enrollments increased by 36
percent over the irst three years to 2,358 or 7.l percent
of the student body. Hispanic students increased 56
percent to l,055 students or 3.2 percent of the student
body. Asian students increased 37 percent to 2,474 or
7.5 percent, while Native American students increased
22 percent to l57 or 0.5 percent total.
3. There was also remarkable progress at the graduate and professional levels: 46 percent increase in minority graduate students (55 percent increase in Black)
and 36 percent in minority professional students (53
percent Black).
4. The University’s graduation rates for students of
color exceeded 60 percent, ranking it among the best in
the nation.
5. During the irst three years of the Michigan Mandate the University added l2l new faculty of color to
the University’s tenure track ranks, including ifty-nine
African American faculty. This put the University on
schedule in achieving a preliminary objective of doubling the number of faculty of color on campus within
the irst ive years of the Michigan Mandate.
There were many other signs of progress ranging
from major growth in inancial aid to students of color
to increased outreach programs to school systems in cities such as Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw.

The Michigan Mandate: In High Gear
The New Challenge
The irst phase of the Michigan Mandate was focused on the issue of increasing the representation of
minority groups within the University community.
But increasing the numbers was always recognized to
be the easy part of the plan. It is the case that one can
have a great many diferent people living in the same
locale, working side-by-side, going to the same classes,
but that will not mean that one has a community. Just
increasing the numbers and mix of people doesn’t provide one with a sense of mutual respect and a cohesive

45

Lester Monts

John Matlock

Robert Zajonc

The leadership of the next phase of the University Diversity initiatives

community. To achieve this the University faced the
challenge of creating a new kind of community, a community that drew on the unique strengths and talents
and experiences of all of its members. And this was felt
to be the important challenge of the second phase of the
Michigan Mandate.
More speciically, it was recognized that the traditional institutions of our society, our communities and
neighborhoods, our churches and public schools, our
business and commerce, all had failed to create a sense
of community or to provide the models for creative interaction that were needed to build a new kind of society based on a general mutual dependence, trust, and
respect. It was recognized that in America today it is
on our college campuses that many students come together for the irst time with students of other races and
cultures in an environment in which they are expected
to live, work, and learn together. It was therefore not
surprising that in our existing universities structures
there is a good deal of tension and separatism.
Hence, the University accepted that one of its missions was to build multicultural learning communities.
In a sense, it was recognized that our college campuses
would become the crucibles in which the multicultural, multiracial world cultures of 2lst century America
would be forged. This was a major responsibility–in-

deed a mandate–for the University.
The Evolving Plan
The University of Michigan had a certain advantage over many other institutions because it beneitted
from having one of the strongest concentrations of programs in the social sciences of any American university.
Hence, it was clear that key to the University’s success
in building a multicultural university would be drawing on the great experience and knowledge of its social science faculty. To this end, the Change Group was
restructured into a group that more appropriately relected these disciplines and Robert Zajonc, Director of
the Institute for Social Research, was asked to chair the
committee. Beyond this a second structure was formed
by replacing the airmative action coordinator council
with a new committee consisting of the second ranking administrative oicers in each unit of the University, and charged with implementing many of the ideas
necessary to take the University toward a multicultural
community.
In this regard, it should also be noted that while the
Michigan Mandate was being moved into a new phase
the strong commitment to achieve a more representative presence in the life of the University by minority

46

Toasting the achievements of the Michigan Mandate team!!
students, faculty, and staf continued to be among the
University’s highest priorities. The President and other
oicers continued to push very hard on this agenda and
would meet from time to time with units of the University who were felt to be making less than the desired
commitment.

Concluding Remarks
Through the Michigan Mandate, the University of
Michigan set out on a new course to better respond to

the extraordinary diversity of our nation and the world
in which we live. In a sense, the University was acting
to change its make-up and its culture to bring all ethnic
groups fully into the life and leadership of the institution. The goal of the Michigan Mandate was to make
the University a leader known for the racial and ethnic
diversity of its faculty, students, and staf. To make the
University set its sights on becoming a leader and creating a multicultural community capable of serving as
a model for higher education and for society-at-large.

47
Student Access and Success
Undergraduate Student Access
Wade McCree Incentive Scholarship
King/Chavez/Parks Program
Summer programs (e.g., DAPCEP)
College Day visitation for families
Tuition grants to all Native American students
from Michigan.
Special Undergraduate Programs
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program
21st Century Program
CRLT Programs
Leadership 2017
Oice of Academic Multicultural Initiatives
Graduate Student Support
Fully funding minority graduate support
Rackham Graduate Merit Fellowship Program
Special Programs
Tapped grass-roots creativity and energy using
$ 1 M/y Presidential Initiatives Funds tor
competitive proposals from faculty and
student groups.
Results
Enrollments:
83% increase in students of color (to 28%)
90% increase in underrep min (to 15%)
57% increase in AA (to 2,715 or 9.1%)
126% increase of Latinos (to 4.3%)
100% increase in Native Americans (to 1.1%)
Graduation rates for African Americans highest
among public universities.
UM ranked 27th in nation in minority BA/BS
8th for M.S. degrees, 7th for PhD degrees
1st in African American PhDs (non HBCU’s)
Graduate education
Increased minority fellowships by 118%
Of 734 Rackham Fellows in 1994,
51% were African American,
29% were Latino
Professional Schools:
Business: 12% AA, 28% color
Medicine: 11% AA, 39% color
Law: 10% AA, 21% color

Faculty
Target of Opportunity Program
Faculty Development (Faculty Awards Program for
minority faculty)
Cluster hiring
Creating a welcoming and supportive culture (networks, centers, surveys)
Enlarging candidate pool by increasing PhD enrollments
Results
+62% for African Americans (128)
+117% for Latinos (52)
+75% for Native Americans (7)
Senior academic leadership (URM): from 14 to 25
Staf
Demanded accountability in hiring and promotion
Human Resources and Airmative Action programs
Consultation and Conciliation Services
Results
Top managers: +100% (to 10% of management)
P&A: +80 (from 449 to 816)
More Generally
Building University-wide commitments
Oice of Minority Afairs, Vice-Provost for Minority Afairs
Demanding accountability
Included in compensation review
Included in budget review
Included in appointment review
Leadership
Half of Executive Oicers were African American
Executive VP Medical Center (Rita Dumas)
Secretary of University (Harold Johnson)
VP Research (Homer Neal)
UM Flint Chancellor Charlie Nelms
UM Dearborn Chancellor James Renick
JJD’s Successor was African American (Homer Neal)

Some Actions and Results of the Michigan Mandate by 1996

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Appendix D

Diversity
Chapter 9 in A University for the 21st Century (UM Press, 1999)

Today civilization is in danger by reason of a perversion
of doctrine concerning the social character of humanity. The
worth of any social system depends on the value experience
it promotes among individual human beings. There is no one
American value experience other than the many experiences
of individual Americans or of other individuals afected by
American life. A community life is a mode of eliciting value
for the people concerned.
Alfred North Whitehead
A distinguishing characteristic and great strength
of American higher education is its growing commitment over time to serve all segments of our pluralistic society. Higher education’s broadening inclusion of
talented students and faculty of diverse ethnic, racial,
economic, social, political, national, or religious background, has allowed our academic institutions to draw
on a broader and deeper pool of talent, experience, and
ideas than more exclusive counterparts in other places
and times. This diversity invigorates and renews teaching and scholarship in American universities, helping
to challenge long-held assumptions, asking new questions, creating new areas and methods of inquiry, and
generating new ideas for testing in scholarly discourse.
We have never needed such inclusiveness and diversity more than today when diferential growth patterns and very diferent lows of immigration from
Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Mexico
are transforming our population. By the year 2030 current projections indicate that approximately 40 percent
of all Americans will be members of minority groups,
many—even most—of color. By mid-century we may
cease to have any one majority ethnic group. By any
measure, we are evolving rapidly into a truly multicultural society with a remarkable cultural, racial, and
ethnic diversity. This demographic revolution is taking

place within the context of the continuing globalization
of the world’s economy and society that requires Americans to interact with people from every country of the
world. These far reaching changes in the nature of the
people we serve and the requirements of global responsibility demand far-reaching changes in the nature and
structure of higher education in America.
Our rapidly diversifying population generates a remarkable vitality and energy in American life and in
our educational institutions. At the same time, it gives
rise to conlict, challenging our nation and our institutions to overcome at last our long history of prejudice
and discrimination against those groups who are diferent, particularly and most devastatingly, those groups
identiied by the color of their skin. Tragically, race remains a signiicant factor in our social relations that
profoundly afects the opportunities, experiences, and
perspectives of those discriminated against as well as
those who discriminate. To change this racial and cultural dynamic, we need to understand better how others think and feel and to learn to function across racial
and cultural divisions. We must replace stereotypes
with knowledge and understanding. Slowly, we Americans are learning but there remains a great distance to
go.
The inal century of the second millennium, for all
its advances in learning and technology, is likely to be
most remembered for the horrors unleashed by racial,
religious, and ethnic prejudice and discrimination. If
anyone should doubt the urgency of our task in seeking to overcome this evil heritage, they have only to recall the Holocaust or to look around the world today at
the religious, racial, and ethnic conlicts that have killed
millions of innocents, made millions of others refugees,
ripped nations asunder, set neighbor against neighbor,
and poisoned the minds and hearts of generations.

2
From Rwanda to Timor, from Kosovo to the Middle
East, the endless toll of violence and sufering rises
unabated. Some see this as evidence that the ideal of
tolerance and understanding is impossible to achieve.
We cannot accept such defeatism. We must meet this
challenge to overcome prejudice and discrimination
here and now. America’s colleges and universities have
a critical part to play in this struggle.
This means we must not falter in our national commitment to ending discrimination and achieving the
promise of equal opportunity. In recent years academia
has made a dedicated efort to make progress towards
diversity. It can point to signiicant gains as a result of
these eforts. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, this progress has given rise to a growing backlash. An increasing number of Americans oppose our
traditional approaches to achieving diversity such as
airmative action. Federal courts are pondering cases
that challenge racial preference. In state after state, voters are taking aim through referenda at an earlier generation’s commitment to civil rights. At such a time, it
seems particularly important that we in academe talk
openly, with boldness, about the need for more, not
less, diversity. There is plenty of room to debate the
merits of various methods of achieving our ends, but
as our nation and our world become ever more diverse,
ever more interdependent and interconnected, it is vital
that we stand irm in our fundamental commitment to
our diversity.

The Case for Diversity
When one discusses the topic of diversity in higher
education, it is customary to focus on issues of race and
ethnicity, and we shall do so in much of this chapter.
But it is also important to recognize that human diversity is far broader, encompassing characteristics such
as gender, class, national origin, and sexual orientation. These, too, contribute to the nature of an academic
community. In both the narrow and broader sense, it is
important to set out a compelling rationale for seeking
diversity in American higher education. First and foremost, the case rests on moral responsibility and democratic ideals, based on our social contract with society.
I would also contend that diversity is a critical element
in sustaining the quality and relevance of our education

and scholarship. Our nation’s campuses have a unique
opportunity to ofer positive social models and provide
leadership in addressing one of the most persistent
and seemingly intractable problems of human experience—overcoming the impulse to fear, reject, or harm
the “other.” In addition, there are persuasive pragmatic
reasons for academia to pursue diversity.
Social and Moral Responsibility
American colleges and universities are founded
on the principle that they exist to serve their society
through advancing knowledge and educating students
who will, in turn, apply their knowledge for their own
advancement but also to serve others. Hence, higher
education, indeed all educational institutions, are responsible for modeling and transmitting essential civic
and democratic values and helping to develop the experience and skills necessary to put them into practice.
In this sense, then, higher education’s commitment to
relect the increasing diversity of our society in terms
of both our academic activities and the inclusiveness of
our campus communities is based in part on the American university’s fundamental social, institutional, and
scholarly commitment to freedom, democracy, and social justice.
To further these lofty goals, our colleges and universities must overcome inequities deeply embedded in
our society by ofering opportunity to those who historically have been prevented from participating fully
in the life of our nation. Over the years our universities
have broadened their commitment to providing equal
opportunity for every individual regardless of race, nationality, class, gender, or belief. They have done so as
part of their basic obligations to serve those who founded and support us, to serve as models of social interaction, and to serve as a major source of leaders throughout society. This is a fundamental issue of equity and
social justice that must be addressed if we are to keep
faith with our values, responsibilities, and purposes.
Educational Quality
Nevertheless, universities are social institutions of
the mind, not of the heart. While there are compelling
moral and civic reasons to seek diversity and social eq-

3
uity on our campuses, the most efective arguments in
favor of diversity to a university community tend to be
those related to academic quality.
Perhaps most important in this regard is the role diversity plays in the education of our students. We have
an obligation to create the best possible educational environment for the young adults whose lives are likely
to be signiicantly changed during their years on our
campuses. Their learning environment depends on the
characteristics of the entire group of students who share
a common educational experience. Students constantly
learn from each other in the classroom and in extracurricular life. The more diverse the student cohort,
the more opportunities for exposure to diferent ideas,
perspectives and experiences and the more chances to
interact, develop interpersonal skills, and form bonds
that transcend diference.
There is ample research to suggest that diversity
is a critical factor in creating the richly varied educational experience that helps students learn. Since students in late adolescence and early adulthood are at
a crucial stage in their development, diversity (racial,
demographic, economic, and cultural) enables them to
become conscious learners and critical thinkers, and
prepares them to become active participants in a democratic society. Students educated in diverse settings are
more motivated and better able to participate in an increasingly heterogeneous and complex democracy.
We must accept as a fact of life in contemporary
America that the persistence of separation by race and
ethnicity, past and present, has shaped the life experiences and attitudes of whites and minorities in fundamental ways. Americans of diferent races and ethnicities live in worlds that have a long history of separation
and are still, to a great extent, separate. Indeed, in many
regions, we are more sharply segregated than ever.
Too few Americans of diferent racial and ethnic backgrounds interact in a meaningful way on a daily basis.
A racially and ethnically diverse university student
body has far-ranging and signiicant beneits for all students, non-minorities, and minorities alike. Students
learn more and think in deeper, more complex ways in
a diverse educational environment. Racial diversity in
a college student body provides the very features that
research has determined are central to producing the
conscious mode of thought educators demand from

their students.
Intellectual Vitality
Diversity is similarly fundamental for the vigor and
breadth of scholarship. Unless we draw upon a greater
diversity of people as scholars and students, we cannot hope to generate the intellectual vitality we need to
respond to a world characterized by profound change.
The burgeoning complexity and rapidly increasing rate
of change forces us to draw upon a broader breadth and
depth of human knowledge and understanding. Perhaps our society could tolerate singular answers in the
past, when we could still imagine that tomorrow would
look much like today. But this assumption of stasis is no
longer plausible. As knowledge advances, we uncover
new questions we could not have imagined a few years
ago. As society evolves, the issues we grapple with shift
in unpredictable ways. A solution for one area of the
world often turns out to be inefectual or even harmful
in another. The dangers of unanticipated consequences
of our actions multiply as we take on ever more complex social problems. Many academic and professional
disciplines have found their very foundations radically
transformed as they grapple with the impact of new
perspectives, revolutionary technologies, and the exponential growth of knowledge.
For universities to thrive in this age of complexity and change, it is vital that we resist any tendency
to eliminate options. Only with a multiplicity of approaches, opinions, and ways of seeing can we hope to
solve the problems we face. Universities, more than any
other institution in American society, have upheld the
ideal of intellectual freedom, open to diverse ideas that
are debated on their merits. We must continually struggle to sustain this heritage and to become places open
to a myriad of experiences, cultures, and approaches.
In addition to these intellectual beneits, the inclusion of underrepresented groups allows our institutions
to tap reservoirs of human talents and experiences from
which they have not yet fully drawn. Indeed, it seems
apparent that our universities could not sustain such
high distinctions in a pluralistic world society without
diversity and openness to new perspectives, experiences, and talents. In the years ahead we will need to
draw on the insights of many diverse perspectives to

4
understand and function efectively in our own as well
as in the national and world community.
Serving a Changing Society
Our nation’s ability to face the challenge of diversity in the years ahead will determine our strength and
vitality. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, our culture needs to come to grips with the fact
that those groups we refer to today as minorities will
become the majority population of our nation in the
century ahead, just as they are today throughout the
world. For instance, as we enter the next century, one of
three college-age Americans today is a person of color,
and roughly 50 percent of our school children (K-12) are
African American or Hispanic American. By 2020, the
American population, which now includes 26.5 million
African Americans and 14.6 million Hispanic Americans, will include 44 million African Americans and 47
million Hispanic Americans. By the late 21st century,
some demographers predict that Hispanic Americans
will become the largest ethnic group in America.
The truth, too, is that most of us retain proud ties to
our ethnic roots, and this strong and fruitful identiication must coexist with—indeed enable—our ability to
become full participants in the economic and civic life
of our country. Pluralism poses a continuing challenge
to our nation and its institutions as we seek to build and
maintain a fundamental common ground of civic values that will inspire mutually beneicial cohesion and
purpose during this period of radical transformation of
so many aspects of our world.
Human Resources
The demographic trends we see in our future hold
some other signiicant implications for national economic and political life and especially for education.
Our clearly demonstrated need for an educated workforce in the years ahead means that America can no
longer aford to waste the human potential, cultural
richness, and leadership represented by minorities and
women. Our traditional industrial economy is shifting
to a new knowledge-based economy, just as our industrial economy had evolved from an agrarian society in
an earlier era. Now, since people and knowledge are

the source of new wealth, we will rely increasingly on
a well-educated and trained workforce to maintain our
competitive position in the world and our quality of life
at home.
Higher education will play a particularly important
role in this regard. For example, in the 1960s barely 1
percent of law students and 2 percent of medical students in America were black. Through the use of afirmative action, inancial aid programs, and aggressive
recruiting, universities were able to attract more minorities into their professional programs, and by 1995, 7.5
percent of law school students and 8.1 percent of medical school students were black. Hence, it is clear that
higher education can open the doors of opportunity to
under-served components of our society. Our universities must make special eforts to expand educational
achievement and workforce participation by minorities
and women not just because that is good social policy,
but because we cannot aford to waste their talents.
America will need to call on the full contribution of all
of its citizens in the years ahead.

The Challenges of Diversity
Although American higher education has long
sought to build and sustain diverse campuses, this is
a goal that has faced many challenges. Our nation continues to be burdened by prejudice and bigotry that
plague our neighborhoods, our cities, and our social
institutions. Although we think of America as a melting
pot in which diverse cultures come together in common
purpose, in reality, most among us seek communities of
like rather than diverse colleagues. All too frequently
we deine ourselves in terms of our diferences from
others, and we have great diiculty in imagining the
world as others see it. And, although change is always
a diicult task for tradition-bound institutions such as
universities, it has proven particularly so in the areas of
diversity.
The Challenge of Racism
Prejudice and ignorance persist on our nation’s
campuses as they do throughout our society. American
society today still faces high levels of racial segregation
in housing and education in spite of decades of legis-

5
lative eforts to reduce it. Furthermore, most students
complete their elementary and secondary education
without ever having attended a school that enrolled
signiicant numbers of students of other races and
without living in a neighborhood where the other races
were well represented.
Yet, because of the distinctly diferent historical experiences of white and non-white Americans, race continues to afect outlook, perception, and experience. For
example, most white Americans tend to think that race
has only a minor impact on the daily experiences and
future expectations of Americans whatever their background and that blacks receive the same treatment as
they do both personally and institutionally. Most nonwhites, in contrast, feel that race still matters a great
deal, and considerable numbers report having experienced discriminatory treatment in shops and restaurants or in encounters with the public. Whether explicit
or more subtlety, our society continues to perpetuate
stereotypes which reinforce the idea that one race is superior to another.
Not surprisingly, new students arrive on our campuses bringing with them the full spectrum of these
experiences and opinions. It is here that many students
for the irst time have the opportunity to live and work
with students from very diferent backgrounds. In
many ways our campuses act as lenses that focus the
social challenges before our country. It is not easy to
overcome this legacy of prejudice and fear that divides
us. Not surprisingly, our campuses experience racial incidents, conlict, and separatism. When these occur, we
must demonstrate clearly and unequivocally that racism on our campuses will not be tolerated. Programs
are also needed to promote relection on social values
and to encourage greater civility in social relations. It
is also critical to develop new networks and forums to
promote interaction and open discussion among campus groups.
The Challenge of Community
In an increasingly diverse country, deep divisions
persist between whites, blacks, Hispanics, Native
Americans, and other ethnic groups. There is nothing
natural about these divisions. They are not immutable
facts of life. Rather they are a consequence of a troubled

and still unresolved past. Racial and ethnic groups remain separated by residence and education. There are
unfortunately few places in American society where
people of diferent backgrounds interact, learn from
each other, and struggle to understand their diferences
and discover their commonality. The fundamental issue
that we face at the end of the 20th Century is to work
to overcome our divisions in the spirit of the venerable
American motto, E Pluribus Unum. To build unity from
pluralism, to recognize diversity and learn from it, to
fashion a democracy of many voices, is still an uninished project. Its success is vital to our nation’s future.
As a social institution, the university can ind direction in its history and tradition of openness. We
must set forth a vision of a more varied and tolerant
environment—a more pluralistic, cosmopolitan community. We have to become a community in which all
barriers to full participation of all people in the life of
our institution are removed; a place where we can all
draw strength from the richness of our human variety;
but also a place where we can work constructively together as a community of scholars and as citizens of a
democratic society. This is the challenge before us. As
citizens we have to reairm our commitment to justice
and equality. As scholars we have to support unwaveringly our shared commitment to academic freedom and
the pursuit of excellence.
Seeing Diference Diferently
We need to work diligently to transform our campuses, encouraging respect for diversity in all of the
characteristics that can be used to describe our human
species: age, race, gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, religious belief, sexual orientation, political beliefs,
economic background, and geographical origin. Yet,
in doing so, we will have to move in two directions at
once. We have to set aside the assumption that people
from groups diferent from ours necessarily have the
same needs, experiences, and points of view that we do.
At the same time, we cannot succumb to the equally
pernicious assumption that “they” are all the same.
Real barriers, experiences, and culture may be shared
by many in a group, but that does not give us permission to treat people as though they conform to some stereotyped image of “white,” “gay,” or “Latino.” We seek

6
a community where various cultures and ethnicity are
valued and acknowledged, but where each individual
has the opportunity to ind her or his own path.
At the same time, we should recognize that not everyone faces the same consequences for their diferences. The experience of an Asian American student on our
campus is not the same as that of an African American
student or a white woman or a person with a disability.
We should not forget that issues of diference are inextricably intertwined with issues of power, opportunity,
and the speciic histories of groups and of each individual. As we pursue a pluralistic campus, we should
realize that equality will require efort, resources, and
commitment to both structural change and education.
We must learn to see diference diferently. The multicolored skein that would be a multicultural university
has to be woven together, becoming a tapestry, with
each thread retaining its unique character while part of
a larger design.
The Challenge of Change
It is important not to delude ourselves. Institutions
do not change quickly and easily any more than do the
societies of which they are a part. Achieving our democratic goals of equity and justice for all often requires
intense struggle, and we remain far from our goals as
a nation. In confronting the issues of racial and ethnic
inequality in America we are probing one of the most
painful wounds of American history.
Throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, progress towards greater racial equity in our society and
our social institutions has been made, in part, through
policies and programs that recognize race as an explicit
characteristic. For some time, universities with highly
selective admissions have used race as one of several
factors (e.g., special athletic, artistic, scientiic or leadership talent, or geographic origin; status as children of
alumni; or unique qualities of character or experience)
in determining which students to admit to their institutions. Special inancial aid programs have been developed to address the economic disadvantages faced
by underrepresented minority groups. Minority faculty
and staf have been identiied and recruited through
targeted programs.
Yet, despite its utility, the use of race as an explicit

factor in eforts to achieve diversity or address inequities is being challenged with great force through popular
referenda, legislation, and by the courts. For example,
actions taken in several states now prohibit the consideration of race in college admissions. In such instances,
it is sometimes suggested that other approaches such
as admitting a certain fraction of high school graduates
or using family income could be used to achieve the
same diversity objectives. Yet, the available evidence
suggests such alternatives may not suice. Income
based strategies are unlikely to be good substitutes for
race-sensitive admissions policies because there are
simply too few Black and Latino students from poor
families who have strong enough academic preparation
to qualify for admission to highly selective institutions.
Furthermore, standardized admissions tests such as the
SAT, ACT and LSAT are of limited value in evaluating
“merit” or determining admissions qualiications of all
students, but particularly for underrepresented minorities for whom systematic inluences make these tests
even less diagnostic of their scholastic potential. There
is extensive empirical data indicating that experiences
tied to one’s racial and ethnic identify can artiicially
depress standardized test performance.
Hence, progress toward diversity will likely require
some signiicant changes in strategy in the years ahead.
Unfortunately, the road we have to travel is neither frequently walked nor well marked. We can look to very
few truly diverse institutions in American society for
guidance. We will have to blaze new trails, and create
new social models.
At the University of Michigan we saw that we needed both a commitment and a plan to achieve diversity.
We took the long view, one that required patient and
persistent leadership, as well as the commitment and
hard work of people throughout our community and
beyond.

The Michigan Mandate
It may be useful to consider the University of Michigan’s experience in its efort to achieve diversity because it led to measurable progress and because, since
it happened on my watch, I can describe some of the
victories and pitfalls that occurred along the way. Like
most of higher education, the history of diversity at

7
Michigan has been complex and often contradictory.
There have been too many times when the institution
seems to take a step forward, only to be followed by
two steps backward. Nonetheless, access and equality
have always been a central goal of our institution. We
are proud that the University has consistently been at
the forefront of the struggle for inclusiveness in higher
education.
From our earliest beginnings in 1817, the University
of Michigan focused on making a university education
available to all economic classes. This ideal was stated
clearly by an early Michigan president, James Angell,
when he said the goal of the University was “to provide
an uncommon education for the common man.” At our
founding, we attracted students from a broad range of
European ethnic backgrounds. In the early 1800s, the
population of the state swelled with new immigrants
from the rest of the country and across the European
continent. By 1860, the Regents referred “with partiality,” to the “list of foreign students drawn thither from
every section of our country.” Forty-six percent of our
students then came from other states and foreign countries. Today more than one hundred nations are represented at Michigan.
The irst African American students arrived on our
campus in 1868. In the years after Reconstruction, however, discrimination increased. Black students joined
together to support each other early in the century
and staged restaurant protests in the 1920s. It was not
until the 1960s that racial unrest inally exploded into
campus-wide concerted action. Although the University had made eforts to become a more diverse institution, both black and white students, frustrated by the
slow movement, organized into the irst Black Action
Movement (BAM) in 1970. The central administration
building was occupied, and students boycotted classes.
Many positive advances came from this outpouring of
student solidarity. The number of African American
faculty and students on campus increased; new goals
and programs were established and old programs were
funded. Yet only a few years later, enrollments began to
fall again and funding waned. By the early 1980’s, black
enrollment began to increase but still fell short of the
goals set a decade before.
It would take two more student uprisings (BAM II
and III), several disturbing racial incidents, negative

national media attention, mediation with Jesse Jackson,
and powerful legislative political pressure before the
University again took a systematic look at the diicult
problems of race on campus. To put it mildly, it was a
time of ferment built on the Michigan tradition of activism. In this instance, our students recalled us to our
commitment and held us to our promises.
Demands for change came not only from black students. These protests were joined by Latino students,
who had been involved in the BAM struggles from
the beginning, but now raised their voices as a separate group to demand greater visibility and attention to
their agenda.
The University had a disappointing record with respect to Native Americans, and they also began to protest as well. Ironically, in 1817 local tribes ceded 1,920
acres of land to the Northwest Territory to establish the
“University of Michigania.” Yet the Native American
enrollments remained quite low, less than 0.5 percent,
throughout most of the University’s history.
Michigan’s record is somewhat better with respect
to inclusion of Asian and Asian Americans. Historically, the University played a major role in expanding the
opportunities for students from Asia. In the late 1800s,
Michigan became one of the irst universities to admit
foreign Asian students. It was the irst university in the
United States to award a doctoral degree to a Japanese
citizen. Michigan eventually became a major center for
Asian education. In recent years, the number of Asian
American students has grown more quickly than any
other group, and during the protests of the 1980s Asian
Americans also made their voices heard.
By the late 1980s it had become obvious that the
University had made inadequate progress in its goal to
relect the rich diversity of our nation and our world
among its faculty, students and staf. As we learned
from our minority and female constituencies, simply
providing access to our institution was not suicient
to provide full opportunity for those groups that continued to sufer from social, cultural, and economic
discrimination in our society. People from underrepresented groups who did manage to ind their way here
faced serious barriers to their success and advancement
in a University (and national) culture still largely dominated by a white, male majority.
We also faced a particular challenge because of our

8
geographic location. As a state university, we draw
roughly two-thirds of our undergraduates from Michigan, with almost one-half of these from the metropolitan Detroit area. Unfortunately, Michigan ranks among
the top four states in the nation in the degree of black/
white school segregation: 82 percent of black students
attend schools in all black school districts, while more
than 90 percent of white students attend schools with
a black enrollment of less than 10 percent. Furthermore, Detroit is the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country (following only Gary, Indiana),
and the rates of residential segregation in Detroit were
higher in 1990 than in 1960. Many suburban communities on the borders of Detroit have remained almost
completely white despite their proximity to adjoining
minority-dominated city neighborhoods. Drawing a
signiicant fraction of our undergraduate enrollment
from such a racially segregated environment presented
a particularly serious challenge and responsibility for
the University.
To address these challenges we knew that the University would have to change dramatically to achieve
diversity. Our irst step was to convene a group of faculty with direct experience in organizational change
and multicultural environments. We drew upon the expertise of faculty from the social sciences, management,
law, and social work along with selected administrators. We wanted a free-wheeling, sky’s-the-limit planning group. It took more than a year of intense discussion and study to arrive at the irst outline of goals and
a plan for increasing diversity, which was announced
in 1987. Based on the experience of other strategic planning eforts, we knew that the plan would need to be
strategic and long term, leaving operational details to
be developed through extensive consultations. The
plan was really only a road map. It set out a direction
and pointed to a destination. It ofered incentives for
achieving goals but disbursed responsibility authority
and accountability for many of the speciic steps to be
taken by individual academic and administrative units.
As the plan evolved, we took care to retain the diicult
but essential requirements of community building and
pluralism.
It was also essential to engage as many of our constituents as possible in a dialogue about the plan’s
goals and strategies with the hope of gradually build-

ing widespread understanding and support inside and
beyond our campus. Early drafts of the plan, in outline
form and expressed in general terms, were circulated
to ever widening circles of administration and faculty,
and their useful comments were incorporated. The plan
evolved daily and was seen as organic and evolving in
such a way as to facilitate open exchange of views. The
challenge was to construct a process that would engage
the various constituencies of the institution, relecting
in the plan’s text their ideas and experiences. The plan
would provide the framework for a continuing dialogue about the very nature of the institution. In this
sense, we wanted to engage in a dynamic process rather than delivering commandments from on high.
Over the irst two years, hundreds of discussions
with groups both on and of campus were held. We
reached out to alumni, donors, and civic and political leaders and groups and met with countless student faculty and staf groups. Great care was taken to
convey the same message to everyone as a means of
establishing credibility and building trust among all
constituencies. Meetings were sometimes contentious,
often enlightening, but rarely acrimonious. Gradually
understanding increased and support grew. Although
the plan itself came from the administration, it would
be individuals and units that would devise most of the
detailed plans for carrying it forward. University publications, administrators’ speeches and meetings, Faculty
Senate deliberations, all carried the message: Diversity
would become the cornerstone in the University’s efforts to achieve excellence in teaching, research, and
service in the multicultural nation and world in which
it would exist.
The initial planning process and early promulgation
of the diversity initiative began when I served as University Provost with the full support of then President
Harold Shapiro. When I was named to succeed him in
1987, I seized every opportunity to reiterate my three
strategic goals: Make Michigan a national leader in
achieving diversity, internationalizing education and
research, and building a knowledge infrastructure for
a twenty-irst century learning institution. I wanted to
leave no doubt about what our priorities should be in
the years ahead.
It was the long-term strategic focus of our planning
that proved to be critical because institutions do not

9
change quickly and easily any more than do the societies of which they are a part. It is easy to falter, to become
discouraged or distracted. The University would have
to leave behind many reactive and uncoordinated efforts that had characterized its past and move toward
a more strategic approach designed to achieve longterm systemic change. Sacriices would be necessary
as traditional roles and privileges were challenged. In
particular, we foresaw the limitations of focussing only
on airmative action; that is, on access, retention, and
representation. We believed that without deeper, more
fundamental institutional change these eforts by themselves would inevitably fail—as they had throughout
the 1970s and 1980s.
The plan would have to build on the best that we already had. The challenge was to persuade the community that there was a real stake for everyone in seizing
this moment to chart a more diverse future. More people
needed to believe that the gains to be achieved through
diversity would more than compensate for the necessary sacriices. The irst and vital step was to link diversity and excellence as the two most compelling goals
before the institution, recognizing that these goals were
not only complementary but would be tightly linked in
the multicultural society characterizing our nation and
the world in the future. As we moved ahead, we began
to refer to the plan as The Michigan Mandate: A Strategic
Linking of Academic Excellence and Social Diversity. But it
continued to be modiied as discussions broadened and
experience was gained.
The early steps in developing the Michigan Mandate were to: 1) develop a carefully designed strategic
process for achieving, using, and valuing diversity; 2)
achieve a community strongly committed in philosophy to our goals and objectives; and 3) allocate the
necessary resources to accomplish this task. Based on
strategic models from other spheres, the plan featured
clear, concise, and simple goals; proposed speciic actions and evaluation mechanisms; and relected extensive interaction with and direct comment from a variety
of constituencies and individuals to assure responsiveness of the plan.
The mission and goals of the Michigan Mandate
were stated quite simply:
Philosophy: To recognize that diversity and excel-

lence are complementary and compelling goals for the
University and to make a irm commitment to their
achievement.
Representation: To commit to the recruitment, support, and success of members of historically underrepresented groups among our students, faculty, staf, and
leadership.
Environment: To build on our campus an environment that seeks, nourishes, and sustains diversity and
pluralism and that values and respects the dignity and
worth of every individual.
Associated with these general goals were more speciic objectives:
Faculty recruitment and development: To substantially increase the number of tenure-track faculty in
each underrepresented minority group; to increase the
success of minority faculty in the achievement of professional fulillment, promotion, and tenure; to increase
the number of underrepresented minority faculty in
leadership positions.
Student recruitment, achievement, and outreach: To
achieve increases in the number of entering underrepresented minority students as well as in total underrepresented minority enrollment; to establish and achieve
speciic minority enrollment targets in all schools and
colleges; to increase minority graduation rates; to develop new programs to attract back to campus minority
students who have withdrawn from our academic programs; to design new and strengthen existing outreach
programs that have demonstrable impact on the pool
of minority applicants to undergraduate, graduate, and
professional programs.
Staf recruitment and development: To focus on the
achievement of airmative action goals in all job categories; to increase the number of underrepresented
minorities in key University leadership positions; to
strengthen support systems and services for minority
staf.
Improving the environment for diversity: To foster
a culturally diverse environment; to signiicantly reduce the number of incidents of racism and prejudice
on campus; to increase community-wide commitment
to diversity and involvement in diversity initiatives
among students, faculty, and staf; to broaden the base

10
of diversity initiatives; to assure the compatibility of
University policies, procedures, and practice with the
goal of a multicultural community; to improve communications and interactions with and among all groups;
and to provide more opportunities for minorities to
communicate their needs and experiences and to contribute directly to the change process.
A series of carefully focused strategic actions was
developed to move the University toward these objectives. These strategic actions were framed by the values
and traditions of the University, an understanding of
our unique culture characterized by a high degree of
faculty and unit freedom and autonomy, and animated
by a highly competitive and entrepreneurial spirit.
The irst phase of the Michigan Mandate from 1987
to 1990 was focused on the issue of increasing the representation of minority groups within the University
community. Primarily our approach was based on providing incentives to reward success, encouragement of
research and evaluation of new initiatives, and support
for wide-ranging experiments. The plan very emphatically did not specify numerical targets, quotas, or speciic rates of increase to be attained.
To cite just one highly successful example, we established what we called the Target of Opportunity
Program aimed at increasing the number of minority
faculty at all ranks. Traditionally, university faculties
have been driven by a concern for academic specialization within their respective disciplines. This is fundamentally laudable and certainly has fostered the exceptional strength and disciplinary character that we see in
universities across the country; however, it also can be
constraining. Too often in recent years the University
had seen faculty searches that were literally “replacement” searches rather than “enhancement” searches.
To achieve the goals of the Michigan Mandate, the
University had to free itself from the constraints of this
traditional perspective. Therefore, the central administration sent out the following message to the academic
units: be vigorous and creative in identifying minority
teachers/scholars who can enrich the activities of your
unit. Do not be limited by concerns relating to narrow
specialization; do not be concerned about the availability of a faculty slot within the unit. The principal criterion for the recruitment of a minority faculty member
is whether the individual can enhance the department.

If so, resources will be made available to recruit that
person to the University of Michigan.
From the outset, we anticipated that there would be
many mistakes in the early stages. There would be setbacks and disappointments. The important point was
to make a commitment for the long range and not be
distracted from this vision. This long-range viewpoint
was especially important in facing up to many ongoing
pressures, demands, and demonstrations presented by
one special interest group or another or to take a particular stance on a narrow issue or agenda. This was
very diicult at times as one issue or another each became a litmus test of university commitment for internal and external interest groups. While these pressures
were understandable and probably inevitable, the plan
would succeed only if the University leadership insisted on operating at a long-term strategic rather than
on a short-term reactive level. It was essential to keep
our eyes irmly focused on the prize ahead resisting the
temptation to react to every issue that arose. Commitment and support within and outside the University
community were necessary ingredients for success, but
as the University had learned over the past two decades, it would take more than this to succeed. It was
essential to have a strategy, a plan designed to guide
institutional change.
Over the next several years, through this and many
other programs, the diversity of the campus changed
dramatically, with the numbers of underrepresented
minority students and faculty members roughly doubling. But increasing the numbers was the relatively
easy part of the plan. Institutions can have a great
many diferent people living in the same locale, working side-by-side, going to the same classes, but that will
not mean that one has a community. Just increasing the
numbers and mix of people will not provide one with a
sense of mutual respect and a cohesive community. To
achieve this, the University faced the challenge of creating a new kind of community—a community that drew
on the unique strengths and talents and experiences of
all of its members. And this was felt to be the important
challenge of the second phase of the Michigan Mandate. More speciically, it was recognized that the traditional institutions of our society—our communities
and neighborhoods, our churches and public schools,
our business and commerce—all had failed to create a

11
sense of community or to provide the models for creative interactions that were needed to build a new kind
of society based on a general mutual dependence, trust,
and respect. It was recognized that in America today it
is on our college campuses that many students come
together for the irst time with students of other races
nationalities, and cultures in an environment in which
they are expected to live, work, and learn together. It
was therefore not surprising that in our existing university structure there was a good deal of tension and
frequent separatism among groups. It may take more
than one generation to ease this situation.
By 1995 Michigan could point to signiicant progress
in achieving diversity. By every measure, the Michigan
Mandate was a remarkable success, moving the University far beyond our original goals of a more diverse
campus. The representation of underrepresented students, faculty, and staf more than doubled over the decade of the efort. But, perhaps even more signiicantly,
the success of underrepresented minorities at the University improved even more remarkably, with graduation rates rising to highest among public universities,
promotion and tenure success of minority faculty members becoming comparable to their majority colleagues,
and a growing number of appointments of minorities
to leadership positions in the University. The campus
climate not only became far more accepting and supportive of diversity, but students and faculty began to
come to Michigan because of its growing reputation
for a diverse campus. And, perhaps most signiicantly,
as the campus became more racially and ethnically diverse, the quality of the students, faculty, and academic
programs of the University increased to their highest
level in history. This latter fact seemed to reinforce our
contention that the aspirations of diversity and excellence were not only compatible but, in fact, highly correlated.
In conclusion, while the Michigan Mandate has been
a success, it should be made clear that no plan, no commitment, no goal, and no action could have brought us
to this point, without the help and support of literally
thousands of faculty, students, staf, alumni, and supporters. They are the ones who made change possible,
and they continue to work for it today.
Michigan is always a work in progress.

The Michigan Agenda for Women
While we pursued the goals of the Michigan Mandate, we could not ignore another glaring inequity in
campus life. If we meant to embrace diversity in its full
meaning, we had to attend to the long-standing concerns of women faculty, students, and staf. We had not
succeeded in including and empowering women as full
and equal partners in all aspects of the life and leadership of the University despite many promises and continuing struggle.
Michigan takes pride in the fact that it was one of
the irst large universities in America to admit women. At the time, the rest of the nation looked on with a
critical eye. Many were certain that the “experiment”
would fail. The irst women who arrived in 1870 were
true pioneers, the objects of intense scrutiny and resentment. For many years, women had separate and unequal access to facilities and organizations. Yet, in the
remaining years of the nineteenth century, the University of Michigan provided strong leadership for the nation. By 1898 the enrollment of women had increased to
the point where they received 53 percent of Michigan’s
undergraduate degrees.
These impressive gains were lost during the early
part of the twentieth century and even more with the
returning veterans after World War II. The representation of women in the student body declined precipitously. It only began to climb again during the 1970s
and 1980s and, for the irst time in almost a century,
once again exceeded that of men in 1996. During the
past several decades, the University took a number of
steps to recruit, promote, and support women staf and
faculty, modifying University policies to relect their
needs. Yet true equality came slowly and great challenges remained.
The Challenges
In faculty hiring and retention, despite the increasing pools of women in many ields, the number of new
hires of women had changed only slowly during the
late twentieth century in most research universities. In
some disciplines such as the physical sciences and engineering, the shortages were particularly acute. We also
continued to sufer from the “glass ceiling” phenom-

12
enon, that is, because of hidden prejudice women were
unable to break through to the ranks of senior faculty
and administrators though no formal constraints prohibited their advancement. The proportion of women
decreased steadily as one moved up the academic ladder. Additionally, there appeared to be an increasing
tendency to hire women of the tenure track as postdoctoral scholars, lecturers, clinicians, or research scientists. The rigid division among various faculty tracks
ofered little or no opportunity for these women to
move onto tenure tracks.
Retention of women faculty was also a serious concern. Studies suggested that women were less likely
than men either to be reviewed for promotion or recommended for promotion at the critical step between
assistant professors and associate professors. Women
faculty, like men, came to the University to be scholars and teachers. Yet because of their inadequate representation in our institutions, our women faculty were
clearly stretched far too thinly by committee responsibilities and mentoring roles. While this was true for
women faculty at all ranks, it took the greatest toll on
junior faculty.
The period of greatest vulnerability in promotion
and retention of women is in the early stage in their
academic careers, when they are assistant professors attempting to achieve tenure. Women faculty experienced
greater demands for committee service and mentoring
of women students; inadequate recognition of and support for dependent care responsibilities; and limited
support in the form of mentors, collaborators, and role
models. The small number of women at senior levels
was due in part to early attrition in the junior ranks.
Women faculty at all ranks described their diiculties
in juggling teaching, research, formal and informal advising, departmental and University-wide committee
service, and family responsibilities. Many female faculty did not feel that these diiculties arose from overt or
systematic discrimination, but rather from the interaction between a system that was becoming increasingly
demanding and competitive and their personal lives,
which were often more complex than those of their
male colleagues because of dependent care responsibilities.
While the low participation of women in senior faculty ranks and among the University leadership was

due in part to the pipeline efect of inadequate numbers
of women at lower ranks, this absence of senior women
was also due to the degree to which senior men faculty
and administrators set the rules and perform the evaluations in a way—whether overt or unintended—that
was biased against women. Old-boy networks, customs, and habits abounded. Women felt that in order to
succeed, they had to play by the rules previously set up
by the men in their ields. As one of our women faculty
members put it, “My profession is male-oriented and
very egalitarian. The men are willing to treat everyone
the same as long as you act like a man.”
At the same time, we faced serious challenges in the
staf area. There was a concern that in higher education,
we simply did not do an adequate job of placing women in the key staf positions to get them ready for senior
assignments. Women were not provided with adequate
stepping stones to senior management, and many believed they were all too frequently used as stepping
stones for others. We also needed to rethink our philosophy of staf beneits. There was a need to move to
more lexible beneits plans that could be tailored to the
employee’s particular situation (e.g., childcare in addition to dependent health care). Furthermore, we needed to aim at providing equal beneits for equal work
that were independent of gender.
Many of our concerns derived from the extreme concentration of women in positions of lower status and
power—as students, lower level staf, and junior faculty. The most efective lever for change might well be
a rapid increase in the number of women holding positions of high status, visibility, and power. This would
not only change the balance of power in decision-making, but it would also change the perception of who and
what matters in the university. Finally we needed to
bring university policies and practices into better alignment with the needs and concerns of women students
in a number of areas including campus safety, student
housing, student life, inancial aid, and childcare.
Over the longer term it was essential that we draw
more women into senior faculty and leadership roles
if we were to be able to attract top women students.
We also needed to do more to encourage and support
women in ields of study where they had been discouraged from entering for decades. Our colleges and universities were far from where they should be—from

13
where they must be—in becoming institutions that provided the full array of opportunities and support for
women faculty, students, and staf. Despite the eforts
of many committed women and men over the past several decades, progress had been slow and frustrating.
Women deserved to be full members and equal partners in the life of our universities. While most women
faculty, students, and staf succeeded admirably in a
variety of roles within higher education, they nonetheless struggled against subtle pressures, discrimination,
and a still-common feeling of invisibility. Removing
barriers and encouraging women’s participation in the
full array of university activities would transform the
University, creating a community in which women and
men shared equal freedom, partnership, and responsibility.
The Plan
It was clear in the 1990s that our university had simply not made suicient progress in providing women
with access to the full range of opportunities and activities in the institution. Not that we ignored these issues. Hundreds of dedicated members of the University community, women and men, had worked long
and hard for women’s equity. But our actions, while
motivated by the best of intentions, had been ad hoc,
lacking in coherence and precise goals and strategy, too
independent of one another, and providing no assurance of progress or accountability for falling short. Here
again we knew Michigan needed a bold strategic plan
with irm goals for recruiting and advancing women
at every level and in every arena. Programs could be
tested against these goals, and our progress could be
accurately measured and shared with the broader University community.
To this end, the University developed and executed
a strategic efort known as the Michigan Agenda for
Women. While the actions proposed were intended to
address the concerns of women students, faculty, and
staf, many of them beneited men as well. Just as the
Michigan Agenda required a commitment from the entire University community, so too did its success beneit
us all, regardless of gender.
In developing the Agenda we knew that diferent strategies were necessary for diferent parts of the

University. Academic units varied enormously in the
degree to which women participated as faculty, staf,
and students. What might work in one area could fail
miserably in another. Some ields, such as the physical sciences, had few women represented among their
students and faculty. For them, it was necessary to design and implement a strategy which spanned the entire pipeline, from K-12 outreach to undergraduate and
graduate education, to faculty recruiting and development. For others such as the social sciences or law, there
already was a strong pool of women students, and the
challenge became one of attracting women from this
pool into graduate and professional studies and eventually into academe. Still other units such as Education
and many departments in humanities and sciences had
strong participation of women among students and junior faculty, but sufered from low participation in the
senior ranks.
There also was considerable variation among nonacademic administrative areas of the University, with
many having little or no tradition of women in key
management positions. To accommodate this variation,
each unit was asked to develop and submit a specific plan for addressing the inclusion of women. These
plans were reviewed centrally, and the progress of each
unit was then measured against their plan each year, as
part of the normal interaction associated with budget
discussions. The challenge here was to create a process
that both permitted central initiative and preserved
the potential for local development of unit-speciic action plans. The Michigan Agenda for Women aimed at
building a working and learning environment in which
women could participate to their fullest. This plan represented a beginning, the sketch of a vision and a plan
that would evolve over time as it was shaped through
the interaction with broader elements of the University
community.
Considerable progress has been made in the years
since the Agenda for Women was proposed. More than
half of the students in professional schools are now
women. Women now serve in key administrative, executive, and management roles. These advances are the
foundation for continued progress until full equity is
achieved.

14

The Distraction of Political Correctness
As colleges and universities struggle to become
more inclusive of people, they can never lose sight of
our commitment to preserve diverse views in academic
discourse. We have a fundamental obligation to protect
the expression of diverse ideas and opinions in classrooms, research, and public forums. Our academic freedoms are always at risk. While our campuses struggled
to become more inclusive of people, there were those
within and without our walls determined to limit or exclude ideas and discourse with which they disagreed.
Today as in earlier times, various forms of extremism on and beyond our campuses threaten academic
freedom and our capacity to meet our responsibility as
teachers and scholars. Recently, universities have been
criticized for tolerating on our campuses a particular
form of extremism known by the popular but misleading term “political correctness,” deined as an efort to
impose a new brand of orthodoxy on our teaching, our
scholarship, and even our speech. Those who attack the
university on the political correctness issue portray it as
threatening not only the quality of our educational programs but the very values which undergird the academy itself: freedom of expression and academic freedom.
In reality, extremist threats to our fundamental values
come from all points along the political spectrum.

Assaults on the Academy
Threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy are hardly new, nor are conlicts within our
ranks about our direction and purpose. Over the centuries, there have been persistent struggles for the heart
of the academy. There have been attacks from religious
and political forces bent on capturing learning for their
own purposes. The American university is no stranger
to periodic ravages from all sorts of zealots and opportunists who would impose a particular belief or orthodoxy on scholarship and teaching. These historical
experiences caution us that when academic freedom is
threatened, the stakes are high for individuals as well
as for the intellectual life and integrity of our institutions.
Threats to academic inquiry unfortunately are alive
and well in our world today. Indeed, in some societies,

universities have been closed, faculty and students have
been jailed or killed, and libraries have been burned. In
others, rigid political or religious orthodoxy governs
education and research. Why? The answer seems obvious. Free and open inquiry simply cannot be tolerated
by tyrants, ideological zealots, inlamed mobs, or narrow interest groups seeking advantage. Not all threats
to the academy are so obviously destructive or malicious. Many of the threats we experience today are motivated by the best of intentions. Often they are no more
ominous than a new regulation to achieve a laudable
goal or even an incentive to stimulate the right behavior
promulgated by federal or state bureaucrats. But these
eforts are sometimes myopically focused on a shortterm goal and mindless of the longer-term erosion of
intellectual and institutional autonomy that may result.
By and large, academic freedom has survived and
prospered over hundreds of years. This is due to the
inherent value of our contribution to society. It has also
called upon the courage of scholars the world over who
guard their autonomy and freedom; who resist tyrants;
and who uphold free, scholarly inquiry. Eventually
they win society’s understanding, however grudging,
because society has long ago learned that if it wishes to
educate its young to be civilized citizens of the world
and to advance learning to serve its interests, then it
must grant freedoms to scholars and their institutions.
Still, we can never be complacent about our autonomy
and our freedoms. Our compact with society is a delicate one. Like all liberties, freedom of inquiry requires
eternal vigilance. Excesses and violations invite intervention from external authorities. We must not abuse
academic freedoms or take them for granted. What is
at stake here is not just the loss of our particular institutional freedoms and values but the erosion of one
of humanity’s inest and most enduring institutional
achievements.
The Political Correctness Debate
Critics who assail us for imposing a new orthodoxy,
a single standard of “political correctness” aim at many
disparate targets. Some decry eforts to incorporate the
study of other civilizations as an added part of the traditional curriculum. Others object to airmative action
eforts to build a more inclusive institution. Still oth-

15
ers criticize new modes of disciplinary inquiry or what
they see as an undermining of traditional values and
received tradition or they single out more philosophical
issues such as what they describe as the dominance of
relativism over absolute moral values.
Of course, many of those who criticize political
correctness are themselves extremists and polemicists
with their own opportunistic political agenda. Much of
what is being written on this issue is often depressingly
supericial, factually incorrect, and wildly overstated.
Some of it is pure ideological guerrilla warfare. A great
deal of the criticism represents yet another chapter in
the contemporary media debasement of public discourse about important social issues through hype,
sound-bite simpliication, and pandering to fads and
base prejudices. Some of these folks are always on the
lookout for a sensational new lightening rod for public
dissatisfaction and frustration. During the past several
years, it is the university that is taking the heat. Part of
this anti-PC agenda is familiar, old-fashioned reactionary stuf. It resorts to polemic to try to stop the greater
inclusiveness of people and ideas, to hold on to the status quo at whatever price, to protect unearned privilege.
At the same time, we have to face the painful truth
that the critics of the politically correct do not lack examples of destructive, even ludicrous, extremism and
zealotry on our campuses over the past decade or so.
Political correctness is a real phenomenon. The left, like
its rightward critics, exhibits its share of stridency, intolerance, and extremism. Proponents of politically correct views have taken strongly ideological stances and
in some cases have attempted to constrain or eliminate
entirely the expression of opposing viewpoints. While
such foolish or destructive behavior is by no means
rampant on our college campuses, those instances that
have occurred have seriously undermined important
academic values and served as a lightening rod for critics of academia. Thus, we should heed the basic message of those who criticize this new form of extremism
on our campuses. What they are saying is that some in
the academic community ideologically do not accept or
have lost touch with our most fundamental missions
and values. Their actions have struck a deep vein of
public discontent with academia. Since the real issue
concerns our commitment to our own values as teach-

ers and scholars, it is on values that we must stand and
debate with our academic colleagues and with our critics.
What Exactly Do the Critics Charge?
The term “political correctness” is just a code word
for a range of concerns about the university:
The Insistence on “Correct” Language: Many on
our campuses have argued that, as a supposedly civil
and increasingly diverse community, we must strive to
be aware of the preferences and sensitivities of those
who have sufered from past exclusion and discrimination. Some urge that we regulate and enforce language
codes. The fact remains that it is one thing to encourage people to be sensitive and considerate and quite
another to require this behavior. The critics maintain
that censoring speech, allowing or disallowing particular words or phrases, however well-intentioned, can
have efects that range from truly damaging to merely
embarrassing. There is a kind of sententious self-righteousness about much of the language policing that occurs on campuses, and this repulses people more than
it persuades them.
Sensitivity Training: As a civil community, should
we not try to be more sensitive to one another? Isn’t
it reasonable that as we become more inclusive, we
should learn more about one another and learn skills
that will help us to work and live together? But here
again, it is one thing to educate and quite another to
impose a single “orthodox” point of view upon our students, faculty, and staf. The critics argue that as teachers and employers we can require certain standards of
civil behavior, but we cannot require “right” thinking
without compromising our own values.
Harassment: In a similar vein, there are critics who
assail codes or policies that prohibit racial and sexual
harassment. This particular criticism raises very diicult and volatile issues about which there is strongly
divided opinion. There is no denying the potential for
abuse of such policies any more than we can deny the
abuses that led to the codes in the irst place. Such harassment and intimidation cannot be understood outside of the historical framework of violence and fear
that has surrounded racial prejudice and discrimination. What is merely intimidating to one group can be

16
experienced as a threat of violence by those who have
been victimized by discrimination. Our best hope is to
improve the campus climate to the point that the issue
is moot.
Required Courses on Diversity: Many campuses
have concluded that it is reasonable or even imperative that our students—and, of course, we ourselves—
be educated about the culture and experience of other
groups in our own pluralistic society and in an increasingly interdependent world. They believe it critical that
all of us understand in some comparative perspective
more about the nature of group relations and interactions in a world that is rampant with divisions of race,
class, caste, belief, and nationality—divisions that afect
all of us and threaten our very existence as a society.
At the same time, there are many and various ways to
provide education about diversity.
The critics rightly question whether academics can
in good conscience require students to take any course
that presents a single orthodox view of a subject, such
as the value of diversity. Like many other important
curriculum issues, these must be openly and widely
debated. Fortunately, at Michigan we have a well-established framework and tradition of faculty autonomy
for these faculty discussions. We have had many public
debates that serve as models of the civility and intellectual seriousness that should surround such discussions
and demonstrate that we can discuss these matters and
make progress.
Censoring and Intimidating of Professors: Critics
point to a dangerous form of intolerance in which professors who teach “incorrect” subjects, teach their subjects from an “incorrect point of view,” or do research in
“incorrect” areas are intimidated by extremist groups.
Clearly, it is important to challenge ideas with which
we disagree, but can we ever tolerate intimidating attacks on those with whom we difer? To our discredit,
intimidation and reckless charges seem to have been
accepted by many of us at times on our campuses, by
students and faculty alike, as appropriate behavior. We
cannot accept those who would shout down a person
or an idea or who think that opinions should be imposed on others by intimidation or that ideas should be
judged by the number of their adherents rather than on
whether or not they are worthwhile.
Perhaps in a more subtle form this intimidation

includes attempts, however well meaning, to impose
a test of political orthodoxy in grading or hiring and
professional advancement decisions. It is clear that we
in academia have no business in silencing any view or
any person. The test of an idea must be on its merits,
not who propounds it or whether we like it or agree
with it or not.
Censorship of Campus Speakers or Groups and
Individuals: Some members of our community have
argued that given all of the potential for conlict and
sensitivity, certain people or views should be declared
of-limits, that certain controversial speakers should
not be invited at all or at least should be prevented from
being heard. Apparently these people seem to feel that
free speech is for them, but not for those with whom
they disagree. There is a certain irony to this behavior,
since the surest way to call attention to individuals is to
attempt to disrupt or prevent their presence on a university campus.
Curriculum “Correctness”: Universities are assailed
from the right and the left by radical traditionalists
and by radical radicals about curriculum reform. Some
would conine our curriculum to a ixed and narrow
set of “great books” that represent the great traditions
of western civilization. Others would discount any
work by “DWEMs”—dead white European males. Is it
wrong to adapt our teaching to include a broader range
of experience and expression from across time and
around the world? Clearly, we must prepare our students to live in a world in which the majority of people
come from very diferent backgrounds and beliefs. But
does this have to mean that we abandon or denigrate
the learning that is the foundation of our tradition? After all, many of our most profound concepts are derived
from the heritage provided by western civilization: our
faith in rationalism, in knowledge and science, and the
notion of human progress itself. To abandon the study
of the foundations of our culture is to abandon the understanding of what made us who and what we are.
Ethnic and Gender Studies: There are those who
question the development of new academic programs
such as ethnic and gender studies. Of course, a truly
vigorous and rigorous scholarly institution will always
give rise to new ields, new ideas and insights, and new
paradigms along with the structures to accommodate
them. That is one of the great virtues of the research

17
university. Fortunately, if traditional and rigorous academic standards are used, excesses or deiciencies that
develop in any new ields will be scrutinized and substantively debated. From this perspective new ideas
or ields are no more of a threat than entrenched ones.
Neither should be exempt from the time-honored test
of whether they are intellectually worthwhile, whether
they help us to understand our world and ourselves.
Airmative Action: Much of the criticism aimed at
political correctness is actually aimed at airmative action programs in our institutions. Critics claim that airmative action actually promotes increased segregation,
balkanization, and separate and unequal educational
services. These programs are seen as undemocratic, divisive, and ultimately a disservice to those whom they
are meant to serve. The key here is the concern raised
about “preferential treatment” of groups who have historically been subjected to discrimination. Throughout
our long history, one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of higher education has been our
attempt to serve all of our society and to treat human
characteristics such as race, gender, or socio-economic
background as irrelevant to academic ability. It is my
belief that airmative action programs are important
tools in achieving this goal. Having said this, it is important to state as well the importance of allowing the
debate over the merits of airmative action programs
to be heard. We in higher education have a strong case
to make, but it can only be heard in an open dialogue
that tolerates all viewpoints. If there is a better way to
achieve our goals, a more efective or a more just way
for us to proceed, then we need to hear about it.
Adhering to Academic Values
As we consider the arguments of our critics, it becomes apparent that an important part of the criticism
and counter-criticism of higher education is about the
pace, scope, and direction of social and institutional
change. Much of it is about the struggle for greater
inclusiveness, for more openness to ideas and people.
Much of it is about the intellectual challenge of what we
have called the new age of knowledge that characterizes our time. We must not become overly reactive to
what is supericial or transitory or opportunistic in the
criticism at the expense of the more important continu-

ing debate concerning fundamental issues of our future
and a renewal of our mission and a response to change.
Today, our universities are attempting to deal with
some of the most painful, persistent, and intractable
problems in human experience. In our eforts to deal
with racism and sexism, we are combating centuries
of prejudice and discrimination that have robbed the
world of precious cultural wisdom, human talent, and
leadership. At the same time, we are contending with
an intellectual revolution, striving to incorporate interdisciplinary, comparative and international perspectives and experiences into our intellectual framework.
We are scrambling to keep up with the breathtaking
advances in knowledge that are transforming the academy and our society.
To address the intellectual and practical issues of
our time we must be open to new paradigms, new
theories, new combinations of knowledge. While many
in society may prefer to ignore or deny that changes
are taking place, as teachers and scholars we cannot responsibly do so. The university frequently will be in the
uncomfortable position of being a vanguard of change.
Possibly, the intensiied criticism swirling about universities these days is in part a manifestation of the ageold practice of blaming the messenger for the message.
Some may actually hold us responsible for social transformation now underway. In a sense, I suppose, they
are right. After all, we are educating our students for
a changing world, and we are producing much of the
knowledge that drives the change.
Little wonder then that some are threatened and
that many are unsure and concerned. Little wonder that
with our growing inluence on society, we have become
an arena of special interest conlict. We are riding the
tiger of a profound transformation of our society.
We have touched on a number of forces at work
that threaten our ability to debate important questions
and that undermine our teaching and research mission.
These pose dangers, but we are by no means helpless
in the face of them. Our best protection lies in the centuries old traditions and values that preserved and extended the fundamental principles of free scholarly inquiry. Universities survive and they thrive because they
represent the application of reason to human afairs
and the free pursuit of truth through reasoned inquiry.
These are the key principles upon which the university

18
can conidently stand.
Over the centuries we have found that our objective of seeking truth and our means for seeking it have
stood the test. We have not achieved perfection, but we
do have a way of considering questions and problems
that yields insight and lights the way to new and better
questions. What binds us together then is the search for
truth, the tested methods, the principles and values of
scholarship. Society supports these values because universities over the centuries and around the globe have
managed to teach successive generations a respect for
the pursuit of truth and an ability to take up the quest
themselves. Our methods and principles have succeeded in increasing our store of knowledge and our
understanding. Society has granted us our academic
freedoms in recognition, however reluctant at times, of
our essential role in society.
The most efective protection for all of academia
in the face of critics is to be steadfast in guarding the
integrity of our teaching and research. Our idelity to
this primary mission is our best defense against the
critics. It is what we do best to serve humanity. In this
regard one thing is certain and unchanging: We cannot
perform our primary mission of teaching and research
properly, we cannot produce what society most needs
from us, without the freedom to pursue truth wherever
it takes us. This is fundamental.
In summary, through my experience at Michigan I
have become convinced that excellence and diversity
are not only mutually compatible but also mutually reinforcing objectives for the 21st Century university. In
an ever more diverse nation and world, the quality of a
university’s academic programs—its very relevance to
our society—will be greatly determined by the diversity of our campus communities. After all, our social contract is with all of the society that sustains and supports
us, not just with the privileged few. Beyond our social
obligation, it is also clear that diversity contributes
directly to the intellectual vitality of our scholarship.
Social diversity provides diferent ways of conceptualizing and addressing intellectual issues that give new
vitality to our education, scholarship, and communal
life.
Higher education in America is far more diverse today than it was ifty years ago or even ten years ago. Yet
the university is not monolithic and neither is discrimi-

nation; both are shifting constantly. We move ahead,
knowing we can never simply rest.

1

Appendix E

Diversity Management in American Universities
Berlin, Germany, October 21, 2010
Social diversity has always been both a great asset, as well as a considerable challenge, for the United
States. A nation built by wave after wave of diverse immigrant populations, from the early European settlers
to African slaves and their descendants, Asian workers, and more recently dominated by immigrants from
Latin America (both legal and illegal). With each migration, America has been reshaped in demographics
and in culture, but always growing in prosperity and
strength. In fact, the United States is today, and always
has been, a nation of immigrants beneiting immensely
from their energy, talents, and hope.
A personal comment is appropriate here. In case you
might be wondering why your speaker, who is, after all,
named after a German city, Duderstadt, is speaking in
English, it is because I, like most Americans, am a mongrel when it comes to national heritage. Although my
grandfather came from Germany (the Goslar region),
the surnames of my other grandparents were Johnson,
Bramhall, and McCleary – English and Irish! And that,
of course, is the case of most Americans. Almost none
of us have a pure national ancestry!
But this leads to another important characteristic of
the United States today. At a time when aging populations, out-migration, and shrinking workforces are seriously challenging the productivity of developed economies throughout Europe and Asia, the United States
stands apart because of immigration. Immigration is
expected to drive continued growth in the U.S. population from 300 million today to over 450 million by 2050,
augmenting our aging population and stimulating productivity with new and younger workers. In fact, over
the past decade, immigration from Latin America and
Asia contributed to 53% of the growth in the United
States population.

As it has throughout our history, immigration continues to change the ethnic character of the United
States. Demographers project that by 2050, America’s
minority population will rise to 42% of our population.
Already several of our states, including our largest
state, California, no longer have a population with an
ethnic majority. And this is likely to be the case for my
nation in the later half of this century.
The increasing diversity of the American population with respect to race, ethnicity, and national origin
has long been perceived as one of my nation’s greatest strengths. A diverse population gives us great vitality. A diversity of perspectives and experiences is
also vital to sustaining an innovation-driven economy,
perhaps the United States’ most signiicant core competency in a global, knowledge-driven economy. And,
of course, such diversity helps us to relate to a highly
diverse world. However, today it is also one of our
most serious challenges as a nation since the challenge
of increasing diversity is complicated by social and economic factors. Far from evolving toward one America,
our society continues to be hindered by the segregation
and non-assimilation of minority cultures, as well as a
backlash against long-accepted programs designed to
achieve social equity (e.g., airmative action in college
admissions).
Our schools, colleges, and universities have played
a major role in assimilating each wave of immigrants.
A distinguishing characteristic and great strength of
American higher education is its growing commitment over time to serve all segments of our pluralistic
society. Higher education’s broadening inclusion of
talented students and faculty of diverse ethnic, racial,
economic, social, political, national, or religious background, has allowed our academic institutions to draw

2

Addressing the rectors of German universities on diversity

3
on a broader and deeper pool of talent, experience, and
ideas than more exclusive counterparts in other places
and times. This diversity invigorates and renews teaching and scholarship in American universities, helping
to challenge long-held assumptions, asking new questions, creating new areas and methods of inquiry, and
generating new ideas for testing in scholarly discourse.
Our institutions have beneited immensely from
their contributions, challenged by their needs and
strengthened by their energy and talent. Indeed, the
world-class leadership of United States research universities today is due in no small measure to the extraordinary talent of European refugees leeing the
persecution and conlict of the World Wars and later,
the Cold War. But just like our nation, our universities
have also faced very considerable challenge, both internally in developing mechanisms to achieve diverse
campuses and externally in lack of public acceptance
of their aspirations for diversity across a broad range of
social characteristics.
For example, today, minorities comprise 44% of the
Millennial generation of students entering our universities (those born between 1990 and 2003). Yet, the
minorities comprising the most rapidly growing components of our population have traditionally had the
lowest levels of college attainment, for example, Black
and Latino students attain college degrees at only onethird of the rate of white and Asian students. Furthermore, since most current immigrants are arriving from
developing nations (i.e., Latin America) with weak educational capacity, new pressures have been placed on
U.S. schools for the remedial education of large numbers of non-English speaking students.
Clearly our schools, colleges, and universities will
not only have to dedicate a much greater efort, but
also develop new paradigms capable of serving rapidly
growing ethnic minorities still burdened with inadequate K-12 preparation, impoverished backgrounds,
and discrimination. American higher education will
also have to face a changing political environment
that increasingly is challenging in both the courts and
through voter referendum long-accepted programs
such as airmative action and equal opportunity aimed
at expanding access to higher education to underrepresented communities and diversifying our campuses.
My presentation this morning will review both

the strategic issues and approaches used by American higher education and, more generally, address the
challenges and opportunities presented by an increasingly diverse and rapidly changing society. It will also
consider the manner in which these eforts are both demanded and challenged by society.

The Case for Diversity
In both the narrow and broader sense, it is important to set out a compelling rationale for seeking diversity in higher education. Of course, irst and foremost,
the case for diversity in higher education rests on moral
responsibility and democratic ideals, based on our social contract with society. Furthermore, our campuses
have a unique opportunity to ofer positive social models and provide leadership in addressing one of the
most persistent and seemingly intractable problems of
human experience—overcoming the impulse to fear, reject, or harm the “other.”
Nevertheless, universities are social institutions of
the mind, not of the heart. While there are compelling
moral and civic reasons to seek diversity and social equity on our campuses, the most efective arguments in
favor of diversity to a university community tend to be
those related to academic quality.
1) Educational Quality
Perhaps most important in this regard is the role diversity plays in the education of our students. We have
an obligation to create the best possible educational environment for the young adults whose lives are likely
to be signiicantly changed during their years on our
campuses. Their learning environment depends on the
characteristics of the entire group of students who share
a common educational experience. Students constantly
learn from each other in the classroom and in extracurricular life. The more diverse the student cohort, the
more opportunities for exposure to diferent ideas,
perspectives and experiences and the more chances to
interact, develop interpersonal skills, and form bonds
that transcend diferences.
There is ample research to suggest that diversity
is a critical factor in creating the richly varied educa-

4
tional experience that helps students learn. Since students in late adolescence and early adulthood are at
a crucial stage in their development, diversity (racial,
demographic, economic, and cultural) enables them to
become conscious learners and critical thinkers, and
prepares them to become active participants in a democratic society. Students educated in diverse settings are
more motivated and better able to participate in an increasingly heterogeneous and complex democracy.
2) Intellectual Vitality
Diversity is similarly fundamental for the vigor and
breadth of scholarship. Unless we draw upon a greater
diversity of people as scholars and students, we cannot hope to generate the intellectual vitality we need to
respond to a world characterized by profound change.
The burgeoning complexity and rapidly increasing rate
of change forces us to draw upon a broader breadth
and depth of human knowledge and understanding.
For universities to thrive in this age of complexity and
change, it is vital that we resist any tendency to eliminate options. Only with a multiplicity of approaches,
opinions, and ways of seeing can we hope to solve the
problems we face. Universities, more than any other
institution in American society, have upheld the ideal
of intellectual freedom, open to diverse ideas that are
debated on their merits. We must continually struggle
to sustain this heritage and to become places open to a
myriad of experiences, cultures, and approaches.
In addition to these intellectual beneits, the inclusion of underrepresented groups allows our institutions
to tap reservoirs of human talents and experiences from
which they have not yet fully drawn. Indeed, it seems
apparent that our universities could not sustain such
high distinctions in a pluralistic world society without
diversity and openness to new perspectives, experiences, and talents. In the years ahead, we will need to
draw on the insights of many diverse perspectives to
understand and function efectively in our own as well
as in the national and world community.
3) Serving a Changing Society
Our nation’s ability to face the challenge of diversity
in the years ahead will determine our strength and vi-

tality. We must come to grips with the fact that those
groups we refer to today as minorities will become the
majority population of our nation in the century ahead,
just as they are today throughout the world. The truth,
too, is that most of us retain proud ties to our ethnic
roots, and this strong and fruitful identiication must
coexist with—indeed enable—our ability to become
full participants in the economic and civic life of our
country. Pluralism poses a continuing challenge to our
nation and its institutions as we seek to build and maintain a fundamental common ground of civic values that
will inspire mutually beneicial cohesion and purpose
during this period of radical transformation of so many
aspects of our world.
4) Human Resources
Today, higher education’s capacity to serve the educational needs of a diverse population has become
even more important as our world has entered a period
of rapid and profound economic, social, and political
transformation driven by a hypercompetitive global
economy that depends upon the creation and application of new knowledge and hence, upon educated
people and their ideas. It has become increasingly apparent that the strength, prosperity, and welfare of a
nation in a global knowledge economy will demand a
highly educated citizenry enabled by development of a
strong system of tertiary education. It also requires institutions with the ability to discover new knowledge,
develop innovative applications of these discoveries,
and transfer them into the marketplace through entrepreneurial activities.
The demographic trends we see in our future hold
some other signiicant implications for national economic and political life and especially for education.
Our clearly demonstrated need for an educated workforce in the years ahead means that America can no
longer aford to waste the human potential, cultural
richness, and leadership represented by minorities and
women.

The Michigan Mandate
Although the University of Michigan sustained its
commitment to diversity throughout the 20th century,

5
its progress relected many of the challenges facing our
society during the years of discrimination based upon
race, religion, and gender. Many were the times we
took one step forward toward greater diversity, only to
slide two steps back through later inattention. The student disruptions of the 1960s and 1970s triggered new
eforts by the University to reairm its commitments
to airmative action and equal opportunity, but again
progress was limited and a new wave of concern and
protests hit the campus during the mid-1980s, just prior
to the appointment of our administration.
By the late 1980s, it had become obvious that the
University had made inadequate progress in its goal to
relect the rich diversity of our nation and our world
among its faculty, students and staf. Of course, here
we faced many challenges: prejudice and ignorance
persist on our nation’s campuses, as they do throughout our society. American society today still faces high
levels of racial segregation in housing and education in
spite of decades of legislative eforts to reduce it. In
an increasingly diverse country, deep divisions persist
between Europeans, African-American, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, and other ethnic groups.
There is nothing natural about these divisions. They
are not immutable facts of life. Rather, they are a consequence of a troubled and still unresolved past. Racial and ethnic groups remain separated by residence
and education. There are unfortunately few places
in American society where people of diferent backgrounds interact, learn from each other, and struggle
to understand their diferences and discover their commonality.
We also faced a particular challenge because of our
geographic location. As a state university, we draw
many of our students from the metropolitan Detroit
area, a region with an unusually large black population (90% of Detroit public school students) resulting
from the Great Migration of the descendents of slaves
to the northern cities during the early 20th century. In
fact, Detroit is the second most segregated metropolitan
area in the country. Many suburban communities on
the borders of Detroit have remained almost completely white despite their proximity to adjoining minoritydominated city neighborhoods. Drawing a signiicant
fraction of our undergraduate enrollment from such a
racially segregated environment presented a particu-

larly serious challenge and responsibility for the University.
Yet, there are other signiicant ethnic challenges.
Another Michigan community, Dearborn, has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the nation. At
the same time, the historic openness of the University
to Jewish students, particularly from large eastern cities
such as New York, coupled with our institution’s size
(42,000 full-time students), gives Michigan the largest
enrollment of Jewish students in the nation. Hence, we
also experience many of the ethnic tensions now characterizing the Middle East. And the list goes on…
It was apparent that although the University had
approached the challenge of serving an increasingly
diverse population with the best of intentions, it simply had not developed and executed a plan capable of
achieving sustainable results. The University would
have to leave behind many reactive and uncoordinated
eforts that had characterized its past and move toward
a more strategic approach designed to achieve longterm systemic change. Sacriices would be necessary
as traditional roles and privileges were challenged. In
particular, we foresaw the limitations of focusing only
on airmative action; that is, on access, retention, and
representation. We believed that without deeper, more
fundamental institutional change these eforts by themselves would inevitably fail.
More signiicantly, we believed that achieving our
goals for a diverse campus would require a very major change in the institution itself. Hence, we began to
think of the challenge of diversity as, in reality, the challenge of changing an institution in a very fundamental
way–not an easy challenge for university leaders in an
institution where change tends to occur “one grave at a
time!” Our diversity agenda would be, in fact, a major
exercise in institutional transformation.
The challenge was to persuade the university community that there was a real stake for everyone in seizing the moment to chart a more diverse future. More
people needed to believe that the gains to be achieved
through diversity would more than compensate for the
necessary sacriices.
The irst and most important step was to link diversity and excellence as the two most compelling goals
before the institution, recognizing that these goals were
not only complementary but would be tightly linked

6

in the multicultural society characterizing our nation
and the world in the future. As we moved ahead, we
began to refer to the plan as: The Michigan Mandate:
A Strategic Linking of Academic Excellence and Social
Diversity.
The mission and goals of the Michigan Mandate
were stated quite simply:
1. To recognize that diversity and excellence are
complementary and compelling goals for the University and to make a irm commitment to their achievement.
2. To commit to the recruitment, support, and
success of members of historically underrepresented
groups among our students, faculty, staf, and leadership.
3. To build on our campus an environment that
seeks, nourishes, and sustains diversity and pluralism
and that values and respects the dignity and worth of
every individual.
A series of carefully focused strategic actions was
developed to move the University toward these objectives. These strategic actions were framed by the values
and traditions of the University, an understanding of
our unique culture characterized by a high degree of
faculty and unit freedom and autonomy, and animated
by a highly competitive and entrepreneurial spirit. The
strategy was both complex and all-pervasive, involving
not only a considerable commitment of resources (e.g.,
fully-funding all inancial aid for all minority graduate
students) as well as some innovative programs.
A good example here was our Target of Opportunity
program for recruiting minority faculty. Traditionally,
the faculty appointments of American universities have
been driven by a concern for academic specialization
within their respective disciplines. Too often, in recent
years, the University had seen faculty searches that
were literally “replacement” searches rather than “enhancement” searches. To achieve the goals of the Michigan Mandate, the University had to free itself from the
constraints of this traditional perspective.
Therefore, the central administration sent out the
following message to the academic units: “Be vigorous

and creative in identifying minority teachers/scholars
who can enrich the activities of your unit. Do not be
limited by concerns relating to narrow specialization;
do not be concerned about the availability of a faculty
slot within the unit. The principal criterion for the recruitment of a minority faculty member was whether
the individual could enhance the department. If so, resources will be made available to recruit that person to
the University of Michigan.”
Note there was another shoe to drop in this efort.
Since we did not have any new resources to launch this
program, instead we simply established a debt against
future resources each time we authorized a new faculty
hire under the Target of Opportunity program. At the
end of the year, we would then add up these debts and
subtract the total of the top of the next year’s budget,
whatever the amount. In efect, this budget strategy
amounted to shifting dollars away from those academic units that sat on their hands on diversity initiatives
to reward those who embraced the goals (e.g., it took
Internal Medicine several years to realize that their
inactivity in recruiting diverse faculty candidates was
transferring a chunk of their budget each year to aggressive programs such as English Language and Literature!).
Of course, because of the top-down management
culture of American universities, we were also able to
take a few actions that would not be possible in European universities. For example, we included diversity
achievement (such as enrollments or graduation rates)
as a factor in determining the salaries of our key academic leaders, deans and department chairs. Furthermore, on several occasions, we actually removed and
replaced several senior oicers who stubbornly resisted
change (including our director of admissions).
The Michigan Mandate was one of those eforts that
required leadership on the front lines by the president,
since only by demonstrating commitment from the top
could we demand and achieve the necessary commitments throughout the institution. During the startup
phase, I met with hundreds of groups both on and of
campus, not only giving speeches, but more importantly, listening carefully to their concerns and ideas. To
encourage buy-in, every so often we would redraft and
redistribute the documents describing the Michigan
Mandate to demonstrate we were not only listening to

7
the campus community, but using their ideas in shaping the evolution of the efort. (I numbered these documents like computer software, e.g., 1.1, 1.2. There was
never a inal document. The last one I can recall was
numbered 13.8!) (Web-links to the Michican Mandate
can be found at: http://milproj.dc.umich.edu/).
By 1995, Michigan could point to signiicant progress in achieving diversity. By every measure, the
Michigan Mandate was a remarkable success, moving
the University far beyond our original goals of a more
diverse campus.
The representation of underrepresented students
and faculty more than doubled over the decade of the
efort. Minority student enrollments rose to one-third
of our enrollments, relecting levels in the more general American population. For example, increasing
African-American student enrollments to 9.5%. In fact,
when I stepped down as president, 5 of the University’s
10 executive oicers were African American, including
my successor.
But, perhaps more signiicantly, the success of underrepresented minorities at the University improved
even more remarkably, with graduation rates rising to
the highest among public universities, promotion and
tenure success of minority faculty members becoming
comparable to their majority colleagues, and a growing
number of appointments of minorities to leadership positions in the University. The campus climate not only
became far more accepting and supportive of diversity,
but students and faculty began to come to Michigan because of its growing reputation for a diverse campus.
And, perhaps most signiicantly, as the campus became
more racially and ethnically diverse, the quality of the
students, faculty, and academic programs of the University increased to the highest level in history. This
latter fact seemed to reinforce our contention that the
aspirations of diversity and excellence were not only
compatible but, in fact, highly correlated.
Studies of the Impact of Diversity on
the Educational Experience
Since Michigan has long had great strength in the
quantitative social sciences, early in our eforts we began rigorous eforts to measure the impact of increasing
diversity on the educational experience (The Michigan

Student Study, 1994 to the present). For the past 25
years, we have accumulated data on student attitudes
and experiences from entering students, graduating
students, and alumni. In fact, this substantial project
has led to nine PhD dissertations over the past two decades. This efort has not only been critical for guiding our diversity eforts in a changing world of legal
challenges, ballot initiatives, budget crises, shifting demographics, and changing workforce needs, but it has
also proved essential in defending diversity both in the
courts (e.g., the Supreme Court cases) and to the body
politic.
Some of the key conclusions from the studies have
been: the majority of students agree with the key premises that social diversity creates a stimulating and challenging environment that beneits the learning of ALL
students; that it prepares students for participation as
citizens and leaders in our increasingly diverse nation
and interconnected world; and that it fosters preparation for citizenship in our democratic society, a goal that
is not irrelevant to our education goals! Most groups
were also in support of the methods used to achieve
diversity, including airmative action (although interestingly enough, this support tended to decline as
students moved through their academic programs and
later life). There was also strong disagreement that the
emphasis on diversity fosters division and disunity on
campus but rather was a signiicant inluential aspect
of the college experience. Almost all alumni felt that
the diversity on campus enhanced their ability to work
efectively across racial and ethnic diferences and to
understand the multiple perspectives from which people view the world, skills that were viewed as essential
to their later careers. Reports on the Michigan Student
Study can be found at:
http://www.oami.umich.edu/mss/research/index.htm

The Michigan Agenda for Women
Even while pursuing the racial diversity goals of the
Michigan Mandate, we realized we could not ignore
another glaring inequity in campus life. If we meant
to embrace diversity in its full meaning, we had to at-

8
tend to the long-standing concerns of women faculty,
students, and staf. Here, once again, it took time–and
considerable efort by many women colleagues (including my wife and daughters)–to educate me and the rest
of my administration to the point where we began to
understand that the university simply had not succeeded in including and empowering women as full and
equal partners in all aspects of its life and leadership.
Many of our concerns derived from the extreme concentration of women in positions of lower status and
power—as students, lower-pay staf, and junior faculty.
The most efective lever for change might well be a rapid increase in the number of women holding positions
of high status, visibility, and power. This would not
only change the balance of power in decision-making,
but it would also change the perception of who and
what matters in the university. Finally, we needed to
bring university policies and practices into better alignment with the needs and concerns of women students
in a number of areas including campus safety, student
housing, student life, inancial aid, and childcare.
Like the Michigan Mandate, the vision was again
simple, yet compelling: that by the year 2000 the university would become the leader among American
universities in promoting and achieving the success of
women as faculty, students, and staf. Again, as president, I took a highly personal role in this efort, meeting
with hundreds of groups on and of campus, to listen to
their concerns and invite their participation in the initiative. Rapidly, there was again signiicant progress on
many fronts for women students, faculty, and staf, including the appointment of a number of senior women
faculty and administrators as deans and executive oicers, improvement in campus safety, and improvement
of family care policies and childcare resources. Getting
women into senior leadership positions was critical –
appointing the irst women deans of LS&A, Rackham,
and the Vice Provost for Health Sciences, leading to the
appointment of Michigan’s irst woman provost and
later its irst woman president.
Other Areas of Diversity and Social Justice
The university also took steps to eliminate those factors that prevented other groups from participating fully in its activities. For example, we extended our anti-

discrimination policies to encompass sexual orientation
and extended staf beneits and housing opportunities
to same-sex couples (and more recently, to transgender
students). We had become convinced that the university had both a compelling interest in and responsibility
to create a welcoming community, encouraging respect
for diversity in all of the characteristics that can be used
to describe humankind: age, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, political
beliefs, economic background, and geographical background.
The Battle Continues
1) Legal Challenges
But, of course, this story did not end with the successful achievements of the Michigan diversity eforts.
Beginning irst with litigation in Texas and then successful referendum eforts in California and Washington,
conservative groups began to attack airmative action
policies, such as the use of race in college admissions.
Perhaps because of Michigan’s success in the Michigan
Mandate, the University soon became a target for those
groups seeking to reverse airmative action with two
cases iled against the University in 1997, one challenging the admissions policies of undergraduates, and the
second challenging those in our Law School.
Although I had stepped down as president by that
time, I was still named personally as a defendant in one
of the cases, although I had little inluence on the strategies to defend both cases to the level of the Supreme
Court, aside from giving several days of depositions
and having all records of my presidency digitized, archived, and posted publicly by our university history
library.
At Michigan, it was important that we “carry the
water” for the rest of higher education to defend the
value of diversity and the actions necessary to achieve
it. Throughout our history, our university has been
committed to extending more broadly educational opportunities to the working class, to women, to racial
and ethnic minorities, and to students from every state
and nation. It was natural for us to lead yet another
battle for equity and social justice.
Although the Supreme Court decisions were split,

9
supporting the use of race in the admissions policies of
our Law School and opposing the formula-based approach used for undergraduate admissions, the most
important ruling in both cases was, in the words of the
court:
“Student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admission.”
“When race-based action is necessary to further a
compelling governmental interest, such action does not
violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection
so long as the narrow-tailoring requirement is also satisied.”
Hence, the Supreme Court decisions on the Michigan cases reairmed those policies and practices
long used by those selective colleges and universities
throughout the United States. But more signiicantly,
it reairmed both the importance of diversity in higher
education and established the principle that, appropriately designed, race could be used as a factor in programs aimed at achieving diverse campuses. Hence,
the importance of diversity in higher education and the
airmation of methods to achieve it was irmly established by the highest court of the land. We had won. Or
so we thought…
Yet, while an important battle had been won
with the Supreme Court ruling, we soon learned that
the war for diversity in higher education was far from
over. As university lawyers across the nation began to
ponder the court ruling, they persuaded their institutions to accept a very narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court decisions as the safest course. Actually,
this pattern began to appear at the University of Michigan during the early stages of the litigation process.
Even as the university launched the expensive legal
battle ($20 million) to defend the use of race in college admissions following my presidency, it throttled
back many of the efective policies and programs created by the Michigan Mandate, in part out of concern
these might complicate the litigation battle. As a consequence, the enrollment of underrepresented minorities
began almost immediately to drop at Michigan, eventu-

ally declining from 1996 to 2002 by almost 25% overall and by as much as 50% in some of our professional
schools (Law, Medicine, Business). Although there was
an efort to rationalize this by suggesting that the publicity given the litigation over admissions policies was
discouraging minority applicants, there is little doubt
in my mind that it was the dismantling of the Michigan
Mandate that really set us back.
Since the Supreme Court decision, many American
universities have begun to back away from programs
aimed at recruitment, inancial aid, and academic enrichment for minority undergraduate students, either
eliminating entirely such programs or opening them up
to non-minority students from low-income households.
Threats of further litigation by conservative groups
have intensiied this retrenchment. As a consequence,
the enrollments of under-represented minorities are
dropping again in many universities across the nation
(including Michigan).
I must say that after the years of efort in building a
diverse campus at Michigan and successfully defending our actions all the way to the Supreme Court, it
would be tragic indeed if the decisions in the Michigan
case caused more harm than beneit to the cause of diversity. Imagine our frustration in fearing that rather
than advancing the cause of social justice, our eforts
have simply empowered the lawyers on our campuses
to block efective eforts to broaden educational opportunity.
2) Voter Action
A diferent challenge irst appeared in California
with the passage of a public referendum banning afirmative action. The groups pushing the California
ban soon broadened to attack diversity policies in other
states. In 2006, Michigan voters approved a constitutional referendum to ban the use of airmative action in
public institutions similar to that of California’s Proposition 209. This referendum prevents Michigan colleges
and universities from using the narrowly tailored prescriptions of the 2003 Supreme Court decision.
3) Financial Shifts
In the United States, the primary responsibility for

10
providing educational opportunities to the nation’s diverse population has rested with the public universities
supported by state governments. In fact, it has been
the strong support of the state universities through tax
revenues that has enabled their capacity to enroll students of modest economic means and underrepresented minority populations. Yet today, as the global recession has deepened, state after state began to project tax
revenue declines and warn their public universities of
deep budget cuts in the range up to 20% to 30%. This
retrenchment is on top of two decades of eroding tax
support of public universities as the states have struggled with the shifting priorities of aging populations.
We now have at least two decades of experience that
would suggest that the states are simply not able—or
willing—to provide the resources to sustain growth in
public higher education, at least at the rate experienced
in the decades following World War II. In many parts
of the nation, states will be hard pressed to even sustain
the present capacity and quality of their institutions.
There is a growing sense that the balanced inancial
model that has sustained American higher education
for the past several decades is beginning to fray. Traditionally, the support of American higher education
has involved a partnership among states, the federal
government, and private citizens (the marketplace). In
the past, the states have shouldered the lion’s share of
the costs of public higher education through subsidies,
which keep tuition low for students, enabling access
while the federal government has taken on the role of
providing need-based aid and loan subsidies. As state
support has declined, public universities have not only
become increasingly dependent upon student fees (tuition) but furthermore, they have enrolled increasing
numbers of out-of-state or international students subject to much higher tuition. For example, at both the
University of California and the University Michigan,
in-state students now pay tuition of $12,000 a year while
out-of-state students pay $36,000 a year, essentially the
tuition characterizing private institutions. And the result has been a sharp decline in both the economic and
ethnic diversity of the students enrolling in these public
institutions. It has become painfully clear that without
strong state support, the achievement of diversity will
require a new paradigm for inancing public higher
education.

The Road Ahead
The key device many institutions have utilized to
achieve diversity is “airmative action”, that is, giving
a slight edge to minorities in key university decisions–
student admission, staf hiring, faculty promotion. (In
the case of racial diversity, this is sometimes relabeled
as “racial preference”!) Yet, it is clearly the case that
many today believe that despite the importance of diversity, racial preferences are contrary to American values of individual rights and the policy of color-blindness that animated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Richard Atkinson, former president of the University of California, suggests that we need a new strategy
that recognizes the continuing corrosive force of racial
and ethnic inequality but does not stop there. We need
a strategy grounded in the broad American tradition
of opportunity because this is a value that Americans
understand and support. Put another way, we need to
shift to strategies and methods that make it clear that all
of society has a stake in ensuring that every American
has an opportunity to succeed.
Let me suggest two such themes that might suggest
such a strategy.
1) Lifelong Learning as a Civil Right
As noted earlier, today we have entered an age of
knowledge in a global economy, in which educated people, the knowledge they produce, and the innovation
and entrepreneurial skills they possess have become
the keys to economic prosperity, social-well being, and
national security. Moreover, education, knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurial skills have also become
the primary determinants of one’s personal standard of
living and quality of life.
Hence, one can argue that today, democratic societies–and state and federal governments–must accept
the responsibility to provide all of their citizens with
the educational and training opportunities they need,
throughout their lives, whenever, wherever, and however they need it, at high quality and at afordable
prices. Hence, we could include diversity as a key to
achieving a vision for the nation’s future that provides
citizens with the lifelong learning opportunities and
skills they need to live prosperous, rewarding, and se-

11
cure lives in this world. The theme would be a universal life-long educational opportunity as a fundamental
right – a CIVIL right – to all Americans, not a privilege
for the fortunate few.
Actually, several years ago, we managed to persuade our colleagues on the Spellings Commission to
include this as one of our major recommendations. But
the Bush administration largely ignored it. Fortunately,
the Obama administration seems more inclined to pay
attention!
2) Innovation and Creativity
There is a growing recognition in our country that
the United States’ most important competitive advantage in the global, knowledge-driven economy may,
in fact, be its social diversity. As the noted columnist
Tom Friedman puts it, “We live in an age when the
most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative — to spark and imagine new ideas, be
they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer
drugs. And where does creativity come from? To be
creative requires divergent thinking (generating many
unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result). And where does
divergent thinking come from? It comes from being exposed to divergent ideas. It comes from the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse
people and cultures together.”
Friedman also cautions that, “the resistance to diversity is not something we want to emulate. Countries that choke themselves of from exposure to diferent cultures, faiths and ideas will never invent the next
Google or a cancer cure, let alone export a musical or
body of literature that would bring enjoyment to children everywhere.”

Lessons Learned
At the University of Michigan, we remain absolutely convinced that there is a very strong linkage between
academic excellence and social diversity. We have both
demonstrated and fought to sustain this principle. A
similar conclusion can be suggested for the dependence
of a nation’s prosperity and security upon social diversity and broad representation in all aspects of American

life in a global, knowledge-driven world. Indeed, in
an increasingly inter-dependent and diverse world, it
is hard to imagine how a nation can lourish without
tapping the talent, the wisdom, the experience, and the
cultures of all of our citizens.
However, the achievement of diversity in higher
education requires major institutional change – indeed,
it is a major exercise in university transformation.
As with any major change in higher education, there
will be strong resistance from within. But it will also
face signiicant resistance from outside, both through
public acceptance and political reaction. Hence, this
requires both a comprehensive strategic plan and sustained efort over an extended period.
Yet, speaking as a former leader of diversity eforts
in a major university, let me caution that defending
principles such as diversity, equity, and social justice
can be hazardous to one’s health, not to mention one’s
career. Not only are they usually controversial, but
they also frequently demand strong leadership at the
helm of the institution. This is one of the eforts that not
only requires strong and determined leadership, but it
requires leading the troops into battle, rather than issuing orders far behind the front lines. This is perhaps the
reason why so few institutions make progress in complex areas such as social diversity.
My own experience suggests that the political threats
to being a leader in diversity can be challenging, such
as when our state’s conservative political party attempt
to target me for removal because of the Michigan Mandate. Or when our state’s governor and legislature tried
to deduct from our funding an amount corresponding
to the funds we were spending to provide health-care
to the partners of same-sex university couples. (In this
case, we ever so politely iled suit against state government to demonstrate that our constitutional autonomy
prohibited this funding cut. Actually, throughout our
history, our University has sued state government rather frequently to protect our autonomy.) One can even
ind oneself as a defendant before the Supreme Court in
a landmark case on diversity and social justice.
There is an old saying among university presidents
cautioning them to take great care in choosing the ditch
where they ight from, since that battle may be their
last. Yet, I also believe today that I would choose to
ight in this ditch again, even knowing the likely per-

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sonal toll it would take. There are few causes that are
clearly worthy of such sacriices. Diversity, equity, and
social justice are certainly among them.

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UM Ann Arbor Minority Enrollments
Total Enrollments
From 1975 to 2013

A Graphical Presentation

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UM Ann Arbor Minority Enrollments
Enrollments by School and College
From 1975 to 2013

A Graphical Presentation

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