Undermining Racial Justice

How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality

Matthew Johnson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501748608
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: History

Over the last sixty years, administrators on college campuses nationwide have responded to black campus activists by making racial inclusion and inequality compatible.

This bold argument is at the center of Matthew Johnson's powerful and controversial book. Focusing on the University of Michigan, often a key talking point in national debates about racial justice thanks to the contentious Gratz v. Bollinger 2003 Supreme Court case, Johnson argues that UM leaders incorporated black student dissent selectively into the institution's policies, practices, and values. This strategy was used to prevent activism from disrupting the institutional priorities that campus leaders deemed more important than racial justice. Despite knowing that racial disparities would likely continue, Johnson demonstrates that these administrators improbably saw themselves as champions of racial equity.

What Johnson contends in Undermining Racial Justice is not that good intentions resulted in unforeseen negative consequences, but that the people who created and maintained racial inequities at premier institutions of higher education across the United States firmly believed they had good intentions in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The case of the University of Michigan fits into a broader pattern at elite colleges and universities and is a cautionary tale for all in higher education. As Matthew Johnson illustrates, inclusion has always been a secondary priority, and, as a result, the policies of the late 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new and enduring era of racial retrenchment on campuses nationwide.

CHAPTER 1

Bones and Sinews

When black student activists led a campus strike at the University of Michigan (UM) in 1970, they challenged entrenched ideas and practices that seemed so natural and embedded in the institution that administrators had never questioned them. Black students called these ideas and practices part of the “bones and sinews of the place.”¹ Some of these bones and sinews had developed more than a century before black activists took over campus buildings at UM; others had developed not long before activists stepped foot on campus.

The institutional values and practices that justified an admissions system that created racial disparities began in the mid-nineteenth century. Two core values emerged at the first board of regents meetings in Ann Arbor. Campus leaders wanted to create a university on par with any in the United States, and they wanted the university to offer broad access to the people of Michigan. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, campus leaders chose to subordinate the ideal of access to the goal of attaining and sustaining UM’s elite status. UM leaders saw exclusion as a necessary price to pay for creating an elite institution.

Other values developed in the aftermath of World War II. In the 1940s and 1950s, administrators slowly purged official practices that mandated or accommodated segregation in campus buildings and social clubs. In their place, campus leaders developed a vision of a model multiracial community on campus. They slowly incorporated the prevailing ideas of racial liberalism: an ideal that suggested that interracial contact and universalism would end individual prejudice in America. Administrators never anticipated—in fact, they never seriously considered—how the implementation of racial liberalism would impact black students. The ways that UM leaders crafted the model multiracial community led to a toxic racial climate at UM.

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All institutions have a hierarchy of values. At the University of Michigan, crafting and then maintaining its identity as an elite public postsecondary institution has been its main priority since the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout UM’s history, university officials have tried to marry their ambitions to create an elite university with their concerns about access and inclusion. But at every turn, UM leaders made policy decisions that privileged UM’s status as an elite institution over the principle of access. Since the first regents’ meetings in Ann Arbor, access has remained a secondary value—important but always subordinate to quality. Subordinating inclusion in the university’s hierarchy of values would have long-lasting consequences for racial justice advocates at the University of Michigan.

In the university’s first years, though, its foundational values were up for grabs. The university dates its founding to 1817, when Michigan was a small territory. Augustus Woodward, a territorial judge and alumnus of Columbia College, drafted the piece of legislation that created the university. He envisioned a university funded by tax revenues in order to provide an education at a low cost to students. For two decades, the Detroit university existed in name only. The turning point came in 1837, the same year that Michigan achieved statehood, when the university found a home on forty acres of land in Ann Arbor. Two years later, the University of Michigan finally began offering courses at the collegiate level, with six first-year students and one sophomore enrolled.²

Two competing values emerged when the regents began meeting in Ann Arbor. On the one hand, the regents believed that access should be an important principle at a public institution funded with public money. When the regents thought about the principle of inclusion in the early nineteenth century, they were thinking about access for men—UM restricted women’s admission until 1870—regardless of social class. The regents wanted to ensure that the University of Michigan would not become an institution reserved for the children of wealth. After all, the common critique of public higher education, the regents reported in 1839, was that public funds were used to maintain the status of the economically advantaged “when the impoverished genius and talent had to struggle on without this Public facility.” Providing a low-cost education, then, was central to the University of Michigan’s mission in offering what the regents called an institution “of the People.” While access for black men was probably not on their minds at that moment, the regents never created racial restrictions. Thus, prospective black students would not have to fight the same battles as women against official policies of exclusion. It would take a few decades, but UM admitted its first black student in 1853 and graduated its first black student, Gabriel Franklin Hargo, in 1870.³

Several models were available to an institution wishing to build a university “of the people” in the first half of the nineteenth century. This period marked great growth in higher education. The number of degree-granting postsecondary institutions rose from 25 in 1800 to 52 in 1820 and then to 241 in 1860. These new institutions ranged from professional schools to “multipurpose” colleges that tried to offer something for everyone, mixing “practical” courses with traditional college courses. Most often, these colleges incorporated preparatory instruction in order to admit students who lacked advance training at the high school level. Essentially, most of these institutions provided access to anyone who could pay tuition. This was as much out of necessity as out of a grand vision of accessibility and mass education. The biggest struggle that higher education institutions faced in the nineteenth century was finding enough students to pay for operating costs. Open admissions represented a way to survive.⁴

Regents at the University of Michigan did not copy these models. For all their allusions to a university “of the people,” the regents also had aspirations of building an elite university on par with any in the United States and were willing to exclude most of the state’s students in the process. UM modeled its curriculum and admissions standards on the most respected higher education institutions in the Northeast. An important characteristic of “elite” institutions at this time was their steadfast commitment to a liberal education built around a classics course, which was taught in Latin and Greek.⁵ To gain admission to UM, first-year students took examinations in arithmetic, algebra, geography, Cicero’s Orations, Sallust, Friedrich Jacobs’s Greek Reader, and Latin and Greek prosody.⁶ The board of regents made its intentions clear in 1841, stating that UM’s admission requirements would place the university “on an equality with the best colleges in the United States.” From the start UM leaders saw admission standards as a marker of elite status.⁷

These admission requirements weren’t built to provide broad access to Michigan’s residents. Before 1909, when the state legislature finally required counties to either build a high school or pay for its students to attend a high school elsewhere, many students in Michigan didn’t have access to an education beyond the eighth grade. And access to just any high school didn’t guarantee an education that prepared students to take an exam on Cicero. Michigan wasn’t the only state that offered little training to prepare the public for admission to a school like UM. As late as 1940, more than 50 percent of Americans hadn’t completed an education past the eighth grade. It was no secret that UM’s admission requirements excluded the vast majority of young people in the United States. While this might have represented a political risk for the state institution, it presented an even greater financial risk, as UM officials would have to find enough students who were prepared for this type of study in order to pay for operating costs. Leaders at UM decided to take that risk.⁸

The board’s choices in subsequent decades helped reinforce UM’s hierarchy of values. For the first two decades in Ann Arbor, the university operated without a president. By 1852, the regents decided that the university needed a full-time leader. The board hired Henry Tappan, someone who would help build one of America’s first modern research universities and, in doing so, ensure that inclusion remained a secondary institutional value. The regents knew they were getting someone with a grand vision. The year before, Tappan had gained widespread attention for his biting critique of American higher education in his book University Education, in which he suggested that not a single American postsecondary institution could truly call itself a “university” when compared to the German universities he saw in his travels. This wasn’t someone who wanted UM to aspire to become the midwestern Harvard or Yale, like the regents had originally envisioned. Tappan wanted to create an entirely new American university that could aspire to compete with German universities.⁹

Tappan wasted no time initiating the first steps toward making UM a modern American research university. The new president quickly recruited distinguished faculty members. He put resources toward building a library equal to any in the United States that could support advanced research. He raised $15,000 for an observatory and brought an astronomer from Europe to use it. He oversaw a new laboratory of analytical chemistry and the erection of a new campus museum, which Tappan hoped would become one of the great museums of natural history in the United States. As historian Richard Geiger has concluded, “The University of Michigan was the only institution of higher education in the West that made academic quality its foremost value.”¹⁰

Pursuing Tappan’s vision continued to make access a secondary principle at UM. Creating a research university was expensive and required money and resources that the University of Michigan didn’t have. Until 1869, when the university began receiving money from a state property tax, the main source of public funds came from public land sales. Michigan’s territorial governors had invested in UM by providing the university almost twenty-five thousand acres of land to sell. About nineteen hundred of those acres came from Native American lands handed over to Michigan’s territorial governor, Lewis Cass, at the Treaty of Fort Meigs. The rest of the land came from a federal grant. Michigan was one of seventeen states to receive federal land grants to create institutions of higher education before the more famous Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. The university sold this land slowly through the nineteenth century. By 1881, when the regents had finally sold all the land, they had raised $547,000.¹¹

Half a million dollars was no small sum in the nineteenth century, but it still couldn’t support the type of growth that Tappan envisioned. The university needed more students to cover costs. At this moment, keeping so many people out of the university became a problem, as UM wasn’t receiving enough money from tuition revenues to fund Tappan’s vision. If the university’s leaders were going to achieve their goals of building a university that resembled the German model, they needed a stable student population. Still, they weren’t willing to rethink the connection between admission criteria and elite status.

Part of the solution to maintain selective admissions and create a stable student population came from out-of-state applicants. As the University of Michigan began building a modern research university in the second half of the nineteenth century, it gained respect throughout the country. Its newfound reputation sparked interest from students outside the state who qualified for admission at UM, which broadened its pool of potential students. But as a public university supported by state funds—although not as adequately as UM leaders would have liked—admitting too many out-of-state students posed a political problem. To avoid this, university officials needed to find a way to create a larger pool of in-state applicants who could meet selective admission requirements.¹²

In 1854, future University of Michigan president Henry Frieze offered a plan to increase in-state student enrollment. Like Tappan, Frieze was enamored with the German education system. He was especially impressed with a system that provided a pool of talented students for each successive level of education. If UM officials wanted a more reliable pool of students, they needed to get high school leaders to see college preparation as one of their core responsibilities. To do this, UM would tell high school administrators what type of curriculum was necessary for their students to attend the university, and any high school that wanted to provide that curriculum could do so voluntarily. University faculty would travel to participating high schools and certify those schools whose curriculum met UM’s standards. Any student from a certified high school who completed the required coursework prescribed by UM and gained a letter of recommendation from the principal gained automatic admission to the University of Michigan. Students who didn’t graduate from a certified high school could take an entrance exam to prove they were capable of completing UM’s coursework. Adopted unanimously by the faculty in 1870, this system became known as the certification system. UM was the first to develop it in the United States, and it left its mark on universities across the country in the subsequent decades, becoming the most popular method of admissions in the country.¹³

These changes, though, came at a great cost to inclusion. Aside from the fact that many in-state students still lacked access to a high school education and the automatic admission it offered, rising tuition costs that fueled the skyrocketing operating cost of a rising research university priced UM out of the reach of many low-income students. Between 1869 and 1909, the cost of tuition tripled. Not surprisingly, the number of low-income students declined as tuition and fees rose. Before an era of federal and state financial aid, students had to find a way to pay for these rising costs. Into the twentieth century, loans represented the only need-based funds the university provided to low-income students. While low-income enrollment declined, the university’s revenue from tuition receipts skyrocketed. In 1849, the University of Michigan brought in $1,006 from tuition revenues. By 1909, tuition receipts totaled $327,169. What began as a university that would provide low-cost tuition transformed into an institution that imposed costs that excluded many people in the state.¹⁴

While UM’s efforts to become a modern research university limited access, they fulfilled UM leaders’ aspirations to become an elite American university. By the turn of the century, observers recognized that a sea change in higher education was unfolding. There was now a group of universities that looked recognizably different from the rest of the postsecondary institutions. Their large size, commitment to graduate education and scholarly productivity, impressive libraries, and significant annual revenues set them apart. One of these observers, Edwin Slosson, called them the “Great American Universities.” The University of Michigan was on Slosson’s list, along with twelve others, including Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California.¹⁵

To get on this list, UM officials proved that they were willing to accept the declining number of low-income students as long as the university maintained its status as an elite institution. For all the allusions to an institution “of the people,” University of Michigan leaders never saw inclusion as the institution’s leading principle; they were always willing to sacrifice inclusion for status. By the early twentieth century, it was clear that university officials had a high tolerance for inequality.

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Once the University of Michigan secured its position among a select group of elite American universities, maintaining its status became administrators’ primary goal. This was no easy task. Although its position as a modern research university helped signal its elite status, faculty members and administrators still ...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Preserving Inequality
• 1. Bones and Sinews
• 2. The Origins of Affirmative Action
• 3. Rise of the Black Campus Movement
• 4. Controlling Inclusion
• 5. Affirmative Action for Whom?
• 6. Sustaining Racial Retrenchment
• 7. The Michigan Mandate
• 8. Gratz v. Bollinger
• Epilogue: The University as Victim
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index