The Origins of Affirmative Action Admissions

The origins of affirmative action admissions at the University of Michigan lie in the evolution of federal policies that promoted fair hiring practices for African Americans. After the federal government briefly experimented with affirmative action hiring policies during the New Deal, civil rights activists would have to settle for a series of lackluster executive orders that prohibited racially-discriminatory practices among federal contractors. Starting with Franklin Roosevelt, and continuing with Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, these presidents signed orders that gave regulatory agencies little teeth to force businesses to reform hiring practices. Nevertheless, they did offer room for bureaucrats to learn the limitations of using colorblind policies and relying on workers’ individual complaints of discrimination for evidence of noncompliance. While Kennedy’s PCEEO often gets the credit for introducing affirmative action practices, federal bureaucrats in President Dwight Eisenhower’s President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC) were already moving beyond the individual-complaint model and using racial disparities in workforces as prima facie evidence of discrimination. PCGC officials also began using their limited power to pressure some businesses to implement racially-attentive policies.^{Footnote 5}

But President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 was significant in that it was written and enforced in a new era of civil rights activism where protesters were making even more forceful claims for access to job opportunities. While the PCGC did take important steps in moving toward race-conscious practices, the outcomes of the agency’s pressure on companies were insignificant. Civil rights groups became vocal critics of the agency, calling the PCGC feckless and demanding stronger enforcement. As the PCGC failed to spark widespread hiring reform, activists in places like Seattle, St. Louis, and Philadelphia challenged companies directly, reviving the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s. These boycotts demanded race-based hiring goals and led to remedial action at companies such as Tastykake, Pepsi-Cola, and J. C. Penney. This was the environment that framed Kennedy’s campaign and early presidency and led to a stronger executive order concerning discriminatory hiring practices.^{Footnote 6}

The major actor who worked within this environment to help craft Kennedy’s executive order and eventually use it to push UM to implement affirmative action admissions was Hobart Taylor Jr. Lyndon Johnson, who as vice president would oversee the new executive order, called upon Taylor in January 1961 to help him revise what would become Executive Order 10925. The young African American lawyer was on Johnson’s mind because Taylor was one of those well-connected people that Johnson relied on during his campaign for president and then vice president. Taylor grew up in Johnson’s home state of Texas, born into a wealthy family with strong political connections. His father was a multimillionaire businessman who provided key financial backing for Johnson’s Senate run in 1948 and subsequently served as a delegate at the 1956 Democratic National Convention. By the time Johnson decided to run for president, Taylor had left his father’s shadow, graduated from the University of Michigan’s law school, and established himself as an attorney and political player in Detroit. It was no coincidence, then, that Johnson leaned on Taylor for access to his connections in Michigan and for advice on civil rights issues. Taylor acquiesced, courting some Michigan delegates to vote for Johnson at the democratic convention. When Johnson failed to gain the nomination and subsequently accepted Kennedy’s invitation to run as vice president, Taylor raised money and gave speeches in support of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket.^{Footnote 7}

What Taylor knew of past executive orders mirrored the critiques that came from civil rights organizations: they were ineffective and enjoyed little power to change business practices. So when Johnson brought him to the White House to revise the order, Taylor helped expand the powers of the PCEEO. The order gave the agency a variety of penalties to impose on contractors, including cancelling contracts. But Taylor’s most memorable addition came when he changed the language that described employers’ responsibilities. Taylor inserted a term that soon gained resonance across the country and endured for many decades: “affirmative action.” Taylor, of course, didn’t invent the term, and, as I’ve noted above, federal bureaucrats were already experimenting with affirmative action policies. But by writing the term into the executive order, Taylor helped bring it into the public lexicon.^{Footnote 8}

After Kennedy signed the order in March 1961, Taylor continued to offer guidance as the PCEEO developed its early policies and regulations. Taylor’s role might have ended there if African Americans were satisfied with the executive order’s implementation. Especially distasteful to many black activists was Plans for Progress (PfP), which allowed companies to create their own voluntary inclusion plans and sidestep some of the PCEEO’s oversight powers. The NAACP, just one of many critics of the program, called PfP “virtually useless.” Johnson called upon his longtime political ally for help, hoping a change in management would temper criticism. In August 1962, Hobart Taylor became executive vice chairman of the PCEEO, where he would also oversee Plans for Progress.^{Footnote 9}

This is where the story of hiring and admissions began to come together. Taylor was well aware of the calls from civil rights groups to exert more pressure on companies to reform hiring practices, but he was also worried that focusing too narrowly on hiring policies might limit the outcomes of the executive order. In light of deindustrialization, he was especially concerned about the prospects of employment for the large pool of unemployed and underemployed young African Americans in urban America. If there was a place to learn about the consequences of deindustrialization, it was Taylor’s hometown of Detroit. The city lost 130,000 manufacturing jobs between 1948 and 1967. Just forty-five miles from the University of Michigan, African Americans suffered the brunt of deindustrialization in the Motor City, experiencing unemployment rates almost three times as high as whites during the early 1960s.^{Footnote 10}

Taylor thought he knew what needed to happen. If manufacturing jobs were dwindling, African Americans needed access to the growing white-collar sector. The problem was that Taylor believed that the PCEEO could only do so much to advance African Americans’ access to these jobs. Unless more African Americans gained college degrees, increasingly a qualification for these jobs, the PCEEO’s intervention would have little impact. He spent the early 1960s giving speeches highlighting the constricting market for manufacturing jobs and the growing need for African Americans to be trained for professional positions. Taylor, of course, wasn’t the first to point out the importance of African Americans’ access to white-collar jobs. Surely, the civil rights groups that had long promoted the importance of access to higher education and complained about the difficulties African Americans faced in obtaining professional positions influenced Taylor’s interpretation. Whatever the origins of Taylor’s position, he brought this interpretation into a position of power and used it to craft public policy.^{Footnote 11}

Taylor’s emphasis on training also reflected a strategy of the Kennedy administration. Kennedy’s early policies followed a school of economists that promoted “manpower development,” which stressed that providing African Americans the skills to compete in the workplace represented the key to lifting African Americans out of poverty. By focusing on African Americans’ lack of preparation for the job market, this school conveniently ignored the many structural obstacles that prevented African Americans from attaining positions. Nevertheless, discussing African Americans as an untapped resource for employers was a popular way to justify inclusion and training programs to Republicans and businessmen. As much as Taylor’s ideas complemented “manpower development” thinking, they quietly critiqued one aspect of Kennedy’s program by focusing on the need for postsecondary training. When Kennedy thought about “manpower development” he usually had training for blue-collar jobs in mind. By focusing on deindustrialization and the need for higher education, Taylor pointed out one of the flaws in Kennedy’s assumption that providing training and access to manufacturing jobs would offer the solution to African American unemployment rates.^{Footnote 12}

The fact that Hobart Taylor believed he stood the best chance of reforming admissions practices in 1962 speaks to the uneven outcomes of decades of civil rights activism for jobs and access to higher education. African Americans advocating for better access to postsecondary institutions, won important court cases that made it more difficult for universities to practice overt exclusionary practices, and even forced the federal government to intervene at places like the University of Mississippi in 1962. But unlike activism for workplace equity, activism against discriminatory practices in higher education did not lead to a special regulatory agency devoted to collecting racial statistics of student bodies and pushing universities across the country to practice colorblind or affirmative action admissions practices. So while companies taking federal money had been dealing with federal oversight of hiring policies for decades, universities didn’t face the same oversight of their admissions practices. Without a parallel federal agency to push universities to adopt affirmative action admissions practices, Taylor began to think about how he could use his position within the PCEEO to expand African Americans’ access to higher education.^{Footnote 13}

Still using Executive Order 10925 to reform admissions practices was a complicated process since the order said nothing about admissions. Taylor started by focusing on universities he knew well. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan’s law school, UM was on his radar. The University of Michigan was also an easy target for an agency set up to oversee federal contractors, as it was a key site for defense research. At the time, UM was one of the largest recipients of federal defense contracts among postsecondary institutions (only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University received more money). In order to intervene at UM, Taylor began by utilizing the executive order’s compliance reporting system, which gave the PCEEO the authority to demand information from federal contractors on the racial identity of their employees. In March 1962, Taylor came calling for a demographic breakdown of the University of Michigan’s workforce.^{Footnote 14}

UM’s Board of Regents initially resisted cooperating fully with the PCEEO. The very collection of racial data, board members thought, violated the colorblind principles they had worked so hard to implement since World War II. University officials had removed photos from admissions applications, eliminated questions from housing applications that asked students if they were willing to live with an individual of a different racial group, and passed By-law 2.14, prohibiting university officials from discriminating “against any person because of race, color, religion, creed, national origins, or ancestry.” The major assumption behind these policies was that by removing race as a relevant institutional category, a university could take away opportunities for racial prejudice to influence institutional practices. In light of these changes, Regent Donald M. D. Thurber of Detroit lamented that “it would be regrettable if we were forced to take this type of census” since it “would only focus attention on something on which we’ve lost consciousness.” In a similar vein, a writer for UM’s student newspaper accused the Kennedy administration of “stirring up racial consciousness where it has long been dead.”^{Footnote 15}

At UM’s March Board of Regents meeting, the university’s Vice President for Business and Finance, Wilbur Pierpont, proposed a response to the PCEEO. He suggested that UM should document the number of University employees (approximately 10,253) but explain that racial statistics were not available. In addition, Pierpont recommended that UM attach a copy of its nondiscrimination policy and explain that the “maintenance of such records is inconsistent with the bylaw and the long-standing philosophy which indicates that these [racial] distinctions have no place at the University.” All of the Regents approved Piermont’s proposal. The University’s response read like a lecture to the PCEEO. Regent Allan Sorenson stated that “philosophically this answer is ahead of federal action”—the federal government, in other words, had not yet entered into the progressive world of colorblindness.^{Footnote 16}

Taylor responded quickly to the University of Michigan’s initial attempt to avoid providing racial statistics. He cared little that the university did not keep records of its employees’ racial identity. Taylor suggested that UM officials provide a racial census by conducting a “visual check” of university employees. One administrator commented on the significance of Taylor’s persistence: “The University has since become more convinced, through Mr. Hobart Taylor, Jr. . . , that the Federal Government is determined to have these data.” In December 1962, only after continued pressure from Taylor, the university agreed to provide the PCEEO with a racial census.^{Footnote 17}

The University of Michigan completed the study in February 1963. To the public, the university reported that African Americans made up 10.4 percent of UM’s workforce. The reality, however, was much more complex. At the time, the bulk of UM’s black employees worked in service and manual-labor positions. The university employed only eight black faculty members at or above the rank of instructor. Employment data like this, which showed racial disparities in workforces, gave the PCEEO a tool to justify intervention at worksites. Rather than relying on individual complaints of discrimination, the PCEEO used workforce data as prima facie evidence of discrimination.^{Footnote 18}

Following the release of workforce data, Taylor organized conferences with UM and Wayne State University (WSU) of Detroit—which recently went through a similar struggle with the agency over racial data—to clarify the universities’ responsibilities in complying with Kennedy’s executive order. It’s doubtful that UM or WSU officials ever expected to discuss admissions practices at these conferences. After all, they agreed to a meeting to talk about employment data with the head of an agency that oversaw hiring practices. And the first of their Detroit meetings with Taylor did just that, focusing on the universities’ compliance reports submitted to the PCEEO. The second conference, however, must have surprised university officials. There, Taylor focused on both hiring practices concerning African American faculty members and educational opportunities for African American students.^{Footnote 19}

The process of using the executive order to reform admissions practices, of course, required more than a discussion about educational opportunities for African Americans at a compliance conference. Taylor needed sympathetic allies in executive decision-making positions within the university. The PCEEO did have the authority to revoke contracts, but it was unlikely that Taylor could cancel a contract because a university chose not to modify admissions practices—something well outside the language of the executive order. But even if admissions practices were part of the executive order, Taylor preferred not to use this coercive power. Taylor thought that the success of affirmative action programs hinged on making institutional managers feel like “participants and innovators” in government policymaking. Despite the fact that Johnson brought him to the PCEEO because of criticism of Plans for Progress, Taylor still liked PfP’s voluntary formula of institutional change. In Taylor’s mind, institutional change worked best when managers were able to carry out affirmative action “as part of their program rather than because they were compelled to do it by law.” Force from above was not as effective, Taylor surmised, because to get a real institutional commitment to implement affirmative action “you have to change a man’s mind from being negative and doing what he’s doing under force to do something he’s doing.”^{Footnote 20}

Scholars have pointed out the flaws in Taylor’s optimism about voluntary compliance. Some companies did take Plans for Progress seriously and implemented reforms, but overall PfP was a colossal public policy failure. Many businesses joined PfP to avoid the oversight of the PCEEO and made only minor reforms. All of this is to say that scholars have spilled much ink in showing the limitations (or outright uselessness) of voluntary compliance. The fact that UM adopted an affirmative action admissions program that would triple African Americans’ enrollment by the end of the decade in response to weak government pressure makes the university’s case unique. That’s not to say that more forceful pressure wouldn’t have led to an even greater increase in African American enrollment. But UM’s story is useful because it sheds light on the conditions necessary for voluntary compliance to spark institutional reforms. In order for weak government coercion to give African Americans unprecedented access to UM, the interests of Taylor and at least one well-placed executive administrator at UM needed to align, as Taylor would have to depend on people at the University of Michigan who were willing to fight the hard fight of developing a potentially controversial program.^{Footnote 21}

Luckily for Taylor, he found a powerful ally sympathetic to his goals in Roger Heyns, UM’s Vice President for Academic Affairs—the person who oversaw the university’s Office of Admissions. Unlike the Board of Regents, Heyns was more comfortable with affirmative action. By the time the PCEEO entered into the fray at UM, Heyns had already taken steps to modify admissions policies. In 1962, he met separately with Francis Kornegay of the National Urban League and representatives from the local NAACP chapter about implementing new methods to increase African American enrollment. Neither of these groups threatened to protest if Heyns did not implement affirmative action, but these meetings marked an important turning point. Not much is known about Heyns’ views of civil rights and affirmative action before 1963. Perhaps Heyns was already sympathetic to race-based solutions to inequality or perhaps the arguments of activists convinced him that affirmative action was necessary. Whatever he thought about racial equity before these meetings, Heyns would spend the rest of his administrative career supporting efforts to expand opportunities for African Americans in higher education, beginning at UM and then as chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley. By February 1963, Heyns began discussions with UM’s admissions and public relations offices about the possibilities of increasing access for black students. In proposing that the university take proactive steps to make the university more accessible to black students, he was suggesting that colorblind policies were not enough.^{Footnote 22}

But if a powerful administrator already supported affirmative action, why was Taylor’s intervention necessary to spark reforms? Answering this is important in understanding the relationship between coercion—even weak coercion—and institutional change. Before Taylor’s intervention, Heyns’ meetings had not led to any firm plans for new admissions policies or any committees to study the feasibility of an affirmative action program. It is not clear why Heyns did not pursue affirmative action admissions beyond these early meetings with civil rights groups. Perhaps he worried that he would not be able to cultivate enough institutional support at that time. What is clear is that Heyns used PCEEO pressure to advance a program that he already supported. In UM’s case, federal pressure did not force a recalcitrant administrator to implement a program he disagreed with. Instead, federal intervention created an opportunity for a well-placed administrator to advance his own goals. As historian Timothy Minchin found in his work on the southern textile industry, blaming institutional reform on outside coercive pressure is an important tactic in institutional managers’ toolbox that can temper internal resistance. In other words, internal opponents are less likely to challenge institutional reforms if they think those reforms are forced upon an institution, rather than administrative innovations. In UM’s case, the ability to frame admissions reform as a federal compliance measure likely gave Heyns a moment of opportunity to create an affirmative action admissions program.^{Footnote 23}

As Heyns began to figure out how to advance affirmative action admissions at UM during the summer, he gained an important ally in the university’s President Harlan Hatcher. Hatcher came to support Heyns’ efforts after receiving his own dose of federal pressure, this time from President John F. Kennedy. In June 1963, Kennedy invited 175 education leaders, including Hatcher, to the White House. They were there because Kennedy wanted education leaders to help solve the high dropout rates of urban school districts and create educational opportunities for African American high school graduates left with few job prospects.^{Footnote 24}

The White House meeting occurred during an especially difficult time in Kennedy’s tenure as president. Since April, the nation had been watching the violent resistance to civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama—demonstrations that included demands for equal-opportunity hiring in downtown businesses. At the same time, African Americans’ protests against workplace discrimination outside the South did not end after Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925. By 1963, construction sites funded with government money became key sites of protests around the country. In Philadelphia, for example, protesters occupied the mayor’s office for twenty-one hours, demanding that the mayor guarantee African Americans access to jobs on city-funded construction sites. These jobs were typically controlled by trade unions that often excluded African Americans. In the midst of these uprisings, Kennedy received reports from U.S. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and other advisers about “danger spots” around the country, worrying about potential violence in America’s cities. One memo came from G. Mennen Williams, the former governor of Michigan, who advised Kennedy that “large segments of the Negro population are losing confidence in interracial approaches to the problems of gaining full civil rights.”^{Footnote 25}

So in June 1963, Kennedy was trying to gain civil rights groups’ confidence in the federal government and prevent urban uprisings. One of Kennedy’s solutions has been well documented. Just three days after his meeting with Hatcher, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11114, which prohibited racial discrimination on federally contracted construction projects. Less well known are Kennedy’s efforts to convince higher education officials to reform admissions policies. By the summer of 1963, Kennedy was beginning to come to the same conclusion that Taylor had come to years earlier: skills-based training for blue-collar jobs and antidiscrimination enforcement were still going to leave a lot of African Americans without employment opportunities. Given warnings about potential unrest in urban areas, he was particularly concerned about the consequences of a large population of young African Americans, who, despite vocational training, could not find jobs after they left high school. This was why Harlan Hatcher was at the White House in June 1963.^{Footnote 26}

Hatcher took Kennedy’s plea for help seriously. Unlike for Heyns, historical records do not show whether Hatcher was already sympathetic to affirmative action or if his meeting with Kennedy pushed him to reform his views. What is clear is that when students and faculty returned from the summer recess, Hatcher delivered his “State of the University” speech where he outlined the university’s new commitment to tackle the problems Kennedy discussed at the White House. Hatcher unveiled an initiative to “re-examine [UM’s] responsibilities to high schools in which there are a substantial number of Negro pupils” where the “urgent problems” are “high dropout rate or lack of motivation.” Months before the university ever outlined the details of an affirmative action admissions program, he suggested that the university might have to create different admissions criteria for “students from deprived backgrounds.” Hatcher threw his support behind Heyns to address these issues.^{Footnote 27}

Fall 1963, then, proved to be a critical turning point at UM, as officials began to craft affirmative action admissions policies with the support of two of the university’s highest-ranking administrators. As they began creating a new admissions program, Hobart Taylor continued to oversee the university’s progress and kept up pressure on administrators. In October, at the request of Taylor, UM hosted a conference in Ann Arbor to continue to discuss the relationship between educational equity and hiring opportunities for African Americans. The conference included representatives from Big Ten universities, the University of Chicago, and Wayne State University—which by that time had become the first postsecondary institution to join PfP.^{Footnote 28}

The conference gave American corporations a voice in how universities should respond to government pressure. Executive Order 10925 made some business leaders stakeholders in expanding educational opportunities for African Americans. And despite the fact, as mentioned earlier, Plans for Progress proved to be a public policy failure, two of the companies that pushed for affirmative action admissions at the conference in Ann Arbor were PfP members. Hobart Taylor brought Roy Fugel of General Electric and Arthur Doty of the Aluminum Company of America. They were in Ann Arbor to lay out their own rationale for admissions reform, arguing that the success of businesses’ efforts to advance racial inclusion depended on university programs that increased the number of African American college graduates. Fugel told the audience that “there is a real shortage of qualified personnel flowing from the colleges into industry,” and while change needs to happen at every level of education, “we cannot delay action at the university level.” In response to Executive Order 10925, business leaders saw universities as important allies in providing a pool of African American job candidates that would help companies comply with federal law.^{Footnote 29}

In 1962 and 1963, external pressure, paired with two sympathetic allies in high-ranking positions at UM, proved vital to the university’s commitment to admissions reform. Nevertheless, the origins of affirmative action involved more than a few administrators choosing to adopt affirmative action. The next section of this article explains the difficult process of crafting an affirmative action program that wouldn’t spark strong opposition.

Crafting Affirmative Action

In order to implement new racial inclusion policies, administrators had to create practices that brought more African American students to UM, while protecting the program from potential resistance. The university had to worry about political and legal challenges to any program that took race into account from actors outside the UM community. At the same time, UM had to answer to its own distinct constituency, which included the Board of Regents, faculty members, students, and alumni, some of whom rejected race-conscious solutions to inequality. Importantly, the ways in which administrators interpreted risk and navigated potential opposition influenced the character of affirmative action admissions at UM.

UM hired Leonard Sain, an African American assistant principal in Detroit, to develop a new special admissions program. When he arrived at UM, Sain quickly learned that using race in identifying students was a contentious issue that had to be handled carefully. In his first initiative, he took on the task of creating a racial census of the student body. Nobody at the university knew how many black students were on campus in 1963. Admissions applications did not include questions about race and the Registrar’s Office did not record such information. The census involved the painstaking process of counting black students—that is, faculty members and residence hall directors looked for black students in their classes and housing complexes and recorded their names. When Sain asked faculty members to collect racial data in 1963, he saw signs that some were uncomfortable with the race-conscious aspects of the survey. For example, one English professor wrote to Sain, “I have explained to the staff the purposes of the survey, and have endeavored to answer questions in such a way to quiet anxieties. These anxieties do exist” and “are likely to spread through the student body.” The faculty in the School of Education also showed their concerns. They invited Sain to meet with them because they felt uneasy about identifying students by race and were worried about how students would react to this practice. When Sain met with these faculty members, his notes show that he was prepared to talk about the legal merits of the census. Sain’s experience in collecting racial information must have made him worry about the potential resistance he would face if he made race the sole qualification for an affirmative action program.^{Footnote 30}

Despite concerns raised by members of the university community, enough faculty and staff members participated in the survey for Sain to release the results in February 1964. The census recorded 148 black undergraduate and 25 black graduate students at UM. Only 32 black freshmen were on campus and about 25 percent of those students were athletes. Perhaps trying to account for probable errors resulting from the census’s methods, Sain estimated that 200 African Americans attended the university as full-time students. This meant that African Americans made up 0.8 percent of the freshman class and 0.5 percent of the university’s total enrollment. A “pathetically small number,” Sain lamented.^{Footnote 31}

Sain didn’t look at these numbers and conclude that UM engaged in overt discriminatory practices. Instead, he believed that the university was guilty of what he called “sins of omission.” That meant that the university didn’t use race as a factor to consciously exclude black students, but rather UM’s “colorblind” policies, when put into practice, only effectively identified and supported talented middle-class white students. The university’s admissions criteria, for example, relied on standardized test scores and put much weight on whether students took a college preparatory curriculum. Sain claimed that these policies gave no thought to identifying talented black students who were educated in discriminatory educational environments. And even if black students met UM’s admissions criteria, because the university provided little financial support for low-income students, many could not afford to attend.^{Footnote 32}

Sain knew these policies had to change in order to improve African Americans’ access. But political battles on campus must have further revealed to Sain the landmines involved in creating an inclusion program exclusively for African Americans. For example, when Sain arrived on campus, the Regents were involved in a battle with the university’s Human Relations Board, which had uncovered a long-standing endowed scholarship designated exclusively for whites by its benefactor. While the Regents refused to begin the potentially lengthy legal process of changing the criteria of an endowed scholarship, they promised to put pressure on all future donors to remove any discriminatory clauses. Ironically, this policy worked to preserve the scholarship for whites, while prohibiting attempts to fund racially-exclusive scholarships for African Americans. When an anonymous donor offered to fund an annual scholarship exclusively for black students who lacked the money to attend the university, the Board of Regents accepted the donation only after pressuring the donor to remove any reference to race that would “have discriminated in favor of a Negro student.”^{Footnote 33}

Any official talented at reading the political winds off campus could also find plenty of evidence that using race as a qualifying factor for access to a special admissions program was risky. Opponents to what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were drawing on the political attacks against fair employment practices campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s by condemning the legislation as a quota bill that would give special preferences to minorities over whites. Moreover, in 1963, only four universities were operating an affirmative action admissions program. None of these programs had been tested in court. Eleven years before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in America’s first “reverse discrimination” admissions case, DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974), and fifteen years before Justice Lewis Powell provided his famous opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the constitutional merits for race-conscious admissions programs were up for grabs.^{Footnote 34}

All of these concerns were likely on Sain’s mind as he contemplated what affirmative action should look like. He crafted a special admissions program that put more weight on high school counselor evaluations than grade-point averages and standardized test scores, and also allowed students the option to interview with an admissions counselor. Moreover, all of the students admitted through the program would receive generous grant packages that covered most of their expenses. Ultimately, though, Sain had to make compromises in order to reduce the likelihood of resistance. While Sain had black students in mind when he wrote the new policies, both he and Heyns worried about the resistance that an affirmative action program exclusively for African Americans would bring. So when Heyns announced the program in March 1964, he emphasized that the program would be open to all students, regardless of race, “whose economic and social backgrounds has been of deprivation and disadvantaged.” The program did not yet have a name, but it would soon be called the Opportunity Scholarship Program and by June the Opportunity Awards Program (OAP). Not forgetting Hobart Taylor’s role in OAP, Heyns wrote to Taylor that he hoped the program would double the number of African American freshmen from the previous year. Taylor later sent the names of promising black students for the program to consider.^{Footnote 35}

Making Race Matter in the Opportunity Awards Program

Crafting an affirmative action program that included whites, though, was only the first step in the university’s efforts to protect OAP from resistance. The people who created and ran the program understood the main purpose of OAP: recruit and admit more African American students. So in the early years of affirmative action at UM, the major obstacle was figuring out how to pursue the race-conscious goals of OAP without raising the eyebrows of people who opposed racially-attentive practices. As a result, OAP progressed cautiously under the management of a small group of officials who often had to hide their practices from public view.

Outlining potential opposition to OAP on campus is difficult because the historical record has left little evidence of the views of most of the university community on affirmative action. Officials never took polls of faculty and students on this issue, and contentious debates over OAP don’t appear in faculty meeting minutes of the 1960s. The broadest survey of faculty views on affirmative action comes from a questionnaire sent to individual departments in 1966 requesting information on whether they actively recruited black graduate students and faculty. In response to the question, “Do you make any special efforts to recruit Negro students?” sixteen of the respondents replied affirmatively and eighteen replied negatively. Only two of the respondents suggested that their departments might apply different admissions criteria for black graduate students. Still, the survey suggested that there was at least some support for race-conscious initiatives. But the survey also brought to light adamant opposition to affirmative action. The responses of opponents are filled with statements such as “I trust that discriminating practices will not be directed against Caucasians and Eurasians?” and “The University should consider . . . individuals without regard to race.” The survey irked some department chairs so much that three of them attached letters protesting the suggestion that departments should take race into account. John M. Allen, chair of the zoology department, wrote that special recruiting practices for black students and faculty were “contrary to my own ideas as well as those of my colleagues.” Responses like these further reinforced OAP officials’ belief that they needed to downplay the significance of race in their program for undergraduate students.^{Footnote 36}

This speaks to how institutional change unfolded in the early 1960s when officials didn’t believe that affirmative action had widespread institutional support. OAP officials benefited from the fact that universities began to take on the bureaucratic structure of large organizations. Over the course of the twentieth century, faculty increasingly ceded control of management duties to professional offices that worked underneath executive administrators. In the process, much of the day-to-day management duties of undergraduate admissions, financial aid, and counseling operated outside the view of most of the university community. This allowed OAP officials some autonomy to craft and implement policies without the close oversight of people who would have likely brought more resistance if they knew about the program’s practices.^{Footnote 37}

In the 1960s, two officials were responsible for the day-to-day operations of OAP. Once Sain left, the university hired one counselor and one admissions officer to run the program. These new OAP officials were African Americans who saw their jobs at UM as an opportunity to work for racial inclusion. Consider John Chavis, who took the counseling position. He grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and felt that discrimination in his hometown had stymied his early social mobility opportunities. He worked as a porter for a year and a half after graduation. Only after he was drafted and spent five years in the Army did he finally attend the University of Toledo at the age of twenty-six, likely on the G.I. Bill. When his alma mater finally began an affirmative action recruitment program in the late 1960s, he wrote: “Perhaps the effort, as late as it seems to me, will save others of my race from a lifetime of catching-up.” This is what drove Chavis. His goal at Michigan was to provide the type of opportunities for young African Americans that were missing for him in his younger years.^{Footnote 38}

As committed as these officials were to increasing black enrollment, they understood that they needed to figure out how to sustain affirmative action in an environment that they believed hosted many people who were hostile to race-conscious practices. For OAP officials, that meant consciously crafting admissions and recruiting practices that increased African Americans’ access, but also allowed officials to promote the program’s benefits for white students. Initially, resisting the impulse to put questions about race on admissions applications was important to that process. The university had banned racial classifications on applications in the early 1950s and pushing to amend this practice might have signaled that OAP was only interested in admitting African Americans. Instead, officials added a box on applications that allowed students to apply as an OAP candidate. Still, without the ability to identify race on applications, the admissions recruiter had to cultivate a predominantly black pool of applicants to OAP in order to admit mostly black students. Importantly, those black applicants needed to understand that they had to check the Opportunity Awards Program box on their admissions application; otherwise, an applicant would be evaluated like any other applicant. To do this, the OAP recruiter traveled to high schools with large African American enrollments, developed contacts with high school counselors of predominantly black schools, and cultivated relationships with community institutions in African American communities to spread information about OAP.^{Footnote 39}

These recruiting practices provided an overwhelmingly black applicant pool for OAP that ensured that black students would dominate the program. In fall 1964, sixty-seven of the seventy Opportunity Awards Program students were African American. In subsequent years, black students continued to represent the overwhelming majority of OAP students, comprising about 90 percent of the program’s participants.^{Footnote 40} These disparities suggest that OAP doesn’t fit well into the categories scholars have created to make sense of different affirmative action programs. Scholars have divided practices into “soft” and “hard” affirmative action. “Soft” refers to programs that use race as a factor in recruiting and financial aid practices, but not as a factor in the admissions process. In contrast, “hard” refers to programs that use race as a factor in selecting which students to admit. On the surface, OAP might look like a “soft” program since applications did not ask for students’ racial identity. But closer inspection reveals how OAP blurs the lines between “soft” and “hard.” Despite the fact that admissions officers did not officially know the racial background of applicants—unless students took advantage of the interview option—race-conscious recruiting practices created a pool of applicants that was overwhelmingly black for a special admissions program that used different criteria to evaluate applications. So the line between an admissions officer seeing an applicant’s race on an application and the “colorblind” admissions process of OAP where admissions officers evaluated applicants with a high degree of certainty about their race is blurry indeed.^{Footnote 41}

Once admissions officials began admitting students to the program, the racial disparities within OAP made promoting its benefits for white students a difficult task. Early descriptions of OAP suggest that officials weren’t prepared for the public relations game. Administrators’ descriptions of the program fluctuated from a program open to all students, but focused on bringing African Americans to campus, to a program exclusively for African Americans. One early article went so far as to explain that OAP meant to “counteract some of the obstacles faced by Negro students interested in coming” to UM without mentioning that white students were also able to apply. A 1968 OAP leaflet noted that applicants must be a “member of a disadvantaged minority group.” Nevertheless, after OAP’s first year, administrators were generally more careful in downplaying the significance of race in recruiting and selecting students for the program. For example, in 1967, John Chavis claimed that race actually played no role in selecting students for OAP. He explained that the program focused on “poverty and cultural criteria” and not race. African Americans made up a disproportionate number of OAP students, he argued, because African Americans comprised a disproportionate share of the “disadvantaged” population in the United States.^{Footnote 42}

The efforts to downplay the role of race in OAP impacted more than rhetoric. For example, the recruiting process, which was designed to create a predominantly black pool of applicants without raising the eyebrows of affirmative action opponents, limited the number of black students that the recruiter contacted. The OAP recruiter consciously avoided majority-white high schools—even those schools with black students. Aware of potential legal and political opposition to the program, officials wanted to escape challenges from white students who might realize OAP targeted African Americans. Of course, officials also needed to limit the number of white students who knew about the program and might apply in order to cultivate an overwhelmingly black pool of applicants. Yet this practice also ensured that unless a black student attended a predominantly black high school, that potential black applicant didn’t receive information about the program through school visits.^{Footnote 43}

Even the support services available to OAP students became tied up with public relations efforts to downplay the role that race played in the program. Aside from John Chavis’s counseling position, the university didn’t provide any additional special academic services for the program’s students once they were on campus. Publicly, Chavis used this to safeguard OAP from potential opposition. For anyone concerned that the program gave special treatment to the overwhelmingly black pool of OAP students once they were on campus, Chavis reassured them that “there is no attempt to obtain any kind of . . . preferential treatment for them. In fact, we go to a great deal of trouble to make certain this does not happen.” This might have helped shield the program from resistance, but it also helped limit the support services available to black students. This point wasn’t lost on Chavis. Behind the scenes he complained about the lack of resources devoted to helping black students succeed.^{Footnote 44}

Chavis’s criticism sheds light on a major problem that more University of Michigan officials began to recognize by the late 1960s: trying to improve African Americans’ access to UM while downplaying racial-attentiveness greatly limited racial inclusion efforts. By the end of the decade, UM managed to use OAP to increase African Americans’ representation from less than 1 percent to 3 percent of the student body. Tripling black enrollment is nothing to scoff at. Never in the University of Michigan’s history had African Americans had this type of access to the state’s flagship institution. But the roadblocks OAP officials experienced in advancing racial inclusion, while downplaying their emphasis on race, framed their response to black student activism at the end of the decade. When black students at UM began demanding more race-conscious practices and goals by the end of the 1960s, they found allies among officials who were already eager to move away from practices that downplayed race. It’s important to recognize, then, that black student activism was not the only driving force that led to more racially-attentive practices. Optimism among university officials about the effectiveness of programs that tried to appear “colorblind” was waning by the end of the decade. Black student activists benefited from this environment. By the early 1970s, University of Michigan officials responded to student activism and the limited outcomes of “colorblind” policies, bringing about a new era where officials emphasized and defended the importance of race-conscious practices.