Managing Racial Inclusion: The Origins and Early Implementation of Affirmative Action Admissions at the University of Michigan

In 1962, the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO) called upon the University of Michigan (UM) to provide statistics on the racial background of its employees. It was less than a year after President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925—an order that mandated that employers with federal contracts take "affirmative action" to end discrimination in hiring practices and created the PCEEO to enforce it. The inquiry produced a minor crisis for administrators at UM. The university had spent much of the post–World War II period implementing nondiscrimination policies that were meant to eliminate race as a relevant category in university practices. As a result, UM did not ask potential employees to reveal their racial identity on applications and did not complete surveys on the racial demographics of its workforce. UM officials spent the spring and fall of 1963 meeting with Hobart Taylor Jr., executive vice chairman of the PCEEO, to understand the university's obligations. Just a few months after the meetings, UM announced what might seem like a curious response to an executive order targeting hiring discrimination: the university's first undergraduate affirmative action admissions program. By the end of the 1960s, African Americans' share of the undergraduate student body tripled. But how did an executive order concerning workplace equity spark an affirmative action admissions program? And how did UM administrators implement affirmative action policies without facing significant backlash?

This article uses these questions to shed new light on the origins and early implementation of undergraduate affirmative action admissions policies in the United States. The history of affirmative action admissions in higher education remains surprisingly understudied. Most of the scholarship on affirmative action still focuses on businesses. And even those studies largely tell the history of activists, lawyers, and political elites.¹ This article doesn't overlook the vital roles of these actors, but it emphasizes the important part that university managers played in the origins and long-term viability of affirmative action admissions. Focusing on UM officials offers new insights into the institutional outcomes of federal hiring policies in higher education and the types of actions that protected affirmative action admissions policies from opposition.

While this article emphasizes the importance of institutional managers, it begins by outlining the pressure placed on UM officials to implement affirmative action. Uncovering the external pressure placed on UM officials sheds new light on a question that historians of affirmative action admissions have struggled to answer in recent decades: Why did a select group of universities adopt racially-attentive admissions policies before 1965? Explaining what two scholars call the "early adopters" has been a puzzle because historians have found it difficult to locate the coercive forces that pushed postsecondary institutions to implement affirmative action admissions practices before the late 1960s.² This article breaks new ground by uncovering the direct pressure that led one "early adopter" to reform its admissions policies. In doing so, it reveals the link between the drive for workplace equity and the origins of affirmative action admissions, two developments that are usually studied separately.

But government pressure is just one piece of the puzzle in explaining the rise of affirmative action at UM. Coercion often fails to create significant institutional policy changes. This is especially true in cases of weak coercive pressure, like the type UM received from the PCEEO, which didn't threaten the institution's financial stability or vital day-to-day operations. Scholars have often struggled to explain why some institutions responded positively to this type of government pressure. This article suggests that the people who managed institutions are vital to understanding the outcomes of weak coercion. It argues that weak government pressure worked to bring about change at the University of Michigan only when paired with sympathetic institutional allies who were willing to wage difficult internal battles for new racial inclusion policies. In other words, UM's history brings to light the importance of university officials in providing the internal support necessary for external pressure, especially weak external pressure, to bring about institutional change...