Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality by Matthew Johnson (review)

For more than fifty years, scholars have debated the merits of affirmative action. Undermining Racial Justice, by Matthew Johnson (history, Texas Tech), explores affirmative action in admissions at the University of Michigan in a longitudinal way. It offers a powerful, thoroughly researched narrative, and a plausible, compelling analysis. Johnson describes how UM struggled to admit more Black students in the 1960s but found that Black students had an attrition rate twice that of White students. Black students found the racial climate at the university hostile. UM wanted to be more inclusive, so long as this did not detract from its standing as an elite institution that measured quality by scores on standardized tests, Advanced Placement (AP) courses, grade point averages (GPAs), and similar data. Located in Ann Arbor, only thirty-five miles from Detroit, the university found itself recruiting students from the inner city who did not perform well on standardized tests and had taken few AP courses. How could UM be more inclusive without lowering standards and jeopardizing its elite status?

In 1970, Black students—the Black Action Movement (BAM)—engaged in a confrontational, disruptive campaign to push the university to admit more Black students (a goal of ten percent). Faced with violence so close to Detroit and so soon after the 1967 rebellion, the frightened administration conceded the demand. Johnson argues that over time administrators co-opted the Black student movement by "selectively incorporating activism while preserving long-standing values and priorities." (2) In pursuing affirmative action, UM viewed itself as a victim caught in the middle, mediating between rebellious students and white backlash. The university created an ever more expansive "inclusion bureaucracy" to recruit more minority students and faculty, and improve the campus climate. Discontent was to be channeled to counselors, offices, programs and committees that the executive administrators could control. Change would take place on administrators' terms.

The student demands reflected a more radical vision. This vision did not blame malicious individuals and evil intent but rather "institutional racism." BAM accused the university itself of being part of a structure that "rob[bed] Black people of financial security, political sovereignty and human dignity." (93) The purpose of the university should be modified to help Black people (such as those in Detroit) become more autonomous from White people. The degree to which the university-trained Black students to return to their communities and help empower those communities would be the measure of success. This was a demand to use the university for the purpose of social justice. The administration might not have been persuaded by this discourse, but it did commit to the ten percent goal, created an Opportunity Program for disadvantaged students, and instituted academic support programs.

Over time, the implementation of affirmative action and inclusion shifted to adopt the language of diversity, reinforced by the Bakke decision of 1978. The cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) challenged affirmative action. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the use of different criteria by race but upheld the use of race as one factor in an admissions process designed to create a diverse student body. After Bakke, race attentive policies for redressing general societal inequality were no longer permissible. And at UM, affirmative action originally designed to focus on lower-income and disadvantaged Blacks from the cities was replaced by a focus on middle-class Blacks from "good schools" (suburban) who could succeed at a selective, elite institution.

This is a thoughtful, impressive book that makes a substantial contribution to the field. The story of the University of Michigan parallels the trajectory of protest, affirmative action, diversity, and inclusion at many other elite universities.