The Origins of Diversity: Managing Race at the University of Michigan, 1963-2006

Abstract

I make two arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that institutions and the people who managed them mattered in the fight for racial justice. At the University of Michigan, activists and state actors successfully pushed administrators to create new policies to increase minorities' access to the University, but it was University presidents, admissions officers, housing officials, deans and faculty members who had to put the ideal of racial justice into practice. These institutional managers, many of whom had never participated in a civil rights protest, had to rethink admissions and recruiting policies, craft new curriculum and counseling services and create new programs to address racial tension. In short, this is the story of what happened when institutional managers at the University of Michigan put the civil rights movement through the meat grinder of implementation. The second argument concerns the origins of the concepts and practices of diversity. Scholars have shown that activists, politicians and federal bureaucrats were responsible for the origins of affirmative action. In other words, institutions that implemented race-conscious admissions or hiring practices reacted to both the activists who insisted that institutions had a social responsibility to use affirmative action to address the racial inequities in American society, and to the state actors who enforced this ideal. If activists and state actors invented affirmative action, I argue that institutional managers created the concept of diversity. At the University of Michigan, the concept of diversity emerged out of a long struggle to implement race-conscious policies and carry out the ideal that the University had a social responsibility to address racial inequity in the state of Michigan.