Affirmative Action for Whom?

Abstract

This chapter addresses the new affirmative action policies in the University of Michigan (UM), which ultimately led to the racial retrenchment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Almost all the enrollment gains made since the Black Action Movement (BAM) were reversed. During these years, black enrollment fell from 7.25 percent to 4.9 percent of UM's student body by 1983. Just as important, the economic backgrounds of black students at UM changed, as UM officials shifted their recruiting, admissions, and financial aid policies to focus on bringing middle-class black students from suburban areas around the country. Even as black enrollment began to rise again in the mid-1980s, UM would never again craft its affirmative action policies to target working-class students in Detroit. Ultimately, the policies administrators introduced in the late 1970s revealed that the co-optation of racial justice was a long-term project that evolved to protect the university's priorities as conditions changed. The declining power of black student activists also gave administrators more control over how the university would respond to the changing environment. By the end of the 1970s, the character of affirmative action looked nothing like BAM's vision of racial justice.