An academic star in his Detroit charter high school, driven and confident, Darren Gordon felt “a little annoyed” to learn that his acceptance at the University of Michigan was contingent upon attending “Bridge,” a six-week academic immersion program in Ann Arbor. “I wanted to enjoy the summer with my [high school] friends,” explains Gordon, class of 2013, and now a medical student at the University of Toledo. But he developed strong new friendships through the Bridge program, whose predominantly black participants included a number of students who, like him, were among the first generation in their families to attend college.
Then came fall term. “For the first time in my life,” Gordon recalls, “I felt culture shock.” Coming from a predominantly black school and neighborhood, he found himself on a largely white campus. Of the U-M’s 25,000 undergrads, just 1,531 were African American.
“In one of my classes I was the only African American. There was one of me, and fifteen of them,” Gordon recalls. Afraid of playing into stereotypes by sounding “ignorant,” he clammed up in class discussions.
Gordon joined a black fraternity and organized a black pre-med group, something he talks about with pride. But during his four years at Michigan, the number of black undergrads declined; by his senior year, there were 300 fewer than when he started.
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In 1970, the Black Action Movement led a campus-wide strike demanding more minority representation on campus. It ended with the university agreeing to raise African American enrollment to 10 percent–roughly in line with Michigan’s black population at the time.
That target was never met–but no U-M president since has been allowed to forget the promise. And for more than three decades, admissions staffers gave African American, Hispanic, and Native American applicants extra consideration. When two white students sued, charging that such affirmative action discriminated against them, the university mounted a sophisticated legal defense, and won a partial victory at the United States Supreme Court.
In 2006, the U-M had more than 1,700 black undergrads, or 7 percent of the student body. But that same year, Michigan voters barred state colleges from considering “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” in admissions. And just as administrators had warned, the number of black undergraduates dwindled. By 2014, it had fallen by one-third, to 1,166. At 4.4 percent, it was the lowest figure in more than thirty years.
When the University Record asked departing president Mary Sue Coleman that year if she had any regrets, she replied, “I wish we had made greater progress in attracting and retaining more underrepresented minority students.”
As their numbers shrank, Gordon says, he and other black students felt increasingly “marginalized.” Many responded by sticking together more, withdrawing from what he calls the “larger culture.”
In the Supreme Court cases, “Michigan’s extraordinary accomplishment was that it established diversity as a defensible objective under legal doctrine,” writes sociologist Ellen Berrey in her recent book The Enigma of Diversity. “However, it was never as successful at making the campus a supportive, welcoming environment for black, Latino, and Native American students.”
“The university fielded a diversity dream,” says senior Brittney Williams. Michigan’s brochures and websites, she notes, show “a very diverse group” of students but “it’s not that way” in real life. Other students also described their disappointment when they realized the student body didn’t live up to that advertised ideal. One pointed to the engineering school’s admissions web page, which features a beaming black female–even though black women make up less than 1 percent of the college’s undergrads.
If its marketing reflects the university as it wishes to be, black students’ experiences tell a different story. In her book, Berrey blames the disconnect between aspiration and reality on the fact that “the university’s most exclusionary practices–the reliance on standardized test scores and out-of-state students who paid full tuition–remained unchanged.”
It’s true that no one at Michigan is talking about sacrificing its academic reputation to achieve more diversity. Psychology prof Robert Sellers, vice provost for “equity, inclusion, and academic affairs,” sees no reason it can’t have both. The challenge, Sellers says, is to communicate “this nuanced message that while U-M may be providing an elite education it does not provide an elitist education.”
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“We cannot be excellent at the University of Michigan without being diverse in the full sense of the word,” president Mark Schlissel declared in a speech last fall. He was launching what the Record described as “a yearlong effort to create a comprehensive, universitywide plan to improve diversity, equity and inclusion.” Every school and department is on notice that they are expected to help recruit and welcome minorities–just how is up to them. “The president is serious,” says a top staffer at one college. “He has put us all on a tight deadline.”
Provost Martha Pollack has revamped the admissions office bringing in new leaders who–by means of email, phone calls, and face-to-face visits–are fighting to attract the talented minority students that other good schools also seek. Sellers and Kedra Ishop, the university’s first “enrollment manager,” are the field generals of Michigan’s renewed diversity campaign. Sellers is supervising on-campus efforts, including ninety staff “planning leads” scattered among the academic units. Having experienced a kind of culture shock himself when he left an integrated neighborhood for historically black Morehouse College, he says he can relate to African American students suddenly immersed in a largely white society–for students from Detroit, he says, Ann Arbor can seem “like the other side of the moon.”
In January, Ishop was featured in a front-page article in the New York Times. Headlined “New Paths to College Diversity,” it celebrated an almost 20 percent increase in “underrepresented minorities” in the university’s 2015 freshman class. The actual numbers weren’t enormous–about sixty more black students compared to 2014–but it was enough for the Times to suggest that the U-M “may be showing the way forward for many colleges …”
The daughter of civil rights activists, Ishop projects a friendly authority. Her area of responsibility extends beyond admissions to several related departments–financial aid, the university registrar, new-student programs–that in the past had more autonomy. She summarizes her job as “finding opportunities across campus to better the experience for our enrolling students and students enrolled on campus.”
For many minority students, money is as big a barrier as culture shock. Even Michigan residents pay $14,000-15,000 a year in tuition, plus another $10,000 or so for housing. “I was somewhat surprised with the cost of living here,” says Shaylin Yarrell, a pre-med junior from Detroit. Because her classes involve frequent late-night study sessions, Yarrell shares an apartment near campus–but one of her friends commutes from Romulus to save money, and another lives with her grandmother in Ypsilanti.
Though Michigan boasts that 70 percent of students receive some financial aid, in the past students often had to wait a month or more after admission to learn what help they might receive. For those with good offers from other schools, that was just too long; the U-M has now moved up both admissions and financial aid decisions by a week. Undergrad admissions director Erica Sanders and her staff also check in with students who’ve been admitted but haven’t applied for financial aid, and they join administrators, faculty, and students in making phone calls to the undecided.
U-M also is reaching out to more high schools–whether in small towns in Michigan or across the country. Its admissions officer in L.A., explains Ishop, “doesn’t just recruit our traditional feeders. She’s also recruiting from non-feeder schools from inner-city L.A.” While assisting out-of-state students financially is much harder than helping in-state residents, Ishop says that U-M can sometimes find aid “for the very neediest.” This year, out-of-state students accounted for most of the increase in black enrollment, a gain she attributes to expanded outreach to Chicago schools.
Reaching out geographically and to the economically squeezed are strategies that Ishop calls “legally accepted proxies for race and ethnicity.” But she’s blunt that they will never be as effective as affirmative action: “You can’t take those proxies and make them perform at the same rate” in achieving a racially and culturally balanced student body. Translation: she has a hell of a job.
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Inside the Trotter Multicultural Center, a one-time fraternity on Washtenaw, senior Lamar Weir stands in front of about seventy members of the Black Student Union and announces that the meeting will begin with “libations.” The poised Weir, whose T-shirt declares “Faster Every Damn Day,” explains that the libation ceremony honors “those who went before us–our ancestors.”
He asks people to call out names. The first response is “Martin Luther King!” Weir sprinkles water into a large vessel holding a plant. “We say, ‘ashe,'” he says. The crowd shouts “Ashe!” “Trayvon Martin!” “Ashe!” “Malcolm X!” “Ashe!” Later, Weir says that the affirmation, of African origin, means something like “be there.”
Afterwards, while some students mingle over pizza, others take part in a modified version of “Family Feud.” The answers, flashed on a screen, include a “Soul on Ice” skating party and “Black Homecoming.” It’s the first meeting of the year, and a few students happily greet classmates from Detroit’s Renaissance High–probably U-M’s largest feeder of black undergrads. “Are you my sweetie?” one young woman asks another, and they hug. Someone else shouts “Go Detroit!”
“Family Feud” is followed a brief PowerPoint presentation by Trotter House director Jackie Simpson, showing four possible designs for a new building. Simpson asks students to cast a vote for one of the designs before they leave. A new, more centrally located meeting place was one of the demands of protests two years ago that were mobilized using the Twitter hashtag #BBUM–“being black at the University of Michigan.” Last December, the regents approved plans for a new $10 million center on State St. near the Betsy Barbour and Helen Newberry dorms.
Senior Capri’Nara Kendall, until recently president of the Black Student Union, watched the presentation with special interest–she’d helped organize the #BBUM protests. Initially responding to a white fraternity’s ghetto-themed “hood ratchet” party, it joined the Black Lives Matter movement with “die-in” protests. A 2014 protest on Martin Luther King Day demanded the new multicultural center, as well as “emergency” scholarships, housing subsidies, a requirement that all U-M students take a class on race and ethnicity–and that the university reach that elusive 10 percent black enrollment.
“It took eleven black students to make a hashtag to embarrass the university,” Kendall reflects incredulously. A Detroiter and sports management major, she calls the new building the only significant gain from the protests. “Nothing has gotten better,” she says glumly in a later phone interview. “The climate on campus is still messed up.”
She shrugs off the increase in minority freshmen as “a few more bodies.” The change she most wanted–more required classes in diversity–hasn’t been implemented. But another #BBUM activist, engineering senior Robert Greenfield, thinks the protest helped inspire Schlissel’s initiative.
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Of the fourteen black students and recent grads I spoke with, only a few described outright racism at Michigan. Several heard the “N word” dropped casually in conversation by white kids–who seemed surprised to be told it was offensive. One woman was taunted with racial slurs while walking at night on campus. And senior Charvez Wesley recalls leaving a campus building with two other black men right behind a white woman. She saw them and fled.
“She ran fast,” says Wesley, matter-of-factly.
More common is the feeling they don’t get the same respect in class as those in the “majority culture.”
“It’s mainly when I’ve taken a lab,” says Yarrell. When she makes a suggestion, she says, classmates question her in ways they don’t with other students.
Sometimes they aren’t sure if they’re experiencing racism or just dealing with snarky peers. But the tension “wears on you,” says Greenfield. So many students described feeling uncomfortable in classes with only one or two black students that it felt like the same story, told fourteen times.
Many find a refuge in largely black organizations, whether it’s BSU or a fraternity or a sorority. Several told me they made lasting friendships in the Bridge classes. But even those can be a mixed blessing. Rivan Stinson, a 2014 grad (and freelance Observer proofreader), did well enough at Belleville High that she didn’t have to take the program–and says that as a result, never made friends in the “clique-y” circles that formed there. After her sophomore year, she moved back home with her parents to save money and “had no social life.”
Not everyone has Stinson’s hard-nosed attitude, but several of the students express ambivalence about their U-M years. All say they’ve had many great teachers and opportunities, like studying abroad, that enriched their lives. And though they wish more black students shared their college years, they know their degrees will open doors.
Lamar Weir, due to graduate in June, says he’s looking forward to “just taking a picture with a diploma saying ‘I did it.'” He had some fine classes, he says. He’s also learned, he says, “to pick my battles wisely.”
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This article has been edited since it was published in the March 2016 Ann Arbor Observer. The U-M’s in-state undergraduate tuition has been corrected.
