Remembering the Michigan Mandate
Nearly two decades after its creation by the University of Michigan, the Michigan Mandate remains as one of the most comprehensive diversity initiatives ever undertaken by a predominantly White research university. Launched in the 1980s by Dr. James J. Duderstadt, then university president, the effort saw the Ann Arbor campus more than double its minority student population and significantly increase its minority faculty by the late 1990s.
In addition to increasing the numbers of under-represented students and faculty, Duderstadt, now a Michigan faculty member himself, contends the effort succeeded in “changing our culture and character in important ways, and most importantly, making our institution better in every way that we could measure it.
“At Michigan, we remain absolutely convinced that there is a very strong linkage between academic excellence and campus diversity,”
he says.
Duderstadt vacated the Michigan presidency in 1996, a year before the school began its defense against two major affirmative action lawsuits. Diversity proponents lauded the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in one of the cases, Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed race to be used as a factor in college admissions. Across the nation, however, the pursuit of diversity has proceeded cautiously as universities and colleges have sought to minimize their risk from lawsuits by anti-affirmative action groups. Institutions have revamped race-specific outreach programs by making them race-neutral though still using them to achieve diversity in student, faculty and staff recruitment.
Duderstadt is widely hailed for setting the diversity precedent among predominantly White universities. Much of U.S. higher education has followed suit, listing diversity among their institutional goals.
