During the 1980s, many minority students expressed dismay with their experiences at Michigan and called upon officials to make changes. The 1980s also saw serious racial incidents rock the campus. By the 1986-1987 academic year, Duderstadt, then the university provost, responded to the difficulties by bringing people together to develop the Michigan Mandate. After becoming president in 1988, he implemented the mandate and made significant investments to reach out to prospective students and to recruit minority faculty.
“[Duderstadt] committed to diversifying the faculty and the students, but more than that, he’d taken 1 percent off the top of the budget annually and put it in escrow and said it could only be used for [diversity] purposes,” recalls Dr. Earl Lewis, a former Michigan dean and now the provost at Emory University.
Since the 2003 decision, efforts by anti-affirmative action groups have obscured the idea that diversity and academic excellence are linked, thus leading institutions to focus more on potential lawsuits rather than on the benefits of diversity, according to Clayton-Pedersen.
“The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the idea that diversity is essential to excellence. This understanding is often missing from the way institutions approach diversity,” she says.
— By Ronald Roach
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
