The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions

Abstract

What explains the rise of race-conscious affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions? The dominant theory posits that adoption of such policies was precipitated by urban and campus unrest in the North during the late 1960s. Based on primary research in a sample of 17 selective schools, we find limited support for the dominant theory. Affirmative action arose in two distinct waves during the 1960s. A first wave was launched in the early 1960s by northern college administrators inspired by nonviolent civil rights protests in the South. A second wave of affirmative action emerged in the late 1960s, primarily as a response to campus-based student protests. Most late-adopting schools were those most favored by the Protestant upper class. Our findings are most consistent with a theoretical perspective on institutional change in which social movements’ effects are mediated by the moral and ideological beliefs of key administrators.

Keywords

affirmative action higher education racial inequality public policy political sociology

Why, how, and through what mechanisms were race-conscious affirmative action programs originally instituted in college admissions? The dominant theory, which comes from the sociological literature on institutional change in higher education, attributes the rise of race-conscious affirmative action to two specific types of social disruption during the late 1960s. According to this view, campus protests and urban riots in the North posed a powerful new threat to the symbolic legitimacy of the social order. College administrators resolved the problem by incorporating racial considerations into the admissions process. Under this theory, race-conscious affirmative action was prompted by social upheavals in the late 1960s that precipitated a cultural shift in the permissibility of race-sensitive policies. This theory is widely influential, but the empirical evidence to substantiate it is limited.

Our article contributes to the literature by analyzing the origins of race-conscious affirmative action in a nonrandom purposive sample of 17 highly selective undergraduate institutions. Drawing on new primary archival sources, we identify the timing of adoption for each school and systematically compare early adopters to late adopters.

Literature Review and Motivation

Numerous studies have examined the impact of affirmative action in college admissions (Bowen and Bok 1998; Espenshade and Radford 2009), but the literature on the origins and development of such programs is comparatively small.¹ Much of the research concentrates on the period after affirmative action was widely adopted (Grodsky 2007; Lipson 2007, 2011; Takagi 1992). Surprisingly few studies focus specifically on unearthing the origins of affirmative action policies at particular institutions. To the extent this question is explicitly addressed, scholars point to campus protest or urban riots in the North as the main impetus for institutional change (Anderson 2004; Bowen and Bok 1998; Douglass 2007; Duffy and Goldberg 1998; Orlans 1992; Skrentny 2002; Wilkinson 1979).²

This intuition about the role of campus and urban disruption is at the core of the dominant theory of the advent of race-conscious affirmative action, but the empirical evidence supporting it is limited and incomplete. Perhaps the most comprehensive and compelling evidence comes from The Chosen, Karabel’s (2005) groundbreaking history of admission and exclusion at the Big Three—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Drawing on exhaustive research in these schools’ institutional archives, he finds disruption had crucial consequences for the incorporation of racial minorities. Karabel acknowledges that the campaign to dismantle Jim Crow was regarded as “morally compelling” and stirred a “deeper awareness of racial injustice among the men who ran the nation’s leading colleges.” Nonetheless, he concludes that the civil rights movement “had not in and of itself been enough to fundamentally alter the admissions practices of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton” (p. 406). According to Karabel, all three institutions jettisoned their race-neutral admission criteria only after a surge of “disruptive activity, both on and off campus” (p. 406).

Karabel (2005) finds that the “watershed event” was the succession of riots in the mid-1960s, starting with the Watts riot in 1965 and followed by the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit. Unnerved by the devastation wrought in Newark, Princeton administrators tripled the number of African American students entering in 1968. Harvard and Yale followed on the heels of a “terrifying wave of riots in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination” (p. 407). Black students at both campuses mobilized to demand greater representation, but Karabel argues their mobilization “would not have had nearly as powerful an impact in the absence of the urban riots that preceded it” (p. 406). Mobilization of students was not unimportant, but the urban riots were ultimately what made it politically possible to incorporate substantial numbers of African Americans: “What the civil rights movement had been unable to accomplish—a fundamental alteration of racially neutral admissions practices that had the effect, if not the intent, of limiting black enrollment to token levels—the riots had made possible” (p. 407).

With the exception of Karabel (2005) and a few other studies (Duffy and Goldberg 1998; Grodsky and Kalogrides 2008; Karen 1991; Soares 2007; Wechsler 1977; Williamson 2003), empirical evidence supporting the conventional wisdom is thin and indirect. We know very little about when and why race-conscious affirmative action began at a wide range of schools. Karabel’s conclusions about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton seem both appropriate and correct, particularly in connection with changes in enrollment patterns, but how broadly applicable are they? Perhaps these august institutions were the most resistant to change. What about other schools in the Ivy League, particularly schools that boasted stronger egalitarian traditions (Farnum 1990), or top public universities, like the University of Michigan or the University of California, which ostensibly were founded to serve the public interest? What about leading liberal arts colleges, most of which were located quite far from any episodes of urban disorder? We do not know whether the disruptions of the late 1960s forced their hand as well or whether these schools adopted affirmative action earlier than the Big Three. Clearly, further research is necessary.

We also need a closer look at why enrollment of students of color increased so sharply during the 1960s. Did the uptick reflect implementation of new affirmative action policies adopted in the wake of disruption? Did it stem directly from a rejection of racially neutral admissions criteria and the embrace of admission policies that permitted consideration of race? Or did the rise in minority enrollment simply reflect a deepening of institutional effort, not a shift in policy? Was the expansion simply due to a more aggressive implementation of affirmative action programs already in place?³

This is more than a purely empirical exercise. At stake is a key theoretical issue about the sources and mechanisms of institutional change. If colleges and universities proved willing to change their admissions policies only when the “threat from below” (Karen 1991:228) became sufficiently strong in the late 1960s, then campus protests and northern urban riots should indeed be seen as the motivating force behind the advent of race-conscious affirmative action. On the other hand, if admissions policies began to incorporate racial considerations earlier in the 1960s, it would suggest that the southern-based civil rights movement may have played a larger role than previously understood, and it would call for further consideration of the mechanisms linking protest in the South to institutional change in the North.

Methods and Data

We take a comparative approach to investigating the origins of race-conscious affirmative action in undergraduate admissions. The individual school is our unit of analysis, and our analysis is based on a purposive sample of 17 selective, non-southern institutions. We started our sample with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton because of their importance in the literature. We then sought to include a greater range of selective schools, where affirmative action first took root.⁴ We added the remaining schools in the Ivy League because of their historical and social significance and their tendency to coordinate with each other on institutional matters. We then included schools from each of the three major types of selective undergraduate institutions: private universities, liberal arts colleges, and public universities. This makes it possible for us, in a limited way, to detect or rule out variation across type of school. To judge the selectivity of different schools, we relied on a recent list from U.S. News and World Report.⁵ For private universities, in addition to the Ivy League, we included Northwestern.⁶ Among liberal arts colleges, we included Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, and Swarthmore. For public universities, we selected the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington.⁷

We know of no single source of accurate information about the dates when selective institutions adopted race-conscious affirmative action. Accordingly, we collected original data for all the schools in our sample except Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, for which we relied on Karabel (2005). We were especially interested in locating primary sources that would allow us to closely observe changes in admissions policies. We began our data collection by examining relevant articles in student newspapers during the 1960s and 1970s (see online Appendix A). We followed up by conducting research in the manuscript archives of most schools in our sample. Our primary sources include school periodicals; press releases; administrative reports, memoranda, and correspondence; and minutes of trustee and regental meetings.

We then identified the year in which each school in our sample adopted race-conscious affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.⁸ We define race-conscious affirmative action as any admissions policy or program that formally permits a degree of racial consideration—however big or small—in the treatment of potential or actual applicants for admissions. Our definition thus excludes ad hoc actions taken by individual administrators in the absence of a policy or established practice. Among formal affirmative action programs, we distinguished between two broad types.⁹ “Soft” affirmative action involves policies or programs that aim to expand or enhance the pool of minority applicants through talent search programs or through preparatory or bridge programs for prospective students. “Hard” affirmative action is any policy or program that permits an applicant’s racial background to be considered in the decision to admit; it authorizes admissions officers to place a metaphorical thumb on the scale when weighing the admissibility of a minority applicant. To identify the timing of adoption, we looked for empirical evidence that colleges and universities were operating programs of both kinds during a particular year.¹⁰

Once we coded the date of initial adoption for the schools in our sample, we began our two-stage comparative analysis. First, we distinguished schools that adopted affirmative action before the onset of northern urban riots from schools that adopted affirmative action after the onset of these riots, classifying the former as early adopters and the latter as late adopters. We also sought to determine whether adoption of affirmative action was preceded by a campus protest or the credible threat of a campus protest. Second, we compared selected characteristics of early-adopting schools with those of late-adopting schools. We took the Watts riot in August 1965 as the dividing line between the former and the latter. Although there are other plausible ways to draw the line, we chose Watts because it was the first major “commodity riot” of the period. The summer of 1964 saw scattered riots around the country, but none were comparable to Watts in scale or effect.¹¹ Watts is also indelibly marked as a historical dividing line, and the literature posits it as a major source of institutional change (e.g., Karabel 2005). The year 1965 is similarly regarded by many historians as a watershed in U.S. political culture (e.g., Patterson 2012).¹²

Empirical Findings

Our analysis reveals significant temporal variation in the initial adoption of affirmative action. This variation is not strongly correlated with the timing of urban riots in the North.¹³ Figure 1 depicts the pattern of policy adoption over time; it also includes the dates of three major riots that took place in the late 1960s (for more detailed information on individual schools, see online Appendix B). Visual inspection indicates very little correspondence between policy adoption and these riots. The majority of adoptions (10 in our sample) cluster in the early to mid-1960s, before the outbreak of the Watts riot. The trend toward adoption begins climbing upward in 1963, when the Birmingham confrontation and March on Washington galvanized national attention toward civil rights. In our sample, adoptions reach a peak in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. The trend toward adoption falls as riots begin to engulf U.S. cities, starting with Watts in 1965, culminating with riots in Newark and Detroit in 1967, and more or less drawing to a close in 1968 with the protests and riots that swept the country after King’s assassination.

Figure 1.

National, race-related events and the initial adoption of affirmative action among 17 U.S. colleges and universities, 1961 to 1969

Our analysis of data for individual schools indicates that few schools initially introduced affirmative action in response to fear of racial violence or to actual or threatened disruption on campus. In fact, most campus demonstrations protesting the underrepresentation of racial minorities did not begin until 1968. Often, they were precipitated by Dr. King’s assassination. By contrast, many affirmative action programs in our sample were launched before 1968—and in the absence of student protest of any kind. Indeed, many schools adopted affirmative action in the first half of the 1960s, at the height of the southern civil rights campaign of nonviolent direct action.

Some large public universities were among the pioneers. For instance, in 1964, administrators at the University of Michigan and UCLA started new programs aimed at “disadvantaged” students—primarily African American students—who seemed academically capable but whose educational preparation or credentials might have made them uncompetitive or inadmissible (Fleming 1973:3–4; Hatcher 1963:12; Murphy 1965a, 1965c:28; University of Michigan Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 1964b).

Some private universities and liberal arts colleges also adopted early. Our reading of Karabel suggests that Harvard established the first affirmative action policy in our sample (and possibly in the country) when it began to seek greater diversity in 1961, giving, in its own words, “less weight to the so-called objective factors” (Karabel 2005:401). Swarthmore and Wesleyan also were among the early adopters. Timing of initial adoption thus did not correspond to institutional type. Public universities, private universities, and liberal arts colleges were all found among early and late adopters.

The absolute numbers of students admitted under these early programs were small, but the existence of these programs is significant. Most programs had two important features in common. First, they disregarded, suspended, or modified traditional admissions criteria for racial minority admits. Second, they were adopted before northern campus protests and urban riots.

Campus protests and urban riots in the North were not completely irrelevant to the adoption of affirmative action. Among the subset of 10 schools that established affirmative action before Watts, there is evidence that King’s assassination prompted further policy changes at Harvard, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Cornell, and the University of Michigan. However, the effect of disruption at these schools—specifically a surge of student mobilization after King’s death—was not to launch affirmative action programs but to expand and accelerate programs already in place—for instance, by increasing the weight given to racial considerations in the admissions process. At the same time, our evidence indicates that affirmative action was initially adopted by a different subset of schools after the onset of urban riots or campus protests. Among the Big Three, according to Karabel, Yale and Princeton reconsidered their traditional admissions process only in the wake of Watts. Yale administrators began to modify the weight and significance they ascribed to the College Boards when considering minority applicants, and Princeton officials created a distinct category in their admissions review (Karabel 2005). Among the Little Three (Amherst, Wesleyan, and Williams), Williams established affirmative action in 1969, a year after King’s assassination and after black students on campus mobilized. Of the top public universities, the University of Washington and the University of California-Berkeley adopted their affirmative action programs in response to disruption in the latter half of the 1960s.

In summary, we find two waves of race-conscious affirmative action: a first wave of early adopters that came before Watts and a second wave after Watts. The second wave contained two subsets of schools: a group of early adopters that expanded programs they had launched a few years earlier and a group of late adopters that were taking affirmative action for the first time.

Explaining the Pattern Observed

Our findings run counter to the conventional wisdom and present a new puzzle: What explains the variability we identify in the timing of adoption? More specifically, what distinguishes early from late adopters?

We theorize that the decision of northern colleges and universities to take early race-conscious affirmative action was precipitated by the mobilization of a social movement: the nonviolent, southern-based protest against Jim Crow. But the impact of the civil rights movement was not straightforward or direct. Instead, it was mediated in a variety of ways by the specific political and institutional context (see Amenta, Carruthers, and Zylan 1992; Amenta, Halfmann, and Young 1999) of higher education. Building on recent work in political and cultural sociology on the importance of “policy-elite perceptions” (Skrentny 2006; see also Steensland 2007), we argue that the key mechanisms connecting protest in the South to institutional change in northern higher education were university leaders and deans of admissions, whose moral and ideological convictions were central to the entire process. The nationally visible mobilization of the early-1960s civil rights movement inspired key, liberally minded, northern college administrators at a strikingly heterogeneous set of schools to take prompt steps to break down entrenched patterns of racial exclusion they had come to find unconscionable. Administrators were moved to action by the moral claims of the civil rights movement, and they believed their institutions should participate in this kind of social change.

College administrators wielded significant discretion over many aspects of policy making in the early 1960s, but their discretion was not complete. Nor were all administrators liberally minded. Where administrators did not share such beliefs or where their ability to act on such beliefs was blocked by other institutional stakeholders—for example, trustees or alumni—schools took race-conscious affirmative action belatedly, usually after northern campus protest or urban riots presented a threat and cleared the way. Guided by Karabel’s (1984) theory of status-group struggle, we observe that liberal administrators tended to be absent or constrained at a small set of socially exclusive and institutionally conservative schools that were central to the social reproduction of the Protestant upper class. We now turn to comparative evidence supporting our theory, and we take some preliminary steps to weigh the validity of alternative explanations.

Early Adopters

Perhaps the clearest case in which southern protest contributed to policy change at northern schools is Cornell. We date the establishment of race-conscious affirmative action at Cornell to 1964, when the university launched the Cornell Opportunity Program (COP). Students admitted through COP were evaluated “without reference to any specific requirements for admission” (Mills 1967), but they would eventually attain the “same qualifications as anyone else with a degree” by the time they graduated (Owens 1965). COP enrolled 10 students in 1964 and 37 in 1965. Many students in these initial cohorts had been specifically recruited from predominantly black high schools in New York State, and a number in the second year were considered “risk” admits who had not met the “usual” standards of admission (Greenland, Chen, and Stulberg 2010:19; see also Downs 1999).

The impetus for COP came from a university-wide committee established a year earlier by President James Perkins (Downs 1999). The committee had argued that increasing the number of black students at Cornell would require the school to devise “new selection techniques and adopt different criteria for admission” (Committee on Disadvantaged Students, quoted in Greenland et al. 2010:19).

The moral force of the civil rights movement almost certainly led Perkins and other liberally minded administrators to take race-conscious affirmative action in admissions at Cornell. In 1963 and 1964, Perkins did not confront the kind of protests and demonstrations at Cornell that would stun the country a few years later. Instead, it was southern mobilization against Jim Crow that led him and others to conclude that new proactive measures were necessary to achieve the promise of racial equality—even at schools like Cornell, which had not systematically discriminated against black applicants or students in recent decades. As Perkins later recalled in a speech to the United Negro College Fund, “with the Brown case in 1954 and the rise of a visible concern for equal treatment of minority groups at the beginning of this decade, the atmosphere dramatically changed” (Perkins, quoted in Greenland et al. 2010:20). People across the country felt strongly that they ought to do what they could to break down racial barriers, and some higher education leaders believed that only aggressive new steps could make their institutions more racially inclusive. “A passive policy,” Perkins said, “would only guarantee a continuation of de facto exclusion.” A willingness to go further was needed, and Cornell took up the challenge. “We correctly concluded,” he recalled, “that in order to increase the Black student population we would have to encourage Black students to apply, [and] reexamine SAT scores as predictive of academic performance for the disadvantaged . . .” (Perkins, quoted in Greenland et al. 2010:20; see also Downs 1999).

A similar connection between southern mobilization and northern change is also clearly evident at the University of Michigan, which began race-conscious affirmative action in 1964, when President Harlan H. Hatcher and Provost Roger W. Heyns established the Opportunity Awards Program (Fleming 1973:3–4; Hatcher 1963:12; University of Michigan Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 1964b). The Opportunity Awards Program recruited 70 students in 1964 and 64 students in 1965, and many (but not all) of them were African Americans who graduated from Detroit-area high schools (Greenland et al. 2010:12, 15).

In a letter to a concerned faculty member, Provost Heyns explained his reasons for launching the program. First, he simply wanted to “extend educational opportunities for academically qualified students who are presently disqualified for reasons which are largely financial” (University of Michigan Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 1964a). There was reason to believe that such students were capable of doing the academic work at Michigan, even if they did not meet all of the formal admissions criteria, but they simply could not financially afford to enroll. At the same time, Heyns also felt morally compelled to act. As a public university, Michigan was obligated “to participate appropriately in the national movement to improve the status of the American Negro in our society” (University of Michigan Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 1964a). Years later, Heyns looked back on this time at Michigan and noted that increasing minority admissions was a “great interest of mine and something that I thought we were obliged to work on” (Heyns 1987:55). The devastating Detroit riot was three years away, and student uprisings would not disrupt campus life until a year thereafter, but Heyns and his colleagues moved decisively to establish affirmative action in 1964.

The emergence of affirmative action at top liberal arts schools exhibits a similar pattern. By the early 1960s, top administrators at liberal arts schools were committed to the cause of racial equality and believed their institutions could and should contribute to social change. Swarthmore provides a compelling example. In 1962, Swarthmore’s president Courtney C. Smith hired John C. Hoy to serve as the new dean of admissions (Swarthmore College 1962; Wesleyan University 1998). Before arriving at Swarthmore, Hoy had developed a reputation as someone who cared deeply about racial diversity on college campuses. This was, indeed, an important factor in President Smith’s decision to hire him (Wesleyan University 1998). Smith himself had long been concerned with recruiting black students. In 1960, he wrote that “leaning over backwards” and “mak[ing] concessions in matters such as Board score performance” in favor of black applicants was Swarthmore’s usual practice (Swarthmore College 1960).

Swarthmore launched race-conscious affirmative action in 1964, two years into Hoy’s tenure. Hoy stepped up his recruitment of African American students, and Swarthmore joined other Philadelphia-area colleges and universities to expand recruiting from area schools (Wise 1964). Hoy also sought and received a $275,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, in the spring of 1964, to recruit, support, and fund African American and “other culturally disadvantaged” students (“Rockefeller Foundation Gives” 1964:1). Rockefeller provided similar support to six other schools at the time (Swarthmore College 1968). Geared primarily to African American students, this program resulted in a near tripling of the (albeit very small) number of matriculated African American students, from 5 in 1963 to 14 in the fall of 1964 (Swarthmore College 1964, 1968; “Freshman Class” 1964).

In 1964, Hoy was lured away from Swarthmore to reform admissions and increase black enrollment at his alma mater, Wesleyan (Wesleyan University 1998; Young 1988). Hoy quickly instituted a new effort to recruit and enroll black students, and Wesleyan began taking race-conscious affirmative action in early 1965, when the school admitted the “Vanguard Class.” In 1964, before Hoy’s efforts began, two black students enrolled, constituting 0.7 percent of the entering class. The following year, 14 black students enrolled in the freshman class, constituting 4.5 percent of the class. By 1967, 39 enrolled black first-year students made up 10.9 percent of their class (Rockefeller Foundation Archives 1968).

There is clear evidence that racial considerations were a factor in Wesleyan’s admissions process. In 1967, Hoy reported that many black students had been evaluated using “different criteria for admission”:

Standard selection procedures have been found inadequate. Enough evidence was available to indicate that test scores (S.A.T. and A.C.T.) were not to be used in the same way for this group of candidates. Since our experience was limited we decided to ‘gamble’ on compelling candidates who presented personal evidence of motivation and ability, and to judge students without undue attention to aptitude tests, rank in class, and advanced placement information. (Rockefeller Foundation Archives 1967:2–3)

None of these cases were exceptional. What happened at Cornell certainly was not extraordinary for the Ivy League. Dartmouth was one of the Ivy League’s earliest adopters. We date the origins of race-conscious affirmative action at Dartmouth to 1962, when administrators began contemplating more aggressive ways of recruiting and admitting black students (Puttkammer 1963; Woodruff 1963). These policy shifts added up to numerically modest but programmatically significant changes in black undergraduate presence at Dartmouth. In 1963, just three African American students matriculated. This number jumped to 14 in 1964, and by 1968 it was 29 (Hill 1968; Sloca 1964).

Students recruited to Dartmouth through new channels were often granted a degree of racial consideration in the admissions process. As the director of admissions noted in a March 1962 letter, it was common practice to “take into account the background from which a boy comes.” “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I know we bend over backward to help Negroes if they can show any capacity at all for handling the work at a place like Dartmouth College” (quoted in Dartmouth College 1963:1). As some observers later noted, “most of the selection criteria used for normal applicants are not applicable.” Instead, officials looked for other evidence that applicants stood “a reasonable chance of being able to cope with Dartmouth’s academic rigors” (Hill 1968:8).

Similar initiatives were undertaken at other Ivies at the same time. In early 1963, the University of Pennsylvania joined the Ivy-based Cooperative Program for Educational Opportunity (CPEO) and the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students. William G. Owen, dean of admissions, acknowledged that many students recruited through these programs were judged by a different academic yardstick than other applicants (Lack 1963). After a conference with other Ivy League schools in 1961, Columbia formed a recruitment program called the Talent Searching Program. In 1963, Dean Henry S. Coleman said Columbia held some black students to different standards on their College Board scores, even though the school did not admit anyone who would clearly “be over his head” (Rubenstein 1963:1).

Among large, selective public universities, Michigan was far from alone in taking race-conscious affirmative action in the early 1960s. Under the leadership of Chancellor Franklin Murphy and Dean of Students Bryon H. Atkinson, UCLA established the Educational Opportunities Program (EOP) in 1964. At a meeting with high school administrators, Atkinson noted that UCLA had long maintained an “open door” policy that admitted all students who met university requirements, but such a policy had not led to the enrollment of significant numbers of “disadvantaged” or minority students (Murphy 1964). “The purpose of the [EOP] program,” noted Ann Allen, its first administrator, “was to expand educational opportunities for environmentally and economically disadvantaged young people, many from minority groups” (Murphy 1965a:1). The first group of 33 EOP students was identified, admitted, and enrolled at UCLA in the spring semester of 1965. Most students in the inaugural class qualified for enrollment, but UCLA granted three EOP students a limited amount of preferential treatment, admitting them via a special University of California rule that exempted 2 percent of admits from meeting regular university standards (Murphy 1965c:28). No northern urban or campus disruptions were in sight, but UCLA administrators were already taking affirmative action.

The situation was somewhat more ambiguous at Berkeley and Washington, but both cases are consistent with the main thrust of our larger argument. We date Berkeley’s adoption of affirmative action to 1966, after Watts (Somerville 1967). Yet before Watts, Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, had already asked all University of California campuses to consider new ways of increasing minority enrollment (Murphy 1965b). We code Washington as establishing race-conscious affirmative action in 1968, yet its president, Charles Odegaard, took numerous steps to integrate the university starting in 1959 (University of Washington President Records 1959, 1965). At Berkeley and Washington, administrators had substantially moved toward race-conscious affirmative action well before formally adopting policies in the late 1960s.

Late Adopters

Some institutions that were unambiguously late in adopting affirmative action were also led by liberal administrators who shared similar convictions with their colleagues at early adopters about higher education’s role in U.S. racial equality and the importance of campus diversity. Unlike their colleagues, however, their ability to take race-conscious affirmative action was limited by the real or imagined opposition of other institutional stakeholders.

Perhaps the clearest example is Yale. President Kingman Brewster and Dean of Admissions Inslee “Inky” Clark Jr. both had a strong interest in making Old Blue more inclusive (Kabaservice 2004; Karabel 2005; Oren 2000; Soares 2007). Yet Brewster and Clark could not move quickly to translate their ideals into policy or practice. One hurdle was the conservatism of the governing board, known as the Yale Corporation (Soares 2007). At one meeting, Clark was admonished by a board member for his ideas about admissions: “Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here” (Soares 2007:77; see also Kabaservice 2004). Yale was an “exceptionally insular institution” (Karabel 2005:321), and conservative attitudes prevailed among many prominent alumni. After reading a newspaper article reporting an increase in Jewish enrollment, a Manhattan banker complained to Brewster: “It would be a great mistake for Yale to admit 20% to 25% Jews. . . . Jews as a class are clannish, self-centered, rather selfish and do not rank high in public service” (Soares 2007:78). Yale had been a leader on “soft” affirmative action, heading the national CPEO recruitment program under the direction of the school’s Charles McCarthy Jr. (“Yale to Share” 1964; Oren 2000), but it was infertile ground for major admissions reform.

At Princeton, as well, the early emergence of race-conscious affirmative action was likely inhibited by key stakeholders. Its historic conservatism as an institution is clear. By 1962, when E. Alden Dunham was handed the reins of the admissions office, Princeton was entirely male and overwhelmingly white, and 9 out of every 10 students belonged to a socially exclusive eating club (Karabel 2005). Dunham himself seemed fairly liberal in his views about race and higher education, writing that “it behooves all educational institutions to do what they can toward upgrading the status of the Negro in our free society” (Karabel 2005:315).

But a change in policy did not occur at Princeton until 1965, when the admission committee began giving black applicants a “special category (and round in the admissions process)” (Karabel 2005:394). The main factor restraining Dunham before 1965 seems to have been the opinion of alumni, particularly those with southern backgrounds. One alumnus predicted that the “financial” and “moral” support from alumni in the region would be withdrawn if more “active recruitment continues” (Karabel 2005:315). Indeed Princeton, like Yale, experienced a massive alumni revolt in the late 1960s over the changing social character of its admits. Regardless of his own beliefs, Dunham could only go slowly until Watts made it possible for Princeton to break with tradition.

At other late-adopting institutions, college administrators simply did not exhibit as much liberalism as their counterparts at early-adopting schools. At Williams College, which shifted policy only in 1969, administrators faced pressure and a peaceful occupation of Hopkins Hall by the Williams Afro-American Society. Williams’s president at the time, John E. Sawyer, later explained that the college moved with deliberate caution and self-consciously chose a different path than one of its peer institutions: “We went slower and on a visibly different course from Wesleyan’s policy, which undertook a bolder and more rapid inclusion of much larger numbers, many of whom were underqualified, and that contributed to some very fierce divisions there” (Williams College 1991a). Director of Admissions Frederick C. Copeland echoed Sawyer, noting, “We had no big push towards minorities. . . . I mean, they didn’t know Williams and we didn’t know them” (Williams College 1991b). The preferences—real or perceived—of Williams’s fraternities may have been one reason why Sawyer and Copeland were reluctant to increase black enrollment. Indeed, it was not clear whether the “fraternities [were] going to play ball with the black students. . . . Were the black students going to feel completely left out? That was another major, major issue” (Williams College 1991b).

Amherst College moved equally slowly on affirmative action. Eugene S. Wilson was Amherst’s dean of admissions throughout the 1960s, and he did not initiate early race-conscious affirmative action, even though he faced no opposition from the president, alumni, or board (Amherst College 1979). Wilson’s biography clearly indicates that he had long been committed to nondiscrimination (Amherst College 1979; Nathan 1967), but he did not seem particularly interested in changing admission policy to advance racial equality. Instead, his energy went toward maintaining Amherst’s reputation for academic rigor, which he sometimes framed as at odds with increasing racial diversity on campus. He noted years later,

Our attempts to get black students were continuous, but with the curriculum we had, most difficult, because very few black students had had the training to handle the calculus-physics and the foreign language. . . . We increased the number, but not greatly, mainly because the curriculum just made it so difficult to get a black student to try it. (Amherst College 1979:19)

An Amherst Student newspaper piece in October 1966 noted that Amherst had been “a pioneer in Negro admissions” but had fallen behind its peer institutions (Aronson 1966). Wilson recognized the drop-off but chalked up the numbers to the difficulty of Amherst’s curriculum: “For years … the Amherst curriculum didn’t allow Negroes to succeed” (Nathan 1967:1; see also “Blacks Respond” 1970; Aronson 1966).

The tide began to turn only in October 1967, when Wilson and a collection of faculty established the Group on Disadvantaged Students (Nathan 1967). The conversation launched there eventually led Amherst officials to expand the admissions pool (Amherst College 1979) and think in new ways about admissions criteria (Amherst College 1967). The next year, Amherst saw a relatively large increase in the number of African American applicants and admits, mainly due to affirmative action of the “soft” variety (Corcoran 1968).¹⁴ The path to affirmative action at Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Amherst shows that liberally minded administrators were constrained or absent among late-adopting schools.

Institutional Conservatism and Status Group Reproduction

Why were liberal administrators constrained or absent at late-adopting schools? We argue that these schools were institutionally conservative— that is, less willing to alter traditional policies or practices—because of the key role they played in the social reproduction of the Protestant elite. Drawing on Karabel’s (1984:3–5) theory of “status-group struggle,” we argue that institutional development is driven by dominant status groups’ struggle to achieve social closure, often by winning the authority to define cultural ideals, such as the conception of “merit” embedded in admissions policies. Stakeholders at all four schools resisted altering admissions criteria because such changes would threaten the traditional and hitherto successful manner in which the Protestant elite was able to limit access to valuable educational opportunities to all but its own.

We also follow Karabel in arguing that institutional conservatism stemmed, to a degree, from organizational self-interest. As Karabel (1984:4–5) notes, elite colleges and universities are “organizations with their own distinct interests,” and “under ‘normal circumstances,’” they “are likely to be most responsive to the claims of those external groups that control needed resources.” In the case of the most socially exclusive schools, the alumni, whose contributions were crucial to schools’ financial strength, were one of the most important external groups.

Some information about the particular institutions that had the tightest links to the Protestant upper class can be gleaned from the 1963 New York Social Register, an exclusive directory and reference guide of and for the Protestant elite that dates to the late nineteenth century (Sargent 1997). Table 1 displays the top five alma maters by type of institution. In order of popularity, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton were clearly the most favored private universities. Of the liberal arts colleges, Williams, Amherst, and Trinity were the most preferred. Men with degrees from public universities listed the University of Virginia with the greatest frequency. Berkeley was a distant second. This suggests that Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Amherst, and Trinity were the northern schools most central to the social reproduction of the Protestant elite during the 1960s.

Table 1.

Top Five Alma Maters, by Institutional Type, of Men Listed in the 1963 New York Social Register.

Private University	Number	Liberal Arts College	Number	Public University	Number
Yale	2,234	Williams	325	Virginia	160
Harvard	1,746	Amherst	94	California (Berkeley)	36
Princeton	1,422	Trinity	82	North Carolina	33
Columbia	311	Colgate	34	Michigan	24
Cornell	144	Hamilton	32	Wisconsin	22

Source: Adapted from Hawes (1963).

Note: Public universities exclude the Naval Academy and West Point, which would have ranked between Berkeley and North Carolina.

To be sure, many institutional characteristics distinguished late from early adopters, not just their placement in the status hierarchy of U.S. higher education. The trustees’ social composition, the faculty’s ideological makeup, the alumni’s affluence, and the school’s informal religious affiliation were among the most important factors. But these characteristics were highly correlated with one another and with the status order as well. The most socially exclusive schools were most likely to be overseen by trustees with connections to the oldest and most powerful families in the northeastern United States, most likely to be staffed with the most traditionally minded faculty, most likely to be supported financially by alumni who had achieved great success in U.S. business and industry, and most likely to maintain some degree of identification with the wealthiest mainline Protestant denominations (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist). The most socially exclusive schools were the most institutionally conservative, and it was not coincidental that they were also the slowest to take affirmative action. Just as key stakeholders in these schools were fearful that ending restrictions against Jews would reduce opportunities available to sons of the Protestant elite, they were also reluctant to introduce racial considerations into the admissions process.

Compared to late-adopting institutions, early-adopting institutions were far more heterogeneous, encompassing public and private institutions of varying sizes and different systems of governance from all over the country. Some were preferred destinations of the Protestant elite, whereas others were large state universities. However, what almost all early adopters had in common was the presence of liberal administrators who found themselves less encumbered by the objections of other stakeholders.

Institutional Isomorphism?

Of course, other theoretical frameworks may be invoked to make sense of the patterns in our data. Perhaps the most robust alternative is institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), a theory of institutional change that has been usefully applied in the context of race-conscious affirmative action in higher education (Lipson 2011). Indeed, we began our data collection on the lookout for evidence of institutional isomorphism. In particular, we looked for evidence of coercive isomorphism, which stems from legal or political “pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:150); mimetic isomorphism, whereby organizations respond to various kinds of ambiguity and uncertainty in their environments by emulating the behavior of other organizations that are seen as “more legitimate or successful” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:152); and normative isomorphism, which occurs through the development and spread of organizational norms by professionals circulating through the field (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:152–53).

But our evidence is only partially consistent with what we would expect to observe if substantial institutional isomorphism had been operative. We found little evidence of coercive isomorphism, which one might expect due to the major changes in federal civil rights and higher education policies at the time, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 (Loss 2011; Mettler forthcoming; Skrentny 1996). The actors responsible for the initial advent of race-conscious affirmative action—the elite schools in the North—simply did not appear to be directly motivated by federal pressure.¹⁵ Nor did we uncover substantial evidence for mimetic isomorphism. One might expect that early adopters tried to negotiate the uncertainty around their schools’ racial exclusivity by following the lead of the most prestigious institutions or taking cues from their peer institutions. Although we found evidence of institutional information sharing, interinstitutional coordination with respect to student recruitment (e.g., the CPEO program), and the fact that elite schools paid careful attention to what happened at their peer institutions, we found no evidence that college administrators were motivated to take affirmative action to “keep up with the Joneses” or “follow the leader.”

We did find qualified evidence of normative isomorphism. Here we would expect institutional changes in admissions policy to be intimately linked with a professionalization project involving the creation and transmission of specialized knowledge and taken-for-granted norms across professional networks (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Our evidence indicates that college administrators did draw on a similar if burgeoning understanding of the problems that could arise from using standardized tests to assess the academic ability of black applicants. Moreover, there was indeed some “filtering of personnel” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983:152) across schools, as in the case of John Hoy from Swarthmore and Wesleyan. But these processes were in their infancy in the early and mid-1960s. In our view, taken-for-granted assumptions and professional norms were less important in motivating college administrators at the time than were their explicit moral and ideological commitments.

Conclusion

What accounts for the initial advent of race-conscious affirmative action in undergraduate admissions? Our analysis of newly collected data for a sample of 17 schools allows us to establish a novel timeline of adoption for some of the most selective institutions in the United States. Our analysis of these data shows that campus protests and urban riots in the late 1960s were not the main catalysts of institutional change, as the dominant theory suggests. Instead, a first wave of race-conscious affirmative action in the early 1960s arose largely at the initiative of liberally minded administrators, who were inspired to action by the moral claims and collective mobilization of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The role of urban riots and campus protests is clearer in the second wave of affirmative action, which took root after Watts. Among the small subset of schools that did not participate at all in the first wave, northern urban riots and campus protests led to the initial adoption of affirmative action. These lagging institutions historically had been central to the reproduction of the Protestant upper class. It took the threat of urban riots and campus protests in the North for such socially exclusive institutions to take affirmative action. Among the subset of schools that had already launched affirmative action plans, King’s assassination led northern college administrators to expand existing programs, primarily in response to nonviolent, direct action campaigns by black college students and their allies.

Blending intuitions from the “political mediation model” (Amenta et al. 1992; Amenta et al. 1999) with cultural perspectives in political sociology (Skrentny 1996; Steensland 2006, 2007; Stryker and Pedriana 1997), we argue that our findings are best explained by a theoretical model of institutional change in higher education that stresses the key role of social movements mediated through college administrators’ beliefs. But affirmative action was not a “steam valve” implemented by institutions of higher education to shore up their legitimacy—and the legitimacy of the larger social order—in the face of student protests and urban riots. Instead, we conclude that race-conscious affirmative action was a northern “ripple effect” of southern-based civil rights protests against racial inequality and Jim Crow segregation. Historical and political sociologists have extensively documented effects of the southern civil rights movement in the South (Andrews 2004; McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Polletta 2002), but we argue that this movement also had many effects in the North. One of the most important of these was the initial advent of affirmative action.

Whether social movements are broadly capable of shaping institutional change by affecting “policy-elite perceptions” (Skrentny 2006) is a question that requires further empirical research in other policy domains at other moments in time. College administrators in the early 1960s may have enjoyed a degree of discretion over policy that would soon slip from their grasp, suggesting definite limits to social movements’ ability to influence policy through such a mechanism. Social movements may also be unusually influential in the context of higher education, where policy makers have a narrower and less daunting range of political and market forces to address.

Our analysis also leaves other questions unresolved that are worthy of further exploration. What was the federal government’s role in the years around the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 (Duffy and Goldberg 1988; Loss 2011; Mettler forthcoming)? To what extent do coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism help us make sense of institutional developments around race-conscious affirmative action beyond initial adoption? When did southern institutions begin to take affirmative action, and for what reasons? How was the advent of affirmative action connected to the early struggle for desegregation? Sociologists may have hitherto underplayed the importance of the southern civil rights movement in the rise of affirmative action, but the movement and its many legacies continue to pose valuable puzzles worthy of further research.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For excellent research assistance, we thank Claire Blumenson, Meeso Caponi, Nathaniel R. Gibson, Lindsay Helfman, Kimberly Renee Jones, Linda Lomelino, Maria Millard, Karen Muth, and Afrah Richmond. We also thank Nina Pessin-Whedbee and Fiona Greenland for archival research and empirical analyses that proved invaluable. We are grateful as well to the archivists who assisted us as we worked our way through their manuscript collections. For helpful feedback and encouragement, we thank Barbara Anderson, Amy Binder, Becky Blank, Jack Citrin, Susan Collins, John Ellwood, Daniel Galvin, Jerome Karabel, Howard Kimeldorf, David Kirp, Jim House, Richard I. Hughes, Christopher Parker, Caroline Hodges Persell, Morton O. Schapiro, Mitchell Stevens, Robert Warren, Sharon Weinberg, Margaret Weir, Harold Wechsler, Jonathan Zimmerman, and members of New York University’s Education Workshop. Thanks go also to our anonymous reviewers as well as engaging audiences at the American Bar Foundation, Washington, Berkeley, Michigan, Northwestern, and the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Social Science History Association, and the American Educational Research Association. The names of the authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. Both authors contributed equally to the paper.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has received financial support from the Spencer Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Scholars Program in Health Policy Research, the University of California, New York University, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern University.

Notes

Author Biographies

Lisa M. Stulberg is an associate professor in and director of the Sociology of Education program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She is the author of Race, Schools, and Hope: African Americans and School Choice after Brown (Teachers College Press, 2008) and the coeditor (with Sharon Lawner Weinberg) of Diversity in American Higher Education: Toward a More Comprehensive Approach (Routledge, 2011). With Anthony S. Chen, she is completing a book manuscript (Princeton, under contract) on the origins and political development of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. She also is working on two new book manuscripts on lesbian gay bisexual transgender (LGBT) social change.

Anthony S. Chen is an associate professor of sociology and political science at Northwestern, where he is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He is the author of The Fifth Freedom (Princeton, 2009). In collaboration with Lisa M. Stulberg, he is completing a book manuscript (Princeton, under contract) that traces the advent and development of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. He is beginning a new research project that considers whether and how the legal and political mobilization of organized business shapes the policy-making process in the United States in ways that depend on and reinforce patterns of political and economic inequality.

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