Abstract
During the Black Student Movement of the late 1960s and ‘70s, campus activists organized to demand, among other requests, a racial quota system. In response, university administrators often developed race-neutral scholarship programs and recruitment strategies to enroll more students of color without setting quotas. The quota controversy at the University of Texas at Austin reveals important elements of race-conscious and colorblind admissions programs. After the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation demanded the first quota system in 1969, Black students engaged in a decade-long battle with administrators over strategies to increase Black student enrollment. To alleviate the pressure from Black student organizations, University of Texas administrators established scholarships, affirmative action policies, and information-sharing programs to recruit and retain students of color. The struggle between Black students and white administrators is representative of Black student activists’ ideological shift from colorblind policies to race-conscious remedies during the era of civil rights and Black Power. While administrators used colorblind, or race-neutral, policies to diversify the campus community, Black students fought for a race-conscious quota system that would result in a minimum number of accepted students of color each year. Administrators, weary of antiwhite “reverse discrimination,” used race-neutral admissions policies and programs to subvert race-conscious demands for a quota system. In fact, evidence shows that Black student activists’ persistence in setting quotas worked to the benefit of white students, particularly those that did not meet the university's general admissions standards. Overall, the issue of Black student recruitment at the University of Texas uncovers the process by which administrators adopted colorblind logic in reaction to Black student demands, maintained the racial status quo at a predominately white institution, and widened racial inequality.
