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This article applies neoinstitutional organization theory to uncover the central role of university officials in institutionalizing aggressive, race-based affirmative admissions procedures at three selective public universities from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. During this second stage of affirmative action, admissions and diversity officials at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison began to increasingly emphasize the diversity rationale and the method of individualized review. At a time of increasing judicial and executive scrutiny and skepticism of affirmative action, university officials defended and transformed race-conscious admissions in innovative ways when they could have instead chosen to contribute to its demise. Adapted from the source document.

This article applies neoinstitutional organization theory to uncover the central role of university officials in institutionalizing aggressive, race-based affirmative admissions procedures at three selective public universities from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. During this second stage of affirmative action, admissions and diversity officials at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin—Madison began to increasingly emphasize the diversity rationale and the method of individualized review. At a time of increasing judicial and executive scrutiny and skepticism of affirmative action, university officials defended and transformed race-conscious admissions in innovative ways when they could have instead chosen to contribute to its demise.

The institutionalization of race-conscious inclusion policies in employment, education, and contracting has largely endured in post-civil rights America despite predictions of their demise. However, scholarship has continued to mislabel many of the specific policies in these organizations and governments as "affirmative action" policies, even though many such policies lack the civil rights roots necessary to warrant this label. In this article, I explain how many organizations have recast, supplemented, or replaced their rights-based affirmative action policies with utilitarian diversity policies. While the conventional, civil rights framework for analyzing affirmative action obscures the rise of such organizational diversity policies, an alternative body of scholarship that employs a diversity framework has shed light on the causes, content, and consequences of this policy and political realignment. The Supreme Court's 2003Grutter v. Bollingerdecision and the political activism surrounding Michigan's Proposal 2 in 2006 both exemplify the trademark signs of this shift from rights-based affirmative action to organizational diversity policies. The article concludes by assessing the promise and dangers of this trend of rooting racial inclusion policies in a utilitarian diversity logic rather than a civil rights logic.

It has been said that affirmative action, the preference model, has been replaced by the color-blind model at both UT-Austin & UC-Berkeley. This author argues that affirmative action is practiced at these schools but in an alternate form. He calls affirmative action the diversity model rather than the category-blind or the preference models. This involves policy initiatives that seek to aid the disadvantaged & to promote diversity without providing preferences for categories that are viewed as suspect in American law & political culture. He focuses on individual assessment where admissions officers evaluate the applicant holistically. He then examines how the role of affirmative action in undergraduate admissions policies has changed at UC-Berkeley & UT-Austin over the past twenty years. Using these schools, he was able to measure the influence of formal law, organizational culture, political culture, legal mobilization, university structure, religion, university resources, & demographics on admissions reform. 3 Tables, 3 Figures, 85 References. E. Larsen