Battles over affirmative action have shaped the career of the University of Virginia’s incoming president, who has fought for more minorities on campus.
As provost at the Universities of Texas and Michigan, Teresa Sullivan managed the effect of two major legal decisions stopping student admissions weighted by race and gender. She intensified the universities’ recruitment of more diverse student bodies even as the law required admissions to be colorblind.
At Michigan, Sullivan co-chaired a diversity task force after the state’s 2006 decision banning affirmative action. She told the Detroit Free Press that the school would leverage existing programs to reach students in underrepresented schools and neighborhoods.
Scholarships that had been awarded based on gender and race would be refocused to attract low-income students and first-generation students, she told the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press in 2007.
In Texas, Sullivan blamed a 1996 anti-affirmative-action decision for a decline in minority applicants to graduate school, according to a 2001 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“It’s easy [for students] to think, ‘If they don’t have affirmative action, they don’t want me,’ ” Sullivan said.
Virginia has not seen a legal battle over affirmative action, but a study by the Center for Equal Opportunity found that “race and ethnicity are weighed heavily when deciding who does and who doesn’t get in,” said Roger Clegg, president of the Washington think tank.
“I’m not sure that [Sullivan] is going to make things worse,” said Clegg, who opposes the practice. “But I have no reason to think she’ll make things better, either.”
Sullivan’s husband, Doug Laycock, a renowned legal scholar, assisted the University of Texas during its legal battles to preserve affirmative action in the 1990s. He will join his wife at U.Va. as a law professor. While rare outside of academe, it is not uncommon for universities to offer positions to professor spouses of recruits.
Sullivan will leave a $366,000 salary at Michigan for $680,000, including benefits. Outgoing U.Va. President John Casteen III earns about $797,000 after nearly 20 years. Laycock will leave his $283,000 salary at Michigan’s law school, but the details of his U.Va. position have not been released.
