By Eve Silberman

Fresh out of graduate school, 24-year-old Carl Cohen started teaching philosophy at U-M in the fall of 1955, a time when the country was timidly edging its way out of the McCarthy era. Before long, the "Red Squad" of the Michigan State Police was keeping a file on the young professor.

"I taught a course in those days on Marxism," Cohen recalls, "and I would talk about Marx in a very enthusiastic way. His critique of capitalism is powerful, and often very wise." No one at U-M ever tried to shut him up, but the Red Squad continued to keep files on suspected "subversives" for many years.

The Squad dissolved itself in the mid 1970s, later making its files public. Cohen "had the satisfaction of picking up this file that had been maintained by the Michigan State Police—this Red Squad! Outrageous thing for them ever to have done! Outrageous!"

When Carl Cohen has an attack of moral indignation, his resonant voice booms even more. Possessing keen blue eyes and sharply hewn features, he moves and talks like a much younger man.

Cohen is equal parts philosophy professor (he focuses on political and moral philosophy and logic) and civil libertarian. Throughout his four decades at U-M, he has been an outspoken social commentator. During the Vietnam War, as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) activist, he often championed individual acts of civil disobedience, such as sit-ins or resisting the draft. In 1971, he published a well-received book titled Civil Disobedience.

Several years later, Cohen—with equal vigor—supported the ACLU’s position affirming the right of American Nazis to march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois. "I lost some friends," recalls Cohen, who is Jewish, himself, and a past president of his temple. "But you’re not defending the Nazi view—you’re defending the right of the Nazis to speak."

He’s also roused the ire of animal rights activists by speaking out at both local and national forums on medical researchers’ rights to experiment with animals.

Currently, he’s protesting the influence of affirmative action on U-M admissions policy, which includes race as one of a number of factors considered. And this crusade has been his most controversial yet. In 1996, Cohen obtained internal U-M documentation showing how Undergraduate Admissions and the Law and Medical schools handle admissions of under-represented minority students from federally designated groups. In a number of instances, the grades of minority-group students and/or their test scores were lower than those of white students and students from non-designated, minority groups.

Cohen subsequently assailed the University in U-M publications and in the national conservative magazine Commentary. One result is that several Michigan legislators are attacking U-M admissions policies and mounting a lawsuit. The Washington, DC-based Center for Individual Rights, a law firm, filed a class-action suit againt U-M in October (see related story).

"It’s a bit odd," Cohen admits, about his strange political bedfellows. A former Democratic activist and a long-time supporter of the NAACP, Cohen says that in the 1950s "some of the strongest advocates for civil rights were Communists, but that didn’t mean that others who shared their view on civil rights were Communists."

Cohen brandishes a copy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "You see this?" he demands, and reads, ‘No person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance!’ Now the University of Michigan is certainly receiving a great deal of federal assistance."

Cohen argues that the original ideal of affirmative action—to end discriminatory policies—has become distorted. "What they [U-M officials and other institutions with similar programs throughout the country] are doing is not simply expanding the pool [of minority applicants]." This is among the arguments he makes in his latest book, Naked Racial Preference.

Cohen says that several U-M faculty members agree with him but are afraid to speak up. A few, however, have publicly rebutted his arguments. "The issue Professor Cohen has forgotten is that grade point and test score statistics are seriously flawed measures, useful only as initial guides," wrote Nicholas Steneck, professor of history and of professional ethics, in the University Record.

John Griffith, the Andrew Pattullo Professor of Health Management and Policy, disputed Cohen’s assertion that support for affirmative action is immoral: "No, professor, I am not immoral, and I do not appreciate your calling me that. I started my adult life at a major East Coast medical center, telling Black patients there was no room for them, when I knew there was, on the white wards. That was immoral, and I’m not going back."

Theodore J. St. Antoine, the Degan Professor at the U-M Law School, rebutted Cohen as his "friendly foe" in a March 1996 debate. St. Antoine said he agreed with Cohen that affirmative action is a "powerful, maybe even dangerous, medicine; that it has some troublesome side effects; that it is divisive; and that it can be demeaning for its intended beneficiaries. In the best of all worlds, we would make all decisions totally on an individual basis; we would not take race or gender into account in admitting people to higher education, either as students or as faculty members."

Citing widespread and long-standing practices of discrimination, St. Antoine argued that "we need race as a criterion. I make no apology for it. And there is no need for any Black person to feel ashamed about the fact. All the white race is doing at this point is struggling over a couple of generations to make up for the two or three hundred years of degradation to which they have subjected Blacks. One cannot expect all those barriers to be surmounted in a single generation."

To critics like Steneck, Griffith and St. Antoine, Cohen retorts that the University, even if it chooses to de-emphasize grades and test scores, still must hold to some sort of across-the-board standards. Further, he maintains that his position "is based in ethics and the law."

Cohen says that he avoids pressing his opinions on his students, who, he acknowledges somewhat sheepishly, are shy about arguing with him. He teaches in the Residential College (RC), which he helped found 30 years ago this fall. The only founder still at the RC, Cohen teaches a course Logic and Language that is something of a legend in the RC. "So many alums remember him so fondly," says director Tom Weisskopf, professor of economics.

The son of "Roosevelt Democrats," Cohen spent his early childhood in Brooklyn (which still tinges his accent), then moved to the Miami suburb of Coconut Grove where his parents ran a shoe store. He attended the University of Miami and earned his doctorate at UCLA.

Cohen scoffs when anyone mentions retirement to him. He juggles teaching, activism and writing (he’s published six books, including the text Introduction to Logic) with late-in-life parenthood. He married Jan Schlain in 1987 after his first wife, Muriel, died. They are the parents of Jaclyn, 7, and Noah, 4.

A superb debater, Cohen often sounds like he’s preparing for a day in court. Clearly, he intends to continue his campaign against using race as a consideration for admissions to U-M. "My life’s commitment has been to equality and fairness," he exclaims. "So I’m going to fight for it as long as there is breath in me."

Eve Silberman is a staff writer for the Ann Arbor Observer.