For many students, racial issues play out as they did for previous generations, as a constant attempt to bridge an often-subtle divide. Nikia Smith, a black freshman, said tensions could be woven into the fabric of daily life — for example, if a white student did not hold a door open for a black student who was about to walk through it. Maybe the student was just in a rush, Ms. Smith, 19, said. But “in my mind, I could be thinking, ‘Oh, it’s because I’m black.’ ”

David J. Leonard, a professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University, said young people often viewed racism as something associated with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. “People who don’t see themselves like this think: ‘We can poke fun. We can engage in stereotypes,’ ” Dr. Leonard said. “Racism gets reduced to intent, as if intent is all that matters.”

While black undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan has ebbed and flowed over the years, peaking in the 1990s, James J. Duderstadt, a professor of science and engineering who was president of the university from 1988 to 1996, said it was difficult to determine whether racism on campus had, in fact, increased.

He said he believed that the recent spate of activism on diversity was being propelled by two issues: a lack of state funding for public institutions that has led colleges to admit more out-of-state students, who tend to be more affluent and less diverse, and challenges to affirmative action laws in states like Michigan and California.

Some experts say that, rather than being uniformly postracial, young people often see different worlds when they contemplate race — just as their parents did. Blanca E. Vega, a doctoral candidate at Teachers College at Columbia University, who is writing her dissertation on racial conflicts in higher education, said white people tended to see much more progress on race.

“There’s a mismatch in the perceptions of race and racism,” Ms. Vega said, “depending on who you speak with and depending on their racial background.”