Through the 1970s, enrollment remained in the high 300s. Dr. R. Wiley Brownlee, a civil-rights activist and former principal of Willow Run High School in Michigan, became CHS dean in the school's second year. In his time at Willow Run High, Brownlee had taken a conciliatory approach to mounting racial tensions at the school, an approach that eventually cost him his job. His insistence on fair treatment for minority students had also propelled him into national headlines when, in 1971, he was assaulted at gunpoint, then tarred and feathered, by members of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan following a Willow Run school-board meeting. In 1974, shortly after taking the reins at Ann Arbor's Community High, Brownlee characterized the student body as sixty-percent "high achievers who are politically disenchanted" and forty-percent students who were "academically disenchanted."