Columbia Missourian | Dec 30, 2015

Written with Alexa Ahern

COLUMBIA — A few months ago, Michael Middleton was preparing to retire as deputy chancellor at MU — to visit his seven grandchildren and spend more time traveling with his wife.

Although he would remain part time, his work at the university he has called home for more than 30 years was drawing to a close.

Until it wasn’t.

As his responsibilities within the university administration were slowing, tensions on campus were building.

During the past semester, the campus erupted in protests, culminating with the Nov. 9 resignations of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe and MU Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.

Three days later, Middleton was named interim president of the four-campus system. With a 30-year tenure as a law professor and administrator whose role included improving equity and diversity at MU, it seemed he was the right person for the job.

Middleton assumes the interim position amid a slew of institutional, academic and social messes. In addition to mending trust with faculty, students and staff, he faces enormous expectations to improve race relations on campus.

But MU and the UM System won’t necessarily see sweeping change in the next six months.

To improve race relations, Middleton said he plans to install task forces on the UM System campuses to investigate the racial climates and search for best practices, not an entirely different approach from Wolfe or Loftin.

Wolfe assembled a systemwide task force in 2014 after MU was criticized for its handling of sexual assault cases, and Loftin created the Graduate Student Insurance Task Force after graduate insurance subsidies were cut last summer.

“I’m a really optimistic guy,” Middleton said, “but if you expect immediate change in the culture on our campuses, that’s probably asking too much.”

Expectations 

When Middleton stepped into the role of interim president, he inherited a university the size of a small city that had just gutted some of the most powerful positions in its leadership.

The students who had spent the fall protesting were not interested in a placeholder president, said Kristofferson Culmer, an MU graduate student and the UM System Intercampus Student Council chairman. They didn’t want a lame duck, someone who would uphold the status quo while the curators were on the search for someone to take over permanently.

“We wanted someone who could begin to address the issues of the campus head on,” Culmer said.

Culmer is also a chair of the Forum for Graduate Rights, one of 14 student groups that formed a coalition called the Collaborative, meant to work with students, faculty and administrators at MU and within the UM System to implement policy changes.

The Collaborative will release a report with the proposed policy changes in the spring, but according to Culmer, priorities include a culture of trust and transparency, shared governance, diversity training and professional development, mentorship and increased funding opportunities for students of color.

Middleton, Culmer said, should lead the charge in these policy changes, starting by confronting challenges at the university with open dialogue.

But Middleton is not only obligated to listen to students. Other stakeholders have expectations, as well.

Faculty and administration members are disgruntled after shake-ups in university leadership. Donors and alumni may be inclined to reconsider their financial gifts after a semester of turmoil.

State legislators are eyeing higher education with bills that might address academic freedom and faculty oversight. And there is always the issue of higher education funding.

State appropriations account for 10 percent of MU’s operating budget, and that figure has been trending downward for the past 15 years. Given recent events at the university, the legislature might be unwilling to pass Gov. Jay Nixon’s initiative to increase higher education funding by 6 percent.

There’s no question that the position of university president is not easy. The question is how Middleton will handle it.

Plans

The campus racial climate is a priority.

The UM System administration has already started to search for an assistant diversity officer and examine how sufficient the established rules for covering race issues are, Middleton said. A systemwide task force established by the UM System Board of Curators will look at programs and practices for race issues on all campuses, as well as identify best practices at other universities.

“We are really trying to build a world-class approach to addressing inclusion, diversity and equity in higher education,” Middleton said.

He also plans to look at the number of faculty and staff of color. One of eight demands by Concerned Student 1950 was to grow the number to 10 percent by academic year 2017-18.

Although he never committed to this time frame, Middleton said he will look at recruitment programs and financial packages to add faculty of color, as well as maximize the diversity of the pools of candidates.

He also hopes to restore trust with campus constituencies, including faculty. Apart from saying he would “get out and try to reassure people that this university has been strong and growing for 175 years,” he shared no specific strategies.

One thing Middleton said the campus can expect to see immediately is a swifter discipline process for those found guilty of discrimination and racism.

“I think we have been pretty effective in finding the offenders and taking them before student conduct committees, so that with civil rights enforcement activity, I think we’ve already gotten it beefed up and in place,” he said.

Middleton said he expects to see recommendations by some task forces by summer. With those recommendations, he hopes to build a catalog of campus programs for students of color and find resources to fund them. Existing programs are underfunded and focus on groups of people too small to address the larger issues of marginalization and exclusion, he said.

“The problem is taking those effective programs and scaling them up to make them available to the huge number of people we have in this system,” he said, though he did not name the programs about which he spoke.

“I suppose it’s only fair that you measure my success by those kinds of measures,” he said.

The next six months will consist of research and planning, Middleton said. The solution lies in a widespread shift in the collective culture of campus, not in quick fixes.

“Culture change is complex,” he said, “and whenever you talk about culture change, you imply that somehow you are going to make people curb their constitutional rights to think the way they want to think and say what they want to say.”

He said that moving forward with culture change is a balancing act of freedom of expression and sensitivity to the experiences of others. Education and training in diversity issues will be paramount in Middleton’s approach to race relations.

“I think the best way to strike that balance is to educate people on the effects of what they do,” he said. “I think most people are good-hearted people who don’t want to offend, intimidate or harass a student. I think it’s mostly inadvertent behavior, and I think learning and conversation can get us to the point where we are going to see some change in behavior.”

Achievements

In November, MU was scrutinized by the national media, which flooded into Columbia during the campus protests and resignations. When he was appointed interim president of the UM System on Nov. 12, Middleton was thrust into the spotlight.

“The value that we bring to the state of Missouri is remarkable, and none of that has stopped. We are still educating 77,000 students in the state,” he said in an interview shortly after he was appointed. It was his third of five interviews scheduled that day, and he answered questions with the careful consideration of a seasoned lawyer.

It’s clear MU means a lot to Middleton. He was a student in the 1960s — only a decade after the first black student was admitted to MU — and a founding member of the Legion of Black Collegians, a governing body for black student organizations on campus. He returned to MU as a law professor in the ’80s and ’90s and became an administrator in 1998.

Middleton taught criminal law and employment discrimination, along with other classes, when he was a member of the Law School faculty. Although he was a tough professor, he was “readily approachable,” said Melvin Smith, a former student who is now an attorney in St. Louis.

“For minority students, Middleton was someone you could confide in about both academics and the inner workings of culture at the university,” Smith said.

As deputy chancellor, Middleton worked closely with the leadership at MU, especially Brady Deaton, who was chancellor from 2004 to 2013.

“Any time we had an issue that had to go to the chancellor for decision, the chancellor relied very strongly on Mike to review all the materials,” said Ken Dean, senior associate provost.

“Mike would listen, he would read all the materials, he would review any materials that were recorded. Then he would provide an evaluation and a synthesis to the chancellor to help him make the final decision. So he was the chancellor’s right-hand man.”

Those qualities, and others, will be assets in Middleton’s role as interim president, Dean said.

“He’s thoughtful, he carefully considers all sides of the issue, he makes fair and reasonable judgments that come out of that consideration,” Dean said. “A very even disposition. He makes everybody feel that he’s listening to them because he is listening to them. Those are all the attributes that will allow him to do a great job in this new position.”

Even though Middleton’s role wasn’t explicitly designed to handle student affairs, he opened his door to students who wanted to speak with him about university matters, not unlike his years as a law professor.

“I saw Mike Middleton from time to time and we’d speak, and he always seemed to be concerned with what was going on with the lives of students,” said Culmer, who has known Middleton since 2011 when he was the Graduate Professional Council president at MU.

But Middleton’s term as MU deputy chancellor wasn’t always smooth sailing.

In 2010, cotton balls were strewn in front of the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center, a racial reference to the period in U.S. history when slaves picked cotton. Middleton reacted frankly and firmly.

“The entire Mizzou family has been offended by the acts that occurred the other night,” Middleton said at a forum after the incident. “Administration is totally offended by what happened and totally committed to making sure it does not happen in the future.”

The turbulent environment on campus today also presents opportunities to lead.

“I’m disappointed that we didn’t do what was necessary to avoid the explosion that we recently experienced,” Middleton said, “but I’m optimistic and happy that I’m now in a position where I might be able to have more influence on solutions to that issue.”