After University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe came under fire from minority Mizzou students and resigned this November, the Board of Curators appointed Michael Middleton to take his place as the interim president. Middleton, a civil rights lawyer, retired as MU deputy chancellor on August 31 after serving in the role for 17 years. A 1968 graduate of MU, Middleton was only the third African-American student to graduate from the MU Law School.
The St. Louis American spoke with Middleton about his new position.
The American: During this past fall when the Concerned Student 1950 group was getting together and participating in a demonstration during the Homecoming parade, did the students ever reach out to you?
Michael Middleton: I had a relationship with Jonathan Butler and a couple young men who ended up being the leadership of CS 1950. We had talked in very general terms about social activism and some of the problems on campus. They didn’t form into a group until immediately before the Homecoming incident, and I didn’t talk to them much after that. I wasn’t part of their strategizing. I did talk to Jonathan after he started his hunger strike. I tried to stay in close touch with him, mostly through text messages, to ensure he was doing okay.
The American: What was your involvement in negotiations after he went on hunger strike?
Michael Middleton: I was doing a bit of shuttle diplomacy between Jonathan and the Board of Curators and the president’s office, trying to work out an understanding of what we could do to satisfy the demands. I sort of evolved as the guy who was in the best position to interpret both sides of the debate and bring them to a conclusion.
The American: What do you think of the new list of demands that the students presented to administrators this fall?
Michael Middleton: It’s an ambitious list of things, but none of them are truly unreasonable. We are not likely to increase black faculty to 10 percent in the next year and a half. We can commit to redoubling our efforts in that regard. The problem is we fail to retain as many as we’ve hired. I hope I’ll be able to explain the work we are doing in that area and the difficulty we are having.
The American: In November, several African-American students in the dorms said they moved out to safe homes in the surrounding area and were not feeling comfortable walking unless they were in a large group. Last time we checked, police said safety was not an issue. What would you like to see done to make sure African-American students on campus feel safe?
Michael Middleton: That is a very complex question, and it really involves an attitude adjustment on all sides.
First, I think the police department is correct. There didn’t appear to be any credible threat of physical harm to anybody. I think when you have these kinds of public displays of frustration, you are going to have some majority-group kids who think it’s funny or cute to make some of these off-color remarks and racially tinged taunts to get attention. I think it’s understandable also that young African-American students who do not have a lot of experience with that in his or her life could feel unsafe. If you are 7 percent of the population at an institution and you hear about one of those incidents, there’s going to be some fear. I think we need to work on trying to educate our students that it’s not appropriate for majority-group students to play that game.
I’m 68 years old and grew up in Mississippi in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The racism and oppression that I grew up with was so in-your-face and imbedded in every entity in the South that we developed coping mechanisms that allowed us to deflect that kind of stuff. I am trying to think of ways to systemize this message for our black students. There are always going to be people who say insensitive things. While I’m not going to tolerate that, this is America and there are free speech issues.
The American: On November 10 at 9:30 pm, a female student was leaving her job at the student center and three college-aged men followed her to her car, taunting her. Is there more that you can do other than trying to address attitudes?
Michael Middleton: Sure. On the Columbia campus, we recently established an Office of Civil Rights. The example you just gave does seem to be a bit more intimidating and threatening than someone yelling the N-word out of the back of a pickup truck. In those instances where we can conclude that behavior constituted real threat or an attempted threat against anybody, we certainly will take that through the student conduct process and sanction the offender. It might result in expulsion. And we need to do that and we need to do that quickly. But we can’t expel a student every time the word “n—-r” is uttered in a public place.
