Confronting a Racial Divide, Missouri’s Interim President Finds Anger and Finger-Pointing

The University of Missouri remains deeply divided over racial issues that came to the fore three months ago, and the system’s new leader says that his efforts to move forward are complicated by anger and distrust that persist across the state.

Michael A. Middleton, a veteran civil-rights lawyer and retired deputy chancellor at Missouri’s Columbia campus, the flagship, was tapped in November to serve as the system’s interim president after Missouri’s two top officials resigned amid student protests.

The protest movement, fueled by a graduate student’s hunger strike and a boycott by the Mizzou football team, drew national attention and fed into concerns about racial intolerance in Missouri. The net effect, Mr. Middleton said on Monday in an interview at The Chronicle’s office, was to cast Missourians as racist, leaving many people embarrassed, hurt, and upset.

“My plan is to try to restore some trust and order and confidence in the university,” he said.

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

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Timothy M. Wolfe, Mr. Middleton’s predecessor, and R. Bowen Loftin, former chancellor of the flagship campus, both stepped down in November as crises mounted at the university. Concerns about race relations dominated national news coverage, but those issues were coupled with controversies over the slashing of health-care benefits for Columbia graduate students — a decision that was later reversed — and the apparent forcing out of a relatively new dean at the School of Medicine.

Moving on from controversy has proved a challenge, and not just because the thorny issue of race has roots dating back hundreds of years. There is still a fervent debate in Missouri and beyond, for example, about whether the student protests exposed an institutional disregard for the welfare of minorities or merely channeled political correctness to scapegoat university leaders.

As interim president, Mr. Middleton has heard plenty of concerns that the university unwisely caved in to a misguided mob.

“The students are not in charge,” he assured. “But the students’ not being in charge does not mean that they don’t matter.”

Tension With Predecessor

As a black man who had worked on diversity issues at Missouri, Mr. Middleton seemed to be an obvious choice as the university’s healer in chief. But he has come under attack, too. In a letter to his supporters that was made public last week, Mr. Wolfe questioned why the governing board would appoint Mr. Middleton, who Mr. Wolfe said had “failed miserable [sic] in his capacity as the longtime leader on diversity issues on the MU campus.”

In his conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Middleton initially resisted talking about Mr. Wolfe’s letter, saying “I don’t want to dignify that with a response.” Pressed on the issue, however, the interim president said that Mr. Wolfe’s comments represent a “vestige” of the very racism that protesters have identified at Missouri.

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Michael Middleton

Inherent in Mr. Wolfe’s argument, Mr. Middleton said, is a presumption that “you hire a black guy,” give him insufficient resources to effect diversity, and then blame him when nothing changes.

In his letter, Mr. Wolfe also suggested that Mr. Middleton had the power to stop the protests because he had a relationship with Jonathan Butler, the hunger-striking student. That argument, Mr. Middleton said, suggests that the job of a black university administrator is to “keep those people quiet and happy.”

“I think that’s how Tim perceived me,” Mr. Middleton said. “I was supposed to keep those people out of his business.”

Mr. Wolfe did not immediately respond on Monday to an email asking for a response.

Past Diversity Efforts Lacking

During his three decades at Missouri, Mr. Middleton said, there had been “no concerted, consistent effort” to make diversity a real systemwide priority. There have been efforts to increase the number of minority students, he said, but no real work to bring those students into the “mainstream” of the university.

“I suppose my inability to get that done is a failure,” Mr. Middleton said.

In his interim role, Mr. Middleton is carrying out a series of recommendations set forth by the Board of Curators to respond to concerns about race. The university expects to name a system-level chief diversity officer in the coming weeks, Mr. Middleton said, and a task force has been formed to conduct “a serious review of best practices.”

More trying than those steps, however, is what Mr. Middleton described as a much-needed statewide conversation about the history of the African-American experience in Missouri. He envisions a series of lectures that, at least in the near term, “might cause more tension.”

“That’s one step, is to put the facts on the table,” he said.

Mr. Middleton said he looks forward to the day when his job is not so consumed by race relations, but new challenges have persisted on that front.

In the past week, two members of the system’s board, both black, resigned, leaving the board without a single African-American member.

Last Wednesday, the board voted to suspend Melissa A. Click, a Missouri communications professor, pending an investigation into whether her attempt to bar student journalists from the protests in November warranted “additional discipline.”

Ms. Click was widely criticized after a video showed her appearing to grab a student journalist’s camera and asking for “some muscle” to help her clear him from the area. She apologized for her behavior, but last week, days before the board vote, she was charged with assault.

The board’s decision to investigate and suspend Ms. Click, however, drew pushback from the Faculty Council at Columbia, whose executive committee said the board’s actions circumvented established university procedures.

Mr. Middleton said the board had the authority to order the investigation and to suspend Ms. Click. He expressed empathy, however, for the professor, who on Friday reached a deal to avoid prosecution.

“She lost control,” he said. “But everybody loses control at some point.”

The broader issue at hand for the university, Mr. Middleton said, is to try to get beyond the defensiveness that tough conversations about race tend to engender. Progress is unlikely to be made until then, he said.

“We’ve got to stop trying to fix blame,” Mr. Middleton said, “and start trying to fix the problem.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.