Charles R. Middleton was having lunch to mark a trustee’s first year of service to Roosevelt University when the trustee asked a typical question.
“I don’t know anything about you personally,” Mr. Middleton remembers him saying. “Can you tell me about your wife?”
Mr. Middleton, Roosevelt’s president, didn’t give a typical answer. “I’m not married,” he said. “I’m in a long-term relationship with another man.”
That could have derailed the conversation. But instead it led the trustee to ask Mr. Middleton’s advice: How could his bank show a gay employee—who seemed to think his sexual orientation might hold him back—that the bank didn’t care and wanted to promote him?
Roosevelt had to send Mr. Middleton the same message before he got the president’s job here, in 2002. He was sure he’d never hold such a position—there were no openly gay college presidents at major research universities a decade ago, as far as he knew. But being gay has become largely a “ho-hum” issue here, he says.
In fact, not only is Mr. Middleton gay, but so are Roosevelt’s provost, an interim vice provost, a dean, and an assistant dean. They are part of a diverse array of top leaders at Roosevelt, a private university with 7,000 students founded in 1945 with a mission of promoting “social justice.”
Last year Mr. Middleton helped start a national support group for gay and lesbian college presidents. Its numbers are small—the roughly 30 members represent less than 1 percent of all presidents nationwide. But Mr. Middleton, who some call the first openly gay man to head a major university, has become a touchstone for gay professors, administrators, and students. His leadership, they say, has helped expand their own opportunities.
John M. Isaacson, president of a Boston-based search firm called Isaacson, Miller, says sexual orientation is fast becoming a nonissue in the recruitment of college leaders. “I think that barrier has fallen rapidly,” he says. “I don’t think it’s entirely gone, but it has substantially changed.”
At Roosevelt, Mr. Middleton maintains a delicate balance between being president and being an advocate for gay causes. “He is not a zealot,” says Jim Mitchell, the board chairman. Mr. Middleton has been inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, and he marches every summer in Chicago’s gay-pride parade, holding a sign in the university’s signature lime green that reads, “Hi. I’m the PRESIDENT and OUT at Roosevelt University.”
Still, on the campus, which comprises primarily a grand, century-old building in the downtown South Loop neighborhood, Mr. Middleton is known less for being gay than for what he’s doing. He’s presiding over construction of a 32-story building, and he has shifted the student population from older adults to more traditional-age undergraduates, revitalized alumni groups, and brought back sports. Those things have gained him both criticism and praise.
“He’s just the president,” says Pamela Kimmel, a professor of guitar. And his being gay? “No one thinks anything of it.”
Halted by Homophobia
Mr. Middleton grew up in Miami in the 1950s, listening to his father rail against homosexuality at the dinner table. While Mr. Middleton, who is 66, says he probably always knew he was gay, he treated it as a “deep dark secret because you think something’s horribly wrong with you.” To compensate, he became very good at other things, particularly school, where he earned all A’s and completed a bachelor’s degree at Florida State University in just three years. He went on to a doctorate in British history at Duke University and snagged an assistant professorship in history at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1969.
Mr. Middleton also dated girls and married his college sweetheart when he was 20. The couple had three children, but by the time he was in his mid-30s, Mr. Middleton says, he had come to the conclusion that “it wasn’t healthy for me to live two different lives,” and the couple divorced. “The effort of constant internal dialogue saps your energy,” he says. “It’s like two cats in a bag.”
He and his ex-wife shared custody of their kids until she died unexpectedly in the mid-1980s, making Mr. Middleton a full-time parent of three teenagers. At the same time, he had begun moving into the administrative ranks at Boulder, first as an assistant dean of arts and sciences and later as dean, while gradually coming out to colleagues and friends. He had also begun seeing an assistant professor of languages, John S. Geary.
Mr. Middleton was a popular dean at Boulder, but when he made a bid for the chancellor’s job, in 1995, he was halted by homophobia, he says. A friend on the search committee, he says, told him that two board members had refused to vote for him because he was gay. Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the University of Colorado system, says “it’s difficult for us to comment on an unsubstantiated allegation regarding a personnel matter that’s 16 years old.” He pointed out, however, that the university has same-sex benefits for the partners of gay and lesbian employees.
Whatever the case, losing out on the top job was a deep disappointment to Mr. Middleton, and it prompted him to move on—first to Bowling Green University, where he was provost and vice president for academic affairs, and then to the University System of Maryland, where he was a vice chancellor. Even though he was clearly taking jobs that would groom him to become a college president, he was shocked in 2001, when a search firm approached him about the top job at Roosevelt.
“I just laughed,” he recalls. But then the headhunter told him that members of the search committee already knew he was gay—knowledge that he figured would have been a deal-stopper.
While board members at Roosevelt brush off Mr. Middleton’s sexual orientation as a nonissue, some people here remember trustees’ asking questions. Lynn Y. Weiner, who is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says a board member stopped her during the search process and asked, “Does it matter that he’s gay, with fund raising, and that he doesn’t have a wife to entertain?”
“I said, That’s an outdated concept,” Ms. Weiner recalls. “There could easily be a president who was single or had a partner with their own career.”
Patrick M. Woods, who worked with Mr. Middleton at Boulder and moved to Roosevelt three years ago as vice president for institutional advancement, says that with alumni and donors, Mr. Middleton’s sexual orientation never comes up. On the campus, the matter seems routine. Mr. Middleton has no problem with a reporter’s announcing at the beginning of a meeting of his finance staff that she is here to write about the president’s being gay.
One father did yank his son out of the university last year after Mr. Middleton helped start the national group of gay and lesbian college presidents, complaining that Mr. Middleton was “running a gay agenda.”
To guard against impressions like that, Mr. Middleton is careful to inform the board chairman when someone he wants to hire is gay. “I don’t want someone complaining that I’m creating a gay mafia at the vice-president level,” he says. Mr. Middleton says the hires fit in with the diversity of Roosevelt’s top ranks: Of the 21 top executives here, administrators say, 10 are women, four are from racial minority groups, and four are gay or lesbian.
Putting People at Ease
Mr. Middleton is known at Roosevelt as a warm and energetic leader who likes to talk with everyone, including students and security guards. It’s not unusual for him to strike up a conversation with an undergraduate in an elevator, learn that the student is struggling to get into a class she needs for graduation, for example, and take her concerns directly to an administrator. “I don’t like things that are unfair,” he says, things “that run people around for the convenience of employees, not students.”
The president’s sense of humor puts people at ease, a skill that comes in handy when he mixes with politicians and donors. From their first meeting, Mr. Middleton got along famously with Mayor Richard M. Daley. The windowsill of the president’s eighth-floor office—which looks out over Lake Michigan—bears paperweights and photos of him posing with Democratic politicians, including President Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Tucked into the corner near his desk is a photo of his partner, Mr. Geary, from before the two first met. Mr. Geary is now an associate professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago.
Mr. Middleton is a man of simple tastes who makes his own coffee and books his own travel (he flies more than 120,000 miles a year). He and Mr. Geary own a modest town house, a few miles from the campus, that they bought fully furnished from a retiree who was moving to Florida. They frequently have dinner on their own, either something they cook or takeout from Whole Foods. One of the few luxuries Mr. Middleton allows himself are custom-made shirts, not because he wants them but because he needs them. One of his arms is an inch shorter than the other.
While everyone on his own campus knows that Mr. Middleton is gay, he must still frequently explain his sexual orientation when he meets new people. “We all have to come out over and over again, because the assumption is you’re a straight person,” he says. In starting the group of gay and lesbian college leaders, he wanted to make the coming-out process easier for others. It was a good time for him to assume such a leadership role, he says, since he is nearing retirement and can take more risks than younger administrators. “I don’t have to be cautious anymore,” he says. “What’s going to happen to me?”
Since the group started, Mr. Middleton has heard from lots of gay people in higher education. Some presidents have wanted to join but still don’t feel comfortable being out. Other young academics hope some day to be members.
Aaron F. Mertz, who is working toward a Ph.D. in physics at Yale University, says he questioned his own dream of being a college president until he learned about Mr. Middleton and the group of gay presidents. “I began to wonder whether there was a place at the highest levels for a queer person like me,” he says. “It took finding mentors like Chuck Middleton for me to feel fully comfortable being me and realizing it would not be an obstacle.”
