Mike Middleton, University of Missouri System’s interim president, faces a difficult task

From his front window on Rose Street in Jackson, Miss., young Mike Middleton spotted Martin Luther King Jr. strolling down the road. Behind King was a group of marchers. Mike and his sister Jeanne ran out to join.

“You get back in this house in three minutes!” his mother yelled. Middleton and his sister were on the streets, again, like the last time King came through. Middleton was running from police dogs, Middleton was splashed with the hoses. And Middleton was back at home, safe, smiling.

Now he’s at his desk in a wide room in the University of Missouri’s University Hall — the system president’s desk. Middleton, now 68, chews through the story, speaking low and slow. “My parents could not be that active,” he says of the King marches.

It’s here where Middleton, in suit and tie, inadvertently makes a revealing statement about who he is, about the structures of power, about the viscosity of institutions, and about how far gone he is from his younger days of activism:

“My father was a military officer, so he had to be kind of cool,” he says. “You can’t take off your uniform and go out there and protest.”

The University of Missouri — its students returning a couple of weeks ago after a tumultuous semester — continues to be choke-slammed by every conceivable entity, from a band of activists to, very soon, the Missouri legislature. It faces threats of decreased alumni donations, decreased state funding, decreased enrollment. There’s been student unrest on race, protests over graduate health care and Planned Parenthood. There’s its precarious position in the Association of American Universities; and, recently, virulent accusations from deposed system president Tim Wolfe.

One of the recipients of these accusations is Mike Middleton, Wolfe’s interim replacement. It’s his job to at least begin to fix the mess.

Middleton has always had an uncanny ability to mediate. His brother, Richard T. Middleton III, cites it. His contemporary colleagues — Brady Deaton and Richard Wallace, the two chancellors before R. Bowen Loftin — cite it. He is, after all, a lawyer. Now Middleton finds himself controlling the system’s $3.14 billion in university funds and faced with an impossible collision of conflicting interests to mediate.

His resume shines. As an MU undergraduate in the 1960s he informally counseled Chancellor John Schwada on race issues, helped found the Legion of Black Collegians and helped draft a list of demands that nearly mirror those of Concerned Student 1950. He earned his doctorate, also at MU, in 1971. He spent a half decade as a trial attorney for the Department of Justice. He sat in high seats at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education.

In 1985 he became MU’s first black law professor, with an emphasis on civil rights. A former student, Anita Estell, described Middleton as “contemplative” and a “steady hand,” a professor who encouraged his students to “get involved on the national level.”

A decade later, in 1998, he was deputy chancellor of the campus, serving until August 2015. As Deaton puts it, “It’d be hard to find another individual with as comprehensive a knowledge of the state of Missouri as Mike Middleton.” If anyone can steer the university back, it’s probably him.

Middleton did his share of front-line activism on campus as an undergraduate. He says he quit Marching Mizzou because they played “Dixie” at halftime. In another old story, he and his friends in Kappa Alpha Psi, then the only black fraternity on campus, tried to raise a black liberation flag at halftime of a football game just as white students were raising a traditional Confederate flag. An MU policeman scooted through the crowd with his hand on his gun and took the flag, and that was that.

But Middleton soon graduated. Then he graduated again. He entered the federal courts and began a decades-long career in pursuit of civil rights from the inside of the system. And that was that.

There’s a sense that Middleton’s career at MU has been less than a fulfillment of his potential. Much of his job as deputy chancellor involved working on diversity, which, in a sea of white administrative faces, was often perceived as a puppet position.

“It tells me a lot about an institution that you take people of his caliber skills and you put him in that kind of position where you can only look through the window at him,” community activist Traci Wilson-Kleekamp says.

Middleton felt that marginalization. “I was swimming upstream trying to effect change,” he says, his speech measured. “I think this position (as president) gives me a little more clout, a little more influence than I had as deputy chancellor.”

He’s been married since the year he graduated, has three children and seven grandchildren. But no one can offer much more than that. No personal stories are shared, no quirky anecdotes, no exemplary scenes. He is brilliant, virtuous and somewhat flavorless on the surface. Whether that is emblematic of a black man playing least-common-denominator to survive in a white world or the inevitable result of a life in administration is a difficult question. Middleton hasn’t gone there in interviews, but it’s a point that Wilson-Kleekamp raises.

“When you are in a position like that and there’s a lot of (white) people on campus like that, people need job security and it’s not easy for people to jump up and go, because they get comfortable in their life and they stay there,” Wilson-Kleekamp says. “They figure out how to cope, and they figure out how to manage, so they can collect their check.”

“I have the utmost respect for him and the things he’s done in this space,” says Reuben Faloughi, a member of Concerned Student 1950. “That being said, because of the history of the university, I reserve some skepticism for anyone and everyone from the old culture. Historically, things tend to slingshot back to the status quo.”

Faloughi and Wilson-Kleekamp both express support for Middleton, but their reservations make clear the divide between race and the power structure.

In a recent letter containing a basketful of accusations, former MU System president Tim Wolfe pointed a finger at Middleton’s connection to members of Concerned Student 1950 and his inability to solve racism on campus during his tenure as deputy chancellor.

“Why did the Board of Curators decide to hire the leader who had failed miserable (sic) in his capacity as the long time leader on diversity issues on the MU campus?” Wolfe wrote.

“I don’t want to dignify that with a response,” Middleton said, speaking with the Chronicle of Higher Education. Wilson-Kleekamp, however, did.

“If he wanted to be disruptive (as deputy chancellor), he would have had to do it very quietly behind the scenes,” she said. “People can only make change within the comfort zone of the person they work for. I call that plantation politics. Not that he wants to be a part of that, but those are the rules of engagement.”

Even in a realistic lens, however, it’s difficult to enumerate Middleton’s achievements at Mizzou. Part of that has to do with the inherent opaqueness of administrative vocabulary and with Middleton’s roles through the years. Despite a lot of illustrious titles on his resume — principal deputy assistant secretary, associate general counsel, vice provost, deputy chancellor — Middleton’s involvement in university legal matters makes his accomplishments difficult to clarify.

Ask what a president of a university system does, and one gets the administrative gloss in answers like: “The president of the system works with the Board of Curators of the university on all aspects of university policy related to the collected rules, the financing, the benefits system, the retirement system, and has each of the chancellors of the campuses report.”

In a college setting particularly, administrative language is coherent with a long-standing system in which the lowest bodies — the students — do not understand the mechanisms of the highest bodies in time to critique it. That was part of Wolfe’s undoing.

One can see the similarities between former chancellor Deaton and interim president Middleton when they speak. Deaton speaks much more quickly and confidently, but both can carefully mete out strategized statements.

Before Middleton is ready to directly tackle the university’s problems, his answer to his role right now is perfect and nonspecific — on an issue far too complex for a media soundbite.

“The first thing,” Middleton says, “is to restore some confidence in the system, some trust among faculty, students, graduate students, staff, others who have problems; try to control the vitriolic animosities that we feel between some donors, some legislators, others who just have bad feelings about the university and how we handle a variety of things. If we can calm that down, bring some reason to the table, bring some balance to these issues, I think we’ll be going a long way towards getting the university on the right track to focus on educating our students, conducting productive research, and providing health care to Missourians.”

And that brings you to the mediating essence of Mike Middleton.

“I never saw him angry,” recalls Anita Estell, a student of Middleton’s in the ’80s.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him angry,” former chancellor Wallace says.

Last year, Middleton gave a Black History Month speech entitled “Living Civil Rights: A Mizzou Challenge.” “I urge you to understand that whatever indignity you are subjected to, your reaction is in your control,” he said.

The story of young Mike running to join MLK in Jackson is picturesque, but it isn’t the creation story Middleton offers up front. What he offers is more true to his fiber. It wasn’t the hoses or the dogs or King himself that turned him toward civil rights, but it did happen in the same time period. It was the grand arrival of the lawyers, specifically Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP coming to town.

“They were talking to the mayor and the police chief and the politicians, and they were taking people to court, and they were getting things done,” he says. “And I said, ‘I … I can do that. I think I’d be better doing that than being out here in these streets with a picket sign running away from police dogs.’ ”

Middleton, of course, is more than a civil rights advocate. But race, he admits, is what brought him to the table. At the press conference announcing his interim presidency, Middleton looked tired. Across four decades of swimming through white institutions, he remembered when he was a concerned student, sitting in solidarity with black students at an MU football game.

In a way, he’s still alone. He’s a black man on top of a white institution, faced with a centuries-old conflict that he’s expected to fix through initiatives. And to even do that, he needs the Board of Curators, the legislature and alumni on his side. His actions, rather than his placating demeanor, will have the power to reveal more about him than the past decade has, but he still has restricted mobility.

The one thing that does seem clear about Middleton is his sincerity. Speaking at an MU Law School commencement eight years ago, he outlined the approach to conflict that would eventually earn him the interim presidency.

“Abstract reasoning, clarity of thought, an understanding that every conflict can be viewed from a variety of legitimate perspectives, critical thinking, factual, respectful, civil discourse — these are the qualities of mind and character that are so necessary to the healing of our common societal difficulties.”

Middleton spent a long time in waiting. He said he thought he should have been chancellor when Deaton retired in 2013 instead of Loftin.

“I think Professor Middleton required something of a different caliber of courage,” Estell, his former student, said. “He labored in the vineyard. A lot of times people get discouraged by the inertia and leave the cause of equity.” She paused. “When your interest in victory is more profound than the challenge, you stick it out.”

Middleton did, technically, leave the cause of equity. He’d been retired for about three months, before Curator Don Cupps pulled him out of it. Middleton was not expecting the call.

“I thought, well, they’re going to do the same thing they always do, go find some hotshot-on-paper outsider, and—”

For the first time, Middleton’s precision breaks. He hesitates, understanding the subtle implication of his words. Glances over at his chief communications officer.

“I’m sorry,” he says, smiling bashfully and smoothing his uniform. Then he corrects himself.

This story was originally published February 2, 2016 at 8:32 PM with the headline "Mike Middleton, University of Missouri System’s interim president, faces a difficult task."