After a week of protests for racial justice, racial tension, and media fallout punctuated by the resignation of the University president and some professors, the University of Missouri has tried to begin turning the corner beginning with the selection of an interim president. Yesterday, the Board of Curators voted to have Michael Middleton, a black civil rights attorney, replace ousted president Tim Wolfe, who resigned Monday. And in his first statement, Middleton came out swinging. Hard. According to the Los Angeles Times:
At a packed news conference to announce his appointment, Michael Middleton, 68, a retired longtime administrator at the university, spoke bluntly about "systemic racism" he saw on campus.
"It crossed my mind that my 30-year career here had been a total failure," he said of watching protests this semester.
Middleton, who said he was not seeking the permanent job of president of the system's four public universities, promised to work with black campus activists to confront issues surrounding racial inequality at the system's flagship campus in Columbia.
Middleton is one of the first black graduates of the Missouri law school and thus familiar with the University’s complicated and fraught history with black students. But even for a person with his background, his candor and willingness to engage in potentially controversial language about race are notable. More according to the LA Times:
"It's so subtle," he said. "I think women understand it. I think people with a sexual orientation [that is not straight] understand it. I think other people of color understand it.... It is just the feeling of not being heard, not being respected, and being placed on the margins of what's happening in the world."
He added: "I sympathize with white people who don't understand. I don't blame white people who don't understand." He said the way forward was to confront the nation's history of racial discrimination — which he has long worked to combat.
Read more below.
Middleton’s comments come in the wake of a wave of racial tensions, threats, and three associated arrests after student protesters’ initial demand of Wolfe’s resignation was met. However, these events underscored the problems at the University and laid bare the racial climate that students sought to change in the first place. They sought to remove Wolfe not because of offensiveness on his part, but because of his lack of action in correcting that climate. While Middleton stated that does not intend on pursuing a permanent position, that interim status may give him the capital and flexibility to start making the kinds of broad changes that student activists want. For their part, they seem excited.
Middleton, who spent 17 years as deputy chancellor, is the University’s second black administrator, after Elson Floyd’s appointment from 2003 to 2007. According to the Columbia Daily Tribune, Middleton is a co-chair of Missouri’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness and worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Middleton also once served as assistant deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
