SAN FRANCISCO ― The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) and the American Council on Education (ACE) held joint sessions at their co-located annual meetings on Tuesday with a heavy diversity emphasis. Front and center at a session titled, “Campus Climate: Multiple Perspectives from Campus Leaders,” was a man who is now in the eye of the storm — interim University of Missouri System President Michael Middleton.
Middleton had been retired from the post of deputy chancellor of the University of Missouri-Columbia (UM) for less than three months when protests led by Black UM students prompted both System President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin to step down last fall. On November 12, the UM Board of Curators appointed him interim system president, a role Middleton envisioned he’d be in for a year while the board searched for a permanent successor to Wolfe.
However, “I came quickly to the conclusion that I needed more than a year to get this job done,” Middleton told Diverse. “If in their search, which is ongoing right now, they don’t find somebody who they think can take over and complete this mission, I’m willing to stay around two or three years to do that. So we’ll see what happens.”
When asked what he believes will help the nation’s higher ed institutions live up to their ideals of diversity and inclusivity, Middleton cited resources and faculty, “who are the heart and soul of what we do, if you exclude students.”
Middleton added that faculty governance and shared governance give faculty a great deal of autonomy and authority. “And with all due respect to faculty, they are experts at something, and they’re very busy with their area of expertise. And it’s very difficult to convince them that they need to break off a little bit of their attention and a little bit of their superior academic capacity and devote it to” diversity issues.
Middleton says that faculty are reluctant to address diversity issues “because we as a nation have always been reluctant to acknowledge the pervasive impact of our history, that goes back to slavery, to White supremacy as a philosophy of maintaining control over the country. It’s that deep. And most people don’t recognize the magnitude of the problem and the need to really focus on addressing that problem freely so that we can progress into the next century.
“We’re not going to make it to the next century as a society unless we do that, and we’ve got to figure out a way to make faculty understand that and devote their attention and their expertise to solving this problem.”
