Michael Middleton, interim president of the University of Missouri system, took the helm of the troubled system last fall after campus protests at the flagship Columbia campus, Mizzou, felled then-president Tim Wolfe. Now, Middleton intends the school to be “a model of diversity”—to guide other institutions out of the darkness. With record-low enrollment for the fall and a deep deficit, it might be nice to haul Mizzou out of rather deeper holes first. But exquisite healing, of course, is the higher priority.
All part of the goodwill publicity plan—which also includes a million-dollar “diversity audit“—Middleton came to to the National Press Club in Washington this week to address the aftermath of the headline-grabbing protests and how to move past them. The answer—to the surprise of, well, nobody—is a discourse of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
But, pressed only a little, Middleton, a black man who is nearing 70 years old, revealed commonplace parental pragmatism underlying his rhetorical devotion to the touchy-feely. Asked whether today’s college kids are too coddled, he said, “I grew up in the fifties and sixties in Mississippi, and I think I grew a very, very thick skin. And my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles all kept reminding me that the indignities that I was subjected to had nothing to do with me and had everything to do with the ignorance of those who were imposing their stupidity on me.
“And that I needed to stand up, keep my head up and push through it. So at a very early age I learned something about resilience. I don’t know if our young people today have had to learn that level of resilience and you may call that too coddled.”
Abiding by the P.C. mandate, the interim president empathizes with the attitudes of trumped-up petty grievance that overtook his campus. But he came of age during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, back when aggressions were only macro. He learned to navigate an adversarial, unsafe world—home was the “safe space.” His family taught him what he could expect from a society, that was—at best—merely indifferent to his fate. They taught him that his feelings weren’t facts; that, unlike sticks and stones, words couldn’t hurt him.
Many of today’s college students, marinating in a campus culture of “emotional reasoning,” don’t seem to get that. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in an Atlantic cover story last September blamed emotional reasoning, among other intellectual crimes, for “The Coddling of the American Mind“—
Middleton later described a meeting of African-American Mizzou alumni, presumably organized by a deeply worried admissions department, and high school seniors who were starting to second-guess their commitment to Mizzou because of the protests. “It brought a tear to my eye,” he said, “to hear the testimonies of those African-American graduates. They said, ‘Yeah, we experienced the same things the current students are complaining about, but that was a minor part of our experience at Mizzou.'” They had strength of character to brush off minor offenses, the definition of a microaggression.
Regardless of the university’s official response to its diversity crisis, and whatever the outcome of its diversity audit, Middleton’s candid responses reveal the resilient reasoning of an adult who knows what you’re supposed to say to children with hurt feelings (sticks, stones…). But Middleton is a prisoner of the P.C. universe in which he operates.
