During 2015's commencement ceremony, Roosevelt University President Charles R. "Chuck" Middleton will, for the last time, repeat the same request of his graduating students that he has made since joining the school in 2002: "I want you to do well and I want you to do good."
After 13 years at the helm of a school thatsince its founding in 1945 has prided itself on social justice and inclusion regardless of economic status, race, age, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity, Middleton will retire from a position he called "the opportunity of a lifetime in a unique circumstance" on June 30, 2015.
When he took on the role, Middleton told Windy City times he was one of only two openly gay university presidents. Today, the organization LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Educationin which he co-chairsboasts more than 50 members. That member roll is growing by at least two per year. Shortly before Middleton retires, the organization will gather at Roosevelt University Chicago for the first-ever national LGBTQ conference in higher education, entitled "Shaping Our Futures."
Yet, it was an unbridled fascination with the stories and lessons of the past that drove Middleton through his journey in academia. Winston S. Churchill once advised "Study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft." Bedridden in his Miami, Florida, home with a bad case of the measles, Middleton was a seventh-grader when he read all four volumes of Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples in order to stave off boredom. "It captured me," he recalled. "I very quickly developed a love of history as an avocation and then I had the good fortune of turning it into a vocation."
Born in 1944 in the Northwest town of Hays, Kansas ( to a mother named Dorothy ), Middleton's family relocated to Miami shortly after the Second World War. "It wasn't the exotic place that it is now," Middleton said. "It was a pretty quiet southern town with all the 'charms' of a quiet southern town that included segregated schools."
In 1962, he paid his own way through Florida State University with designs on becoming a grocery store manager. After realizing that he had little aptitude for economics, Middleton changed his major from business to history with a particularly interest in the development of bureaucracies and social history in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain.
In the fall of 1964, he married and had three children. "I lived a pretty traditional southern family life all things considered," Middleton said, "and I did my very best to avoid reality checks on my sexual orientation because it was too painful to think about what that might actually mean."
He was able instead to immerse himself in the cultural revolution of 1967 London during a research year spent at the Public Records Office and the then British Museum. Determined to try everything, he and his wife sat in the nosebleed section for a Covent Garden production of Swan Lake danced by Rudolf Nureyev and Joan Fontaine, saw the original version of Fiddler on the Roof starring Topol, and went to the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. "What didn't we do?" Middleton remembered. "I loved it."
He eventually became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. After receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado: Boulder where he would teach for the next 27 years and author his 1977 book The Administration of British Foreign Policy, 1782-1946.
Throughout his early academic achievements, Middleton said he was always thinking about his attraction to men. "Of course living in the south in the late sixties, I would have rather died than do anything about it," he remembered. "There was no gay visibility in those days andif there wasit was always bad."
In the 1976 book about growing up gay in America, The Best Little Boy in the World, Andrew Tobias ( under the pen name of John Reid ) recollected the "shining performances" of his childhood years. "I was feeling less than adequate," he wrote. "Embarrassed? Look, let me tell you about embarrassment! But it was more than that: It was the basic understandingthat sick, guilty feeling in the deepest recesses of my psychethat I was a phony."
Calling the book "essentially my story," Middleton similarly came to realize that he was in an untenable position. "If you just do everything you're supposed to do; follow the rules, study hard. If you do all of that stuff, nobody will ever guess that you have this deep dark secret that you like boys. But by the late '70s, it was increasingly clear that I couldn't sustain that."
Middleton came out and separated from his wife. The subsequent conversation with his childrenwho were then 8, 10 and 12caused three separate reactions. "The 12-year-old said 'OK. Can we turn the television back on?' My 10-year-old boy jumped up and yelled at me, 'Why did you tell us that? You've ruined our lives!' and stormed off and slammed the door to his bedroom. The 8-year-old said to me, 'I don't even know what that is daddy but I know I love you.'"
Middleton began to cry.
The world by then was changing. He recalled sitting in on a dean's meeting the morning after the university's teacher of human sexuality announced to his class that he was gay. "The reaction was almost ho-hum," Middleton said. "They didn't care, but I didn't say anything. I think you have to develop the skill to say something and it takes getting comfortable in your own skin and with who you are. The toughest thing I ever had to do was being able to look at myself in the mirror and say 'you're gay and you're OK.' It took a lot of work to get to there."
Middleton met his partner of 33 years, John S. Gearya now-retired professorand, professionally, went on to become provost and vice pesident for academic affairs at Ohio's Bowling Green State University and vice president for academic affairs at the University System of Maryland.
He described his presidency of Roosevelt University to Windy City Times as "accidental."
"By the late part of the 1990s, I had come to the realization that there had never been an out, publically visible gay man as the president of a university in this country," he said. "So I thought I probably never would be a president and I was OK with that. When they called me about this job and said they were interested in me, I laughed. It was preposterous."
After providing the Roosevelt University search committee representative with all the intellectual reasons he could think of for why they shouldn't hire him, Middleton held his breath and told her he was gay.
"She said, 'They know that,'" he recalled. "And my world changed."
Despite an initial opinion of the downtown campus as a rather seedy looking place, Middleton was immediately taken with the school's commitment to social justice. "It was just embedded in the culture," he said. "Inclusiveness and equality and opportunity was so important in everything they did and the motivating and animating force in both academic and other terms. I felt welcome. This was the place I wanted to be."
Middleton was driving on the I-95 interstate between Baltimore and Bethesda, Maryland, when he was offered the job. Relocating with Geary to the South Loop, he joined the boards of the Center on Halsted the National Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays ( PFLAG ) and Services & Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual and Transgendered Elders ( SAGE ).
During his tenure at Roosevelt, he watched with considerable pride as the students affected their own change in university policy and environment such as the inclusion of a gender inclusive floor in the new Wabash Building. "Our students are comfortable being themselves and advocating for others in their space," he said. Middleton meets with the LGBTQ student group "RU Proud" annually. Those students have helped drive events such as the annual transgender awareness week that takes place every November.
"When they come here, our students are very different than when they leave," Middleton admitted with a smile. "By the time they graduate, we have changed them and I fervently hope and believe it's for the better. We have taught them that the most important way to live an engaged life is to make a difference and take pleasure in the success you helped others to have sofifty or sixty years after you graduatesomebody will say 'it mattered that you walked this way.' If that's true, then this institution has served our students well andthrough themsociety and human kind."
While Middleton counts each of Roosevelt's students among his greatest achievements, he maintains the challenge for him has been for the world to find out about the school in the first place. "Chicago is a very crowded market," he said. "It's hard to get visibility when you are as comparatively young as we are."
Middleton asserted that visibility was one of the reasons he pushed forward the 2012 completion of the Wabash Buildinga 32-story vertical campus that has changed the Chicago skyline. A February article that year in the Chicago Reader took him to task over it, calling his decision "a gamble."
"Go stand outside the Adler Planetarium and look back to the city and you see Roosevelt University," Middleton countered. "Why do we have bows instead of just a straight building? Why is it made of glass? Because we want to make a statement about the importance of what goes on inside this space and that the city and the world needs places like us."
In his farewell speech to the House of Commons in 1955, Churchill hoped "the day may come when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell."
Middleton said he looks forward to the day when LGBTQ people will be able to enjoy the triumph of full equality. While he acknowledged the need for vigilance in the long road towards it, perhaps the students he has watched march down the aisles of the Auditorium Building will be instrumental in seeing its conclusion. Meanwhile, Middleton has looked back and considers his life as an educator "blessed."
"It's a word I don't use that often," he acknowledged. "But I think I've had a terrifically gratifying and satisfying life largely because of the students I've had the privilege of working with over time, many of whom have become my friends. It's been a personal journey as well as a professional journey. Very few people are as fortunate as I am."