The man who kept Michigan’s cool

When demolition crews brought down the Fleming Administration Building in 2022, students watching from a safe distance must have had only the foggiest image of the cool-headed president for whom the building was named.

Robben Wright Fleming (1916-2010) was president from 1968-78, some of the University’s most difficult years. He returned for a year as interim president in 1988.

Friendly, funny, and unpretentious, Fleming was steeped in the field of labor law. That was unusual training among university leaders; most rise through the mainstream academic disciplines. Yet his expertise in the mediation of labor-management disputes fitted him well for the challenges he faced. In Fleming’s era, major campuses from Berkeley to Columbia saw riots and violence. Under him, Michigan kept its cool.

In 1973, after the protest era had waned, Fleming said the most important development of his presidency to date had not been any particular event. Rather, “it is the fact that we have come through without a disaster.”

Conciliator-in-chief

President Robben W. Fleming at a student demonstration in 1969 (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

Born and raised in Paw Paw, Illinois, Fleming was educated at Beloit College, where he played varsity basketball, and the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his law degree at the start of World War II. He took a job with the War Labor Board, then joined the U.S. Army, serving in North Africa and Europe. After the war he went into labor relations, winding up as professor of law and director of a labor-law institute at the University of Illinois.

His rising renown as a mediator of workplace disputes led to his appointment as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, where a conciliator was needed on a campus with rising student unrest. His skillful management there drew the attention of U-M’s regents when President Harlan H. Hatcher retired in 1967.

At his first press conference as president-designate, members of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) shouted him down when he wouldn’t give yes-or-no answers to questions about police on campus. In his flat, midwestern tones, he said: “I don’t think you can have a great university without dissent. I will protect dissenters. In the case of demonstrations, I will interfere only to protect the University. I do not think that those who disagree with me are always wrong.”

Then he invited the protesters to meet with him the next morning at the Michigan Union. The discussion was lengthy and civil. He made it clear, again, that he would protect the right of dissent — but also that he would not tolerate a “heckler’s veto” of any speaker.

It wasn’t long before a leader of the Black Student Union said: “Fleming is this university’s biggest asset. He attempts to communicate with people. I never have the feeling I can’t go see him.”

A dove speaks out

U-M President Robben Fleming at Hill Auditorium, shortly before he came out against the war in Vietnam in September 1969. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

Soon Fleming was dealing nearly every day with challenges arising from the faraway war in Vietnam.

He let it be known around campus that he opposed U.S. policy in Southeast Asia — not for the reasons cited by the New Left, who considered the U.S. a malevolent imperialist power, but because he thought good intentions had led to a tragic and costly blunder. When students asked him to say so in public, he decided he would. He thought moderate critics like himself should try to take the lead in calls for peace.

In the fall of 1969, on the Hill Auditorium stage — speaking only for himself, he said, not for the University — he called the U.S. war effort “a colossal mistake.” In the same speech, he authorized the use of campus facilities for a nationwide day of antiwar protest. (For his troubles, Vice President Spiro Agnew called him “gutless.” But Fleming had the last word. As he drily reflected in his memoir, “The vice president was not yet at the point where he was forced from office for accepting bribes, but he was immensely unpopular with both students and faculty and nothing could have helped me more than his remarks.”)

Elsewhere, university presidents feared that if they didn’t crack down at the first sign of dissent, protesters would be encouraged to escalate their actions. Fleming wasn’t so sure.

At one point, students in the Interfaith Council for Peace — hardly the most radical of the antiwar groups — proposed to dig a big hole in the Diag to symbolize the craters left by U.S. bombs in North Vietnam. Fleming said: “’Why not let them dig one? Everybody else is digging holes for new buildings. It’s not a big job to throw the dirt back in the hole after they get tired. If you make an issue of activities that do no harm and don’t interfere with the running of the University, you run the real risk of attracting a lot of other students who will then be sympathetic to their other demands.”

Fleming and the BAM strike

BAM demonstrators disrupt ceremony in Hill Auditorium as President Robben Fleming speaks, 1970. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

In the spring of 1970, a new protest did threaten to interfere with the University’s business.

For months, students calling themselves the Black Action Movement (BAM) had pressed for a commitment to increase Black enrollment to 10% by 1973. The administration proposed to offer enough financial aid to make that possible, but would not promise to meet the 10% target on a timetable. So BAM called for a shutdown of all classes and set up picket lines.

For 12 days, attendance lagged while Fleming bargained with BAM. Most picketers peacefully encouraged students to stay home; others disrupted classes. Contrary to what the SDS had expected when he started, Fleming was trying, above all, to keep the police out of the strike, believing that a show of force could trigger violence. But he told BAM he would call in the cops if necessary to keep classes open for students who wanted to attend.

One administrator remembered a late night during the strike when BAM supporters were literally shouting at Fleming. His response was to say, again and again: “I hear you. What is your position?”

In the end, the strike was settled with the University’s promise to recruit more Black faculty, start a Black student center, and provide the funding for 10% Black enrollment — essentially what Fleming had agreed to before the strike.

U-M Regent Philip Power once remarked that Fleming saw clashes as the engine of progress. So he embraced them.

“I remember sitting in his office talking about some matter,” Power said, “and he turned to me and said, ‘Look, in all of history, all forward steps are accompanied by conflict. That’s the way it is; that’s the law of history. So let’s have some conflict!’ … His job was to figure out ways to use conflict to move things forward. And he was just extraordinarily skilled in that.”

Fleming himself said: “The typical academic administrator has never lived in a climate in which he was challenged in the way that a trade union challenges management. I was very frequently exposed to confrontations between companies and unions. I don’t take flights of rhetoric quite so seriously as some people do, and I don’t view showdowns as the end of the world.”

Reckoning with the women’s movement

During the turbulent ’60s and early ’70s, President Robben Fleming was a skilled diplomat when the University needed one. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.)

Not that he embraced every change easily. When women faculty and staff members provoked a federal investigation of U-M for discrimination against women in hiring, pay, and promotions, Fleming fought back. Still, he proved to be open to persuasion.

At one point, several high-ranking U-M women asked him to consider a woman to be dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. He said it would be very difficult to find women ready for such a high post.

“For example,” he said, “when I brought Barbara Newell here from Wisconsin [as acting vice president for student affairs], you’ll see that every time Barbara had to make a critical decision, she hadn’t really had that experience before. I was there with her. I always backed her. I made a visible presence so that she had the support to go through it for the first time.”

Nellie Varner, U-M’s director of affirmative action and later a regent, said: “Mr. President, that’s all we’re asking of you; that you should treat women now the way you treated Barbara at the time; that if we don’t have the background, someone has to give us a leg up.”

Elizabeth Douvan, professor of psychology, was in the room. She saw Varner’s point register with Fleming.

“He thought about it,” she said, “and was much more positively oriented toward us on the way out than he had been on the way in.”

“A voice of reason and respect”

Mary Sue Coleman, president at the time of Fleming’s death, said: “Robben Fleming will be remembered in the same breath as Henry Tappan and James Angell as one of the truly great presidents of the University of Michigan. In an era of friction and fighting, he provided a voice of reason and respect. He served the University of Michigan with distinguished leadership, skill, integrity, and a grace that endeared him to a generation of students and faculty.”

With the Fleming Building gone, buildings at U-M that bear the names of past presidents now include Tappan Hall, Haven Hall, Angell Hall, Hutchins Hall, the Burton Memorial Tower, the Ruthven Administration Building, the Hatcher Library, the Shapiro Library, the Duderstadt Center, and Mary Sue Coleman Hall. (C.C. Little’s name was removed from the Science Building on East University in 2018.) That’s every president except Lee Bollinger, Mark Schlissel, and Fleming, whose name has been given to a conference room in the new Ruthven Administration Building.
 
 
Sources included: Robben W. Fleming, Tempests Into Rainbows: Managing Turbulence (1996);
Howard H. Peckham, edited and updated by Nicholas L. Steneck and Margaret H. Steneck, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817-1992 (1967, 1994); William Haber and and Allan F. Smith, “The Fleming Years” in The University of Michigan: An Encyclopedic Survey; and James Tobin, “Me Too, Circa 1970,” University of Michigan Heritage Project; Day of Dissent,” Michigan Today, 6/3/2016; and “The BAM Strike” in Sing to the Colors: A Writer Explores Two Centuries at the University of Michigan (2021). Lead image of U-M President Robben Fleming surrounded by protesters during his interim presidency in 1988 comes courtesy of the Michigan Daily via the Bentley Historical Library.)