History-making professor: as the nation's first out university president, Charles R. Middleton is determined to make Chicago's Roosevelt U. "a welcoming place". (Behind the Headlines).

In early March, Charles R. Middleton, with full academic pomp and circumstance, was officially installed as president of Roosevelt University, a school with 7,500 students on campuses in downtown Chicago and suburban Schaumburg, Ill. Middleton is Roosevelt's fifth president, but he is also a first: the first openly gay president of a major U.S. university.

Named after Franklin and Eleanor, Roosevelt University was founded in 1945 by a group of teachers and administrators who walked out of Chicago's Central YMCA College to protest a proposed quota system to restrict minority admissions. Middleton, 57, a British history scholar and former vice-chancellor for academic affairs for the University System of Maryland, found that commitment to open admissions inviting.

The March installation ceremony was actually a belated formality, as Middleton took over as Roosevelt's president last summer, when he and his partner of 22 years, DePaul University Spanish professor John Geary, settled into a town house in Chicago's Dearborn Park--within walking distance of the downtown campus. The Advocate spoke to the president on the eve of his official installation.

Does Roosevelt's commitment to social justice have anything to do with its being the first to hire an openly gay president?

They were looking for a president who's got experience, who understands the rhythm and the imperatives of higher education, and who has a concept of where the institution is going. But for Roosevelt, I think, as one trustee has said, hiring a gay president was like the next step in the institution's fundamental commitment to opportunity for people irrespective of their status as individuals--be that their religion, ethnicity, their national origin, their sexual orientation, or a whole range of other things.

Has being out hampered your career at all?

My partner would have a lot more to say about this. But, yes, there's a kind of glass ceiling. Universities are open and welcoming places, but the more responsible positions are harder to get into, particularly for a person like myself. [You encounter reactions ranging from] neutrality all the way to outright hostility.

What responsibility do institutions of higher education have to create safer schools? To train future elementary and high school teachers and administrators?

I think universities have a responsibility to train teachers to not be afraid to deal with the kind of hostility, with the epithets that are endemic in schools, to teach them not to walk away from it but to turn it into a learning experience. You need to prepare teachers to deal with it--that is the obligation of the university.

Why did you make the transition from history professor to administrator?

For the students. Education liberates people. It gives them different ways of engaging life. It frees you to become a more complete and whole person because it gives you possibilities for your own life and the lives of others. This is not about a job or a career. It's a calling, if you will. What I'm committed to is that every student who comes here leaves as a degree holder. That's the goal. It's all about students.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where you were a dean of the college of arts and sciences, you created and funded recruitment programs for minority students. Have you considered recruitment programs targeting GLBT students?

We'd like to sponsor something like that. We are going to do that. I want to send the message that this is a welcoming place, a very special place, and that one thing you don't have to think about is whether your sexual orientation is going to hinder your being successful. We pride ourselves on the fact that we are stronger because we embrace the "other."