Robben Wright Fleming (December 18, 1916 – January 11, 2010), also known in his youth as Robben Wheeler Fleming, was an American lawyer, legal scholar, and academic administrator.
Fleming was born in Paw Paw, Illinois, in 1916, he studied at Beloit College and later received his legal education at the University of Wisconsin Law School. During World War II, Fleming served as a U.S. Army lawyer specializing in labor negotiation and labor arbitration.
Fleming later transitioned into academic leadership, serving as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1964–1967) before becoming president of the University of Michigan (1968–1979). During a decade marked by the Civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War, he was credited with leading the institution through significant campus unrest. He returned as Michigan's interim president in 1988 and also served as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2010 at age 93.
Early life and education
Robben Wright Fleming was born in Paw Paw, Illinois, on December 18, 1916, to Edmund P. Fleming and Emily Jeannette Wheeler. He was of Scottish descent on his father's side, while his mother's Dutch ancestors had come to the U.S. in 1652. His brother Teddy contracted spinal meningitis in 1926, and died after a two-week illness. To remember his brother, Fleming began using Teddy's middle name—Wheeler—as his own middle name, and did so until the Army made him revert to his legal name; his own first name was a concatenation of his uncle Robert's and grandfather Beniah's names. His father ran a general store and an indoor recreational facility, but the businesses fell apart during the Great Depression and his father died in 1933 of tuberculosis, leaving the family with no income, so his mother took a job in a one-room school house outside of town.
In high school, Fleming participated in forensics and drama and also played sports, principally basketball and baseball. He graduated as valedictorian and received a scholarship to Beloit College, where he enrolled in 1934. After graduating in 1938, he chose to go to the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. Fleming received his law degree and was admitted to both the Wisconsin and federal bars in June 1941. He had already secured a job offer from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), though he was aware he was likely to be called up in the draft in the near future due to the increasing likelihood of war.
Family
Fleming met Aldyth Louise "Sally" Quixley, a fellow student from Rockford, Illinois, in 1935, when they were both working in the dining hall at Beloit College, and they dated seriously his final two years of school. She worked a variety of jobs in Illinois while he was at law school and joined him in Washington, D.C., after he started his job with the SEC. He proposed to her in Lafayette Square over Christmas 1941, and they were married by Rev. Peter Marshall at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on April 3, 1942. The Flemings had two daughters, Nancy Jo and Carolyn Elizabeth, and one son, James Edmund.
Government, military, and early academic career
Fleming began his work in the corporate reorganizations division of the SEC in June 1941. He found the work uninteresting and came to believe managers were hiring more attorneys than the workload required simply to avoid losing the positions. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt re-established the National War Labor Board, Fleming used his connections with two University of Wisconsin law faculty members who were involved with its formation to secure a junior position with the organization, beginning in April 1942. He served as a panel assistant whose initial duties involved assisting mediators trying to settle disputes between labor unions and employers, but due to personnel shortages he and other junior staff members were soon assigned to travel and attempt to mediate disputes themselves. His first such assignment was to mediate a dispute between the United Auto Workers and the Machinists Union, which were both trying to organize a Wright Aeronautical factory in Connecticut.
World War II
Fleming's draft number came up and in August 1942 he received his induction orders, which sent him to Fort Riley, Kansas, through December for basic training, and then to Fort Custer, Michigan, for three months of Officer Candidate School. He boarded a ship for Algiers on August 27, 1943, arriving there on September 17, and after a detour to Bizerte, Tunisia, he arrived for duty in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, where he was posted until December, when he was sent to Naples, Italy. In March 1944, he was sent to Gourock, Scotland, then Shrivenham and Eastbourne in England, to await the invasion of Normandy. Following the liberation of Paris in August 1944, he was sent to France, then Belgium, where he remained until the end of the year.
In January 1945 his team of civil affairs officers attached to the Ninth Army went to Stolberg, Germany, which had been a city of 30,000 people, of whom only about 10,000 remained. Fleming was responsible for legal services, public health, and supplying labor for restoring bridges and public utilities. He approached the latter problem by offering a free lunch for volunteer laborers. Many of the legal situations he dealt with involved the military's non-fraternization policy designed to keep Americans from interacting with German citizens. He was transferred to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force at Versailles in February, the work of a friend who thought Fleming would find the work at headquarters more interesting. But Fleming asked to be transferred back to his unit in Germany and returned there in March.
Upon his return to Germany, Fleming served as defense counsel to a pair of sixteen-year-old boys in the Hitler Youth who had been caught spying behind American lines; he lost at trial, an appeal was rejected, and the boys were shot. After the war ended, his unit traveled south and he visited the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp; he later recounted the visit in his autobiography and wrote, "Nothing angers me more today than the bigoted scoundrels who would have a new generation ... believe that all of this never happened. Those of us who know ... because we were there have an obligation to speak out." He was ordered home in November 1945 and discharged from the army as a captain on December 16.
Academic life
Fleming took a job with the newly created Veterans Emergency Housing Program, under the direction of Wilson Wyatt. He had hopes that working for the rising Democratic star would make for an exciting place to work, but the agency never got off the ground, and he began looking for other work. Around the same time, the University of Wisconsin offered him a position as assistant professor and director of a new Industrial Relations Center; he accepted the offer and worked there from 1947 to 1952. He returned to Washington from April to September 1950 to serve as executive director of a wage control board President Harry Truman had created at the onset of the Korean War, and during this time he also began to work as an arbitrator. Fleming later served as president of the National Academy of Arbitrators from 1966 to 1967, and was a charter member of the organization at its founding in 1947.
Although he was recommended for promotion at Wisconsin, he felt unsure of the prospect for tenure while in his role at the center. When the University of Illinois offered a position as a full professor and director of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, he accepted, effective September 1952. In 1957 he became a professor of law and continued to have time off to perform arbitration work, and in 1963, the president of the University of Wisconsin system called to offer him a new position. The Wisconsin system was being reorganized with a provost at each campus under the overall direction of the president, Fred Harrington, and Harrington wanted Fleming for the position in Madison; Fleming accepted, effective September 1964.
Chancellor of University of Wisconsin–Madison (1964–1967)
At their January 10, 1964, meeting, the board of regents of the University of Wisconsin named Fleming a professor of law and provost of the Madison campus, effective that September 1. A few months into his tenure, the regents revived the century-old title of chancellor for Fleming. The University of Wisconsin system was expanding rapidly at this time, and part of Fleming's job was ensuring that the Madison campus, which generated most of the revenue, kept an appropriate share of money for its own needs. The first significant student protests against the Vietnam War took place during Fleming's tenure, and his handling of these is the most notable aspect of his administration.
In May 1966, Students for a Democratic Society organized an anti-draft sit-in in a campus building. Rather than forcibly eject the protestors, Fleming allowed them to occupy the building for five days provided they remained peaceful, and he allowed their representatives to address a faculty meeting on the topic. His restraint was widely praised at the time, with the Milwaukee Journal saying the university had "shown the nation that a student protest can be a legitimate exercise in democracy, not a disruptive episode in bitterness". Protest leaders viewed the sit-in as a failure because the university continued to cooperate with the Selective Service Administration.
On February 22, 1967, police arrested seventeen protestors who refused to leave an engineering building at the end of a sit-in protesting Dow Chemical's on-campus recruiting. Fleming personally paid $1,155 in bail () for eleven of them who did not have money to pay their own, an action which drew criticism for being too lenient. He later explained that he did not want the students to become martyrs by remaining in jail during a student rally planned for that evening, and he was confident that if they were present in person, he could make a more persuasive argument than they could. The plan worked, and the protest was muted; students began to call Fleming the "Silver Fox" because they felt he was outwitting them.
He also expanded university projects in Nigeria, France, Germany and Japan.
President of the University of Michigan (1968–1979)
After President Harlan Hatcher announced his retirement from the University of Michigan, the board of regents formed a presidential selection committee assisted by three advisory committees representing students, faculty, and alumni. The student panel voiced concerns related to campus diversity, the university's role in the military draft, and classified research programs with military applications; they also demanded an increased voice in decision-making and respect from the new president. Roger Heyns, then serving as chancellor of the University of California–Berkeley, was the early front-runner for the position. Regents Robert Briggs and Albert Bentley traveled to California in January 1967 to meet with him, but came away unimpressed with his demeanor in the wake of Governor Ronald Reagan's just-announced firing of University of California president Clark Kerr.