When Vietnam War protesters occupied the president's office at the University of Michigan, Robert Fleming was there to greet them.
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Robben W. Fleming, who as president of the University of Michigan in the late 1960s and '70s steered it through a turbulent era of student protests, using his labor negotiator's skills to help defuse crises before they could turn violent, died Jan. 11 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 93.
His son, James, confirmed the death. His father’s health had been failing for some time, he said.
Mr. Fleming, who led Michigan from 1968 to 1978, was often described as patient and unflappable. Those qualities proved useful in March 1969, when members of the left-wing protest group Students for a Democratic Society, demonstrating against the presence of military personnel on campus, barricaded a Navy recruiter in a room.
Mr. Fleming, an opponent of the Vietnam War, refused to summon police, and the threat passed. But he stood firm against protesters in defending the right of the armed services to recruit at the school.
"The university must always be a world of ideas, often in conflict," Mr. Fleming said. "It ceases to be a university, however, when a group which is willing to use totalitarian tactics can impose on the rest of us its views."
Read the rest of the story here and more on Fleming here.
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