Ball State University capitalized on the attention generated within the academic community on "Muncie as Middletown" by establishing the Center for Middletown Studies in 1980. Dwight W. Hoover, professor of history and a recognized scholar in the fields of social and intellectual history, was the founding director. Under Hoover's direction, the Center continued to expand and, in 1984, became an established academic unit within the university. In 1991, Hoover retired and E. Bruce Geelhoed, professor of history and a specialist in American business history, became the Center's new director. At the beginning of the 2004 academic year, Dr. James Connolly took over as the new Director.

The mission of the Center for Middletown Studies is to promote research on the history of "Muncie as Middletown" according to the scholarly tradition of Robert and Helen Lynd. It promotes research and scholarship on Middletown, conducts public programs on Middletown topics for the benefit of the local community, and encourages visits to Muncie and Ball State University by scholars, journalists, and students from around the world. The Center conducts a regular lecture series, and has sponsored visits by international scholars from Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other countries. It regularly publishes an academic newsletter, The Social Change Report, written by sociologist Theodore Caplow.

Over the past quarter century the Center has sponsored a wide range of research. It assisted scholars conducting the 'Middletown IV" research project, the most recent replication of the Lynd's study. That work generated numerous publications, most notably The First Measured Century (2001) by Theodore Caplow, Lewis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenburg, and its accompanying PBS broadcast series. Other recent Center supported publications include Dan Rotenburg ed., Middletown Jews: The Tenuous Survival of an American Jewish Community (1997) and the award-winning The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community (2004) by Eric Lassiter et al.

The Center continues to pursue and support research on Muncie as Middletown as well on themes and issues identified in the Lynds' original Middletown study. It sponsors a regular conference on the history and contemporary experiences of small cities. It has also embarked on an ambitious project entitled "What Middletown Read," which explores the library patronage and reading habits in Muncie between 1892 and 1902. This research is based on a collection of Muncie Public Library records that document every book checked out by every patron for most of a ten-year period. The Center has also launched its Documenting Deindustrialization initiative, which will develop online resources, including oral histories, photographs, scholarly studies, and policy analyses examining economic change and its social consequences in Muncie and the Midwest since 1950.

Parts of this material were published in Public History News, (Vol.19, Number 2, Winter 1999), a quarterly publication of the National Council on Public History.