MIZZOU’S TRAVAILS: Capitulation Has Its Consequences.

First, a great university needs well-qualified students and the financial resources to hire and retain top faculty. Capitulating to the protesters has impaired Mizzou’s ability to secure both.

Not surprisingly, applications are down significantly. According to a leaked internal memorandum, undergraduate applications for the 2016-17 term dropped by five percent from the previous year. Graduate applications fell a whopping 19 percent.

In particular, applications from students with high ACT scores (30 or above) were down 7.7 percent, and the number of African-American applicants plummeted by 19 percent.

While numerous factors affect application numbers from year to year, it’s hard to believe that last fall’s widely publicized protests aren’t largely to blame for the decline.

With fewer applicants to choose from, particularly at the top end, Mizzou’s incoming class is almost sure to be less qualified than its predecessor.

The application numbers also portend financial difficulties for the university. The drop in undergraduate applications was entirely from out-of-state applicants. A substantial reduction in out-of-state students, who pay much more in tuition than do Missouri residents, will impair the university’s financing.

There’s almost no chance that state funding will offset the shortfall in tuition receipts. Many Missouri voters believe that the protesters’ demands—e.g., that the president of the four-campus system be fired because of a few isolated racist incidents over which he had no control—were unreasonable. When faculty, coaches, and staff endorsed those demands and feckless administrators capitulated, no one from the university would speak reason for fear of being called a racist.

Voters have lost confidence in the institution and legislators have responded predictably. Many of them are threatening to reduce the university’s funding for next year.

If enrollment drops and the legislature reduces state support, the university will have to raise more money from private donors or cut spending. While data on Mizzou’s post-protest fundraising aren’t yet available, the frequency with which remarks like “I’ll never give another dime to that school” are heard suggests that the former outcome is unlikely. Budget cuts are almost certainly coming, and Mizzou’s academic offerings will suffer.

Second, free speech and open inquiry will suffer.

To be fair, to the “social justice” crowd that last isn’t a bug, but a feature.

Related: How the NYT presents the “session on diversity” that the University of Missouri requires for its new students.

Why is it daring to say what it’s obvious the teacher wants you to say? The class was imposed on the students. They’re required to sit through it. What might be daring would be to push the teacher back with the kind of statements that have been upvoted in the NYT comments section: “Sharapova looks like a Victorias secret model while Williams looks more like a NCAA football linebacker and that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with race, so don’t make it about race” or “However, Serena IS muscular and she is not built with the long-legged model body of Maria. It’s a fact that most women would prefer to be tall and thin. It’s not a racist fact, it’s simply a fact.” It would be daring to say that from the classroom (as opposed to the comments section), because you’d risk becoming the lesson, as the teacher uses his superior power and experience to demonstrate why what you just said really is racist, including the part where you engaged in denial that it was racist. . . . Human nature exists. Ironically, in an effort to elucidate the human nature that has to do with race, the university and the NYT act as if they are utterly naive about that human nature involved in the teacher-student power relationship and the resistance to coerced speech.

Yeah, people will be lining up to pay top dollar for this experience.