Search Results
THE WAGES OF IDIOCY: After Caving To Race Protesters, Mizzou Is STILL Trolling For Students For This Fall.
After attracting national attention as the site of massive race-based protests back in November, the University of Missouri is still — still — seeking enough freshman and transfer students for the fall semester — which begins in August.
The school’s continuing scramble to find student bodies to fill taxpayer-funded classrooms comes six months after last semester’s eruption of Black Lives Matter protests rocked the Columbia, Mo. campus.
The November protests by the Concerned Student 1950 group centered largely on Jonathan Butler, the son of a millionaire railroad executive. Butler went on a hunger strike and convinced 32 black Mizzou football players to boycott all team activities.
There was a poop swastika. There were false reports of people wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods. . . .
arlier this month, the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) published its annual list of all member schools that are still accepting applications for first-year or transfer students for next fall.
Mizzou is on NACAC’s 2016 college openings list. The school is still accepting freshman and transfer students, the organization says.
NACAC’s 2016 list of schools seeking students this late in the day is much longer than it has been in recent years. This year’s list contains well over 300 public and private schools. By way of comparison, notes Inside Higher Ed, NACAC’s 2015 list of colleges still seeking students in May contained only 225 colleges.
Life in the Education Apocalypse is tough. It’s tougher when you’re stupid.
MORE TROUBLES FOR MIZZOU: Mizzou Women’s Softball Team Says Title IX Is Killing the Sport: University of Missouri administrators forced the team to accept weak players, for equality. “Female athletes essentially claim that university administrators, citing Title IX, have forced the team to bring on under-qualified players. This has in turn reduced the amount of game time enjoyed by more skilled players. Why is Title IX the culprit? Administrators don’t want the federal government to accuse Mizzou of violating federal law, so they have to make sure the softball team is big enough. They don’t want it to look like the school is giving more support to the boys’ team than the girls’ team.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Meet Mizzou Protestor Jonathan Butler: Stealing, Misogyny, Crack Songs:
His disdain for low-income Americans is also apparent in another blog post, from July 2011, that was written about his visit to a Subway sandwich shop. Butler describes how he “stormed up to the counter inpatient [sic] and indecisive,” further detailing rude behavior to the worker. He describes watching the worker, “a grumpy older gentleman, about 70-75 years old,” making his sandwich.
“And at that moment as I was charging my phone and sitting down to my fast food meal,” Butler continues, “it dawned on me that I cannot live like this. I got upset at the world and in rage thoughts raced through my head of all the time I have wasted not investing my money and budgeting correctly because I cannot, I repeat cannot! End up like the older gentleman behind the counter working at Subway. I will not be old, grumpy, and working when I should be retired, relaxed and happy.”
That seems like a relatively safe bet: “Butler, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, is the son of a railroad executive whose compensation in 2014 was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings.”
Related: Hard Truths About Race on Campus.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Meet Mizzou Protestor Jonathan Butler: Stealing, Misogyny, Crack Songs.
Don’t miss the videos.
SJW PROTESTS AS DESTRUCTIVE AS KATRINA? Hurricane Mizzou – Enrollment Plummets, Jobs Cut, Buildings Shutter.
After raucous protests last fall, the University of Missouri has “a dark cloud hanging over the institution—we can’t sugarcoat that,” vice chancellor of operations Gary Ward told faculty this week.
The university’s grave outlook became clearer Monday, as the data rolled in on freshman enrollment for the Fall 2016 semester, showing steep declines.
Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline—and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.
Mizzou also reported a three-year low in grad-school applications, down 1,140 from two years ago. The number of new students shrunk even as the university has embarked on an aggressive effort to drum up interest in the school, using text messages and Skype and deploying more out-of-state recruiters.
Here’s how steep that drop is: Fox Business’s Clay Travis writes that “the only comparable undergraduate enrollment decline in recent decades that I can find at any major college or university is Tulane University the year after Hurricane Katrina.”
The steep dropoff in enrollment appears to directly traceable to the events of last fall.
You surrendered to a noisy minority, and now the silent majority is withdrawing its support.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Mizzou Race Relations Committee Releases Series of Anti-Racism Videos for ‘White People:’
The University of Missouri’s Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations released a video series this week that aims to educate students and faculty about racism on campus, Mizzou’s student newspaper, the Maneater, reported.
Committee member Craig Roberts, a Mizzou plant sciences professor, said that the target audience of these videos will be white faculty, the lessons will be applicable for the while community as a whole.
Roberts explained in an email to the Maneater that white people, including himself, are not as likely to detect racism because they do not experience it first-hand, and white faculty often downplay the degree to which racism affects the community.
“White people tend to see racism in terms of lynching, physical abuse, bullying and other products of hate,” Roberts said. “Racism is more than the overt, blatant, extreme incidents.”
As Ace of Spades quips, “And now you can view Mizzou’s handy guide to What a Racist Your Child Is. Plus — there’s still that one-in-five-will-be-raped thing! So you know: Definitely send your kid there.”
But fortunately, to coin a phrase, A New Hope has emerged from a most unlikely source. “Melissa Click just (accidentally) outed the campus PC Gestapo,” Carrie Lukas writes at the New York Post:
Click now claims her own dismissal is racially charged, meant to send a message that blacks aren’t supposed to stand up against whites. Yet she also notes that being “a white lady” makes her an “easy target.”
In other words, Click believes that although bigotry pervades the university’s liberal halls, administrators are too cowed to fire anyone who isn’t white, making her supposed white privilege also her biggest handicap.
Click is suing the school for allegedly failing to follow the rules governing firings in cases like hers. Her charge may have merit. But where was Click when Wolfe was being similarly sacrificed for political expedience?
As Lukas writes, “It’s long been evident that something is seriously wrong with American higher education, but Click’s case ties key pieces of the puzzle together: the absurdity of the racial- and gender-grievance game on college campuses, the politically motivated inquisitions that serve as university justice and the increasingly useless nature of so much of what’s studied.”
Is there nothing she can’t do?
BECAUSE THEY’RE HORRIBLE PEOPLE: Mizzou Officials Spoke Out When Black Students Were Targeted – So Why the Silence on Anti-Semitism?
SO THEY REALLY HAVEN’T LEARNED THEIR LESSON YET: Mizzou Race Relations Committee Releases Series of Anti-Racism Videos for ‘White People.’
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ASSISTED SUICIDE EDITION: Mizzou Misery: Exclusive Emails Reveal The Brutal Backlash.
Mizzou’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, Ellen De Graffenreid, received a disheartening email last fall at the pinnacle of the crisis on campus. A disgruntled parent wrote to the university’s Board of Curators, describing how her son, a sophomore, considered transferring out, while their two high-school-aged children “have all but eliminated Mizzou from their college list.”
Someone had forwarded the note to the university’s Department of Marketing and Communications, adding: “I’m sure you already know this but you have a PR nightmare on your hands.” De Graffenreid, in turn, forwarded it to the college’s leadership, adding the letter from a parent was “pretty representative of the middle of the road people we are losing.”
New correspondence reviewed by Heat Street and National Review depicts the cataclysmic backlash against the University of Missouri as its administrators grappled with demands from rowdy protestors, a hunger-striking grad student, and a boycotting football team. The protests ultimately toppled both the president and the chancellor.
In one instance, a retired professor wrote a prescient note to top university officials, cautioning that “serious backlash could result” and that “students making demands, protests, disrupting events or that kind of thing won’t sell well outstate.”
His prediction proved spot-on. The 7,400 pages of emails, reviewed exclusively by these two publications, reveal how Mizzou overwhelmingly lost the support of longtime sports fans, donors, and alumni. Parents and grandparents wrote in from around the country declaring that their family members wouldn’t be attending Mizzou after the highly publicized controversy. Some current students talked about leaving.
This passionate backlash doesn’t appear to have been a bluff. Already, freshman enrollment is down 25%, leaving a $32 million funding gap and forcing the closure of four dorms. The month after the protests, donations to the athletic department were a mere $191,000—down 72% over the same period a year earlier. Overall fundraising also took a big hit.
Appeasing the noisy few was a devastating mistake, especially given higher education’s generally vulnerable position these days. If only someone had warned them.
THE STRUGGLE IS REAL: Mizzou Activists Demanded Generators And A Toasty Fire Pit As They Protested Poop Swastika.
Fight the power. Roast the marshmallows.
THE HIGH COST OF INDULGING STUDENT PROTESTS: Mizzou closes two dorms due to lack of students.
Following a drop in students applying for housing, the University of Missouri will not be placing students in two dorms for the fall 2016 semester.
Mizzou will be closing the Respect and Excellence halls (ironic names, given the circumstances) in order to utilize dorm space “in the most efficient manner” to keep costs down.
In March, the university announced that it saw a sharp drop in admissions for the coming school year, and will have 1,500 fewer students. This will lead to a $32 million budget shortfall for the school, prompting the need to close the dorms in order to save money.
“Dear university community,” wrote interim chancellor Hank Foley in an email to the school back in March. “I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall. I wish I had better news.”
When bad behavior by lefties produces consequences, it’s always unexpected! Protesters may not care about such things, but administrators should. And so should trustees and legislators.
FIRED MIZZOU JOURNALISM PROF’S DEFENSE: I DIDN’T KNOW HOW JOURNALISM AT PROTESTS WORKED.
To be fair, there are a lot of “real” journalists who have no idea how journalism works either.
MIZZOU MUSCLE PROF ATTEMPTS OTTER’S ANIMAL HOUSE DEFENSE IN THE WASHINGTON POST. Link safe; goes to a post at Prof. William A. Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog titled “Mizzou Muscle Prof: We want people to take chances, don’t we?”
Click writes:
As a Media Studies scholar, I understand how the increased surveillance resulting from advances in technology like digital recording and wireless broadband has come to mean that our mistakes will be widely broadcast — typically without context or rights of rebuttal — exposing us to unprecedented public scrutiny.
But I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions unfortunately result in imperfect actions. What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance? What if everyone played it safe?
Sites like YouTube and Twitter host forums in which everyday people are subjected to the kinds of excoriation we have typically reserved for politicians and celebrities — those whose public and private actions, due to their vocations, are judged within the public sphere.
In recent years, however, earnest mistakes made by ordinary, unknown people have increasingly become national topics, their errors invoking astonishing amounts of political fury and having unanticipated impact on their careers, families, and futures.
Reaction to the footage containing my errors has resulted in months of scrutiny and most recently the loss of my job….
Whose interests are served when our drive to combat societal imperfections is defeated by fears of having our individual imperfections exposed?
And what value do our rights as citizens have in a culture increasingly ruled by snap judgments and by regulations that are easily rewritten to suit changing political interests?
We should all be concerned about the larger issues my situation raises.
As Jacobson quips in response, “Click writes that she was just stressed that day and Social Justice!” Given that Click is a self-described “Media Studies scholar,” I’m sure she’s studied this legendary media moment:
Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did.
Otter: But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg — isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
[Leads the Deltas out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]
Was it over when the Germans dropped some muscle on Pearl Harbor?
THE WAGES OF APPEASEMENT: Mizzou Protests Lead to Plunge In Freshmen, Massive Budget Deficits.
The fallout from the fake Mizzou protests continues to destablize the University of Missouri. Today the interim chancellor of the university emailed students that the university will enroll 1500 less students than projected and faces a budget shortfall of $32 million this year.
While the 1500 fewer students aren’t broken out by year, the vast majority of them will come from the entering freshman class. How substantial is the decline in enrollment? Based on Mizzou admission data from past years we’re talking about a potential 20% drop in enrolled freshmen.
That’s staggering.
Good. We need an example, to encourage the others.
And to spell things out for administrators: These were never “student demands.” Most students didn’t care or were actively hostile, but were browbeaten into silence — with some assistance from you. So now it’s “Irish Democracy” as people passively withdraw their support. If I were a Missouri legislator, I’d take that $32 million entirely out of administration, and lay administrators off en masse.
REALLY, DID ANYONE EXPECT HER TO GO QUIETLY? Mizzou prof Melissa Click, who refused to accept reporter’s presence on campus, also refuses to accept her firing; says University of Missouri using her as “scapegoat.”
METAPHOR ALERT: There Was A Literal Dumpster Fire At Mizzou Last Week.
Related: Melissa Click: You’re missing all the good I’ve done!
I can’t wait to read her autobiography, particularly when it’s available in Little Red Book size.
IRONY: MIZZOU PROF MEETS “SOME MUSCLE” OF WHICH SHE DISAPPROVES. “It’s always enlightening when those who demand big government come into contact with it, eh?,” Ed Morrissey asks.
Well, yes — see also this iconic Libertarian Party ad that ran while Occupy Wall Street was in full-swing:
DISPATCHES FROM THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Mizzou’s Melissa Click screams at officer: “Get your f*cking hands off me!”
University of Missouri Interim Chancellor Hank Foley responds to the video:
“Last night, like many in our community, I watched newly released footage of Dr. Melissa Click directing a verbal assault against members of the Columbia Police Department during the homecoming parade in October 2015. Her conduct and behavior are appalling, and I am not only disappointed, I am angry, that a member of our faculty acted this way. Her actions caught on camera last October, are just another example of a pattern of misconduct by Dr. Click—most notably, her assault on one of our students while seeking ‘muscle’ during a highly volatile situation on Carnahan Quadrangle in November. We must have high expectations of members of our community, and I will address these new revelations with the Board of Curators as they work to complete their own review of the matter.”
Earlier: Click Agrees to Community Service for Siccing ‘Muscle’ on Journalist.
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.
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.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: New Mandatory Diversity Training For Students At Mizzou Focuses On Taco Costumes. These people are idiots. Any academic who lectures against “cultural appropriation” undermines the whole purpose of a university.
MIZZOU IN DISARRAY: Ex-Missouri President Lashes Out in Confidential Email. “In an email to a group called the Missouri 100, Wolfe accused the former chancellor of Missouri’s Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin, of stirring up controversy to try to protect his own job, and criticized the football team’s decision to go on strike.”
Related: Controversial U of Missouri Professor Suspended. “The University of Missouri Board of Curators announced late Wednesday that it was suspending Melissa Click, who teaches communications at the university’s flagship campus in Columbia. Click was recently charged with misdemeanor assault in relation to her videotaped blocking of a student journalist during last fall’s campus protests. She has apologized for the action, but many Republican legislators have called for her dismissal. Faculty members, while not defending her actions during the protests, have said she should not be fired.”
A QUANTUM OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle’ suspended.
A University of Missouri assistant professor who has faced an avalanche of criticism after she was caught on video calling for “some muscle” to help her eject a student journalist at a protest site on campus has been suspended from her duties, the University of Missouri System Board of Curators announced Wednesday.
The decision to suspend Melissa Click came two days after the Columbia, Mo. city prosecutor’s office announced it had filed a misdemeanor simple assault charge against the department of communication professor. The charge relates to the Nov. 9 incident on campus that captured national attention.
“MU Professor Melissa Click is suspended pending further investigation,” said Pam Henrickson, chairwoman of the Board of Curators, which governs the four University of Missouri campuses. “The Board of Curators directs the General Counsel, or outside counsel selected by General Counsel, to immediately conduct an investigation and collaborate with the city attorney and promptly report back to the Board so it may determine whether additional discipline is appropriate.”
Melissa Click faces a Class C misdemeanor simple assault charge for the incident, in which she was filmed having physical contact and berating a student journalist. The student was trying to conduct interviews at a site set up on the university’s flagship campus in Columbia by students protesting the treatment of African Americans by administrators.
A video of the confrontation, which was taken by student journalist Mark Schierbecker and went viral on the Internet, begins with a group of protesters yelling and pushing another student journalist, Tim Tai, who was trying to photograph the campsite. At the end of the video, Schierbecker approaches Click, who calls for “some muscle” to remove him from the protest area. She then appears to grab at Schierbecker’s camera.
Click, who will continue to be paid during her suspension, was at the protest site as an ally of the activist group Concerned Student 1950, which mounted weeks of protests on campus. Those protests culminated with the firing of University of Missouri system president and the chancellor of the university’s Columbia campus.
It will be interesting to see if there’s a greater penalty down the line.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ACCOUNTABILITY EDITION: Mizzou Prof. Melissa Click Charged With Assault. “Melissa Click, the University of Missouri communications professor who garnered widespread scorn for trying to physically remove a student reporter from a campus protest, was formally charged with assault Monday morning. A spokeswoman for the Columbia Prosecutor’s Office said Click was being charged with third degree assault, a class C misdemeanor that carries a possible 15-day jail sentence.”