Melissa Click, the University of Missouri communications professor who tried to force a student journalist out of a public space where student protests were taking place, has been fired by the University’s board of curators. As the Columbia Daily Tribune reports,
The board voted 4-2 in favor of termination during a closed session in Kansas City, with Henrickson and curator John Phillips opposing the move, UM System spokesman John Fougere wrote in an email Thursday. Curators David Steelman, Donald Cupps, Maurice Graham and Phil Snowden voted in favor of firing Click.
Click did not respond to a message seeking comment Thursday. The board earlier voted to suspend Click with pay on Jan. 27.
“The board respects Dr. Click’s right to express her views and does not base this decision on her support for students engaged in protest or their views,” Henrickson said in the prepared statement. “However, Dr. Click was not entitled to interfere with the rights of others, to confront members of law enforcement or to encourage potential physical intimidation against a student.”
The statement from Henrickson cited Click’s behavior at the Homecoming parade, when she cursed at a police officer who was moving protesters out of the street, and on Nov. 9 at Concerned Student 1950’s protest site on the Carnahan Quadrangle. Her actions at the protest site, Henrickson said, “when she interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students, we believe demands serious action.”
The investigators hired by the curators reviewed videos, documents and conducted more than 20 interviews, Henrickson said.
Three relevant documents:
A review of Click’s behavior by an outside law firm, Bryan Cave (commissioned by the University)
Hank Foley, the interim Chancellor of the University, agreed that Click had become a liability and that her termination had been decided fairly. In my view, given Click’s behavior, her call for students to remove a journalist/student with “muscle”, and her behavior with respect to the police, with whom she interfered, the termination was indeed fair. What she did in denying a student his First Amendment rights did not rise to even a semi-serious violation of the law (though she was convicted of a trivial transgression and given community service), but I can’t say I’m sorry that the University of Missouri let her go.
Click has the right to appeal, and almost surely will.
I feel bad for her, but hadn’t heard that there was another incident. I’m afraid she did show poor judgement, unbecoming of a faculty member.
I agree with your last sentence. But I do not feel sorry for her. She acted like a petty fascist.
“What she did in denying a student his First Amendment rights did not rise to even a semi-serious violation of the law”. I’m a little confused by this, Jerry. How is threatening the use of force to stop a journalist from using their rights not even semi-serious? Was it because he didn’t seem worried? It seems to me that the act of not allowing a journalist to do their job, puts all of us at risk and she be treated seriously, if we value living in a free society.
What I meant is that she didn’t deserve jail time for what she did. Her punishment, community service, was sufficient sanction in my view.
I agree with the community service.
I felt she should be prosecuted but not fired, since being fired is potentially far more serious for the individual concerned than a minor prosecution. That is, if you regard being fired as a punishment for her actions.
However, since she was up for review anyway, I think her actions demonstrate that she wasn’t an asset to the University in her role as ‘communications professor’ and that is a perfectly good reason to terminate her employment.
cr
Yah, She’s a communications professor who doesn’t want to allow her student journalists their first ammendment rights, while threatening them with force…
I somehow doubt that the recorded incident was the only complaint she had recieved. If it was just the one incident on an otherwise fine record, that’d be fine, but I doubt this was just a ‘bad day’ for her.
And if she was up for review anyway, then it looks like she was a victim of her own behavior, and not of the kind of mob justice she would have supported using against her opponents.
sub
I only want to see people fired for job related stuff. I think this was and her firing is a good thing. Enough thuggery thank you.
Admittedly I have no university experience, so I’m curious if it is normal for a professor to take sides in student conflicts.
I’m having the same thoughts – what was she doing there? very confusing.
During the May 1970 student strikes my University shut down but workshops were held for discussion of the issues. Many faculty showed up, including those who supported the students & those who didn’t. (Though the latter were definitely a minority.)
“…I’m curious if it is normal for a professor to take sides in student conflicts.”
When I was at uni some staff developed a reputation for supporting “progressive” students in “student politics”. But most stayed out.
Didn’t Dr. Glick’s now notorious “muscles over here” remark to the student constitute an example of assault as in “assault and battery”?
I realize that a trial was not held. But do universities also have legal powers to rule on such events as they do on issues of sexual assault and rape?
Does anyone know?
From Cornell Law School:
“Intentionally putting another person in reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact. No intent to cause physical injury needs to exist, and no physical injury needs to result”.
This among several definitions I looked at seems to me, a non-expert, that she definitely committed assault. It is a crime.
And I can recall an aquaintance being involved in an assault charge when another person’s progress was impeded. It confused me at the time, but the explantion was that to block someone elses’s lawful transit was simple assault, and if you did so much as poke them in the chest to make your point, that was actionable as battery. Took me awhile to understand the difference, because “assault” sounded to me like hitting someone, but that is not the legal defintion. Battery is the definition of actually hitting someone. Hence, assault and battery often paired.
I swear, happened to a friend. I just heard about it.
It seems from the vid I saw she was just a bit too caight up in the drama, feeling the energy of the crowd and the perceived injustice, and trying to escalate her own importance, if nothing else. But I still think firing was warranted.
She didn’t ask a specific person to help her because she was feeling impeded. She gave a blanket yell for “some muscle” which is a tiny step from incitement to riot, in my book. A crowd is just a mob that hasn’t found a focus yet for all its inner aggrievments.
sub
“But you can’t fire me, I’m standing up for social justice!”
Her defense was more like “you shouldn’t fire me because I was standing up for social justice”. along with the unsurprising “I was a victim of all this attention because I’m a woman”, and “this was a case of people just wanting to deflect from the real issue, racism”.
Good riddance to a petty bully.
I think instances like this, along with others like “no-platforming” and other leftist authoritarian attempts to suppress speech on campus, arise from an over-commitment to theories of social construction more so than social justice.
Decades of denying/ignoring any form of essentialism/human nature, and believing that reality is wholly constructed through language have not resulted in the degree of change they seek. They’re frustrated and getting angrier/more aggressive in part because they’re dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance of their ideological assumptions about the nature of human behavior. The alternative would be to modify their favored (cherished) constructivist theories. That may be harder for some to do.
Especially as some of the pomos and others insist that argumentation itself is to be disdained.
Were it genuinely the case that ‘reality is wholly constructed through language,’ the ‘social justice warriors’ could not stand on a high platform and command the rest of us to hew to their world-view. For then all humanity’s platforms would be of the same height, and indistinguishable from one another.
Anybody else disturbed that the report changed from justified to a simple left alignment in the middle of the report?
?????
I was trying to consider the political implications of this.
Then I realised you were just referring to the formatting of the text, right?
Or are we being all metaphorical here?
😉
cr
yeah, just the formatting of the article. everyone else said what I would’ve said about the events so I thought I’d give some useless comment.
That’s okay, you provided some mild entertainment. (I was going to add ‘which is more than Ms Click did’ but that’s wrong, however in your case the entertainment was intentional 😉
cr
I agree with those who characterize Click as a bully and appreciate the delicious irony that someone in in the Communications Department of a college would go around trying to harass and strong-arm others to suppress their free expression, whatever one might think of the opinions they were expressing.
But would someone please tell me what on earth a “Board of curators” is viz-a-viz a university administration? This “curating” thing used to be reserved for specific kinds of work in museums and archives; now damned near everything is “curated” and damned near everyone wants to be a “curator.” Are there now people who function as “curators” of universities? What is this? What do they do? Help, please.
Makes a change from ‘managers’, I suppose.
cr
Thanks. After reading it I decided to google and it seems that this is essentially another name for board of regents or something similar, and I read that the etymology of curate comes from the latin word for manager so, indeed, they are managers; but the term has metastasized well beyond its original areas of reference and threatens to engulf everything in its path.
I was of course referring to the recent fad for everyone to be a ‘manager’. ‘Environmental control manager’ = toilet cleaner, and so on. I suppose now they’ll be renamed to ‘Building facilities curator’.
cr