‘Systemic Racism,’ Anarchy and Incipient Totalitarianism at University of Missouri

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The New Regime: Mob rule on the Missouri campus.

A frenzied student mob is now running the University of Missouri, having forced the abdication of university system president Tim Wolfe, while chancellor Bowen Loftin will “transition” to another job, the university board announced:

Today the board announced a series of initiatives to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on its campuses, including:

  • A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System. Accountability and metrics will be established for the position going forward;
  • A full review will be initiated of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct;
  • Additional support will be provided for students, faculty and staff who have experienced discrimination and disparate treatment.
  • Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff;

Complete capitulation to the mob, basically. Robert Tracisnki at the Federalist tries to explain what happened at Missouri:

A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough — which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.
Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.

You can read the whole thing. Tracinski’s point about the futility of Wolfe’s pandering — the apologetic, defensive stance signaling weakness, a prelude to surrender — tells us what to expect as a result of the board’s newfound commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion.” Henceforth, no heterosexual white males will be hired by the University of Missouri, and whenever any student complains of having “experienced discrimination and disparate treatment,” a scapegoat will be fired immediately to appease the Gods of Social Justice. A thorough purge of the faculty and administration is to be expected, and woe be unto anyone on campus who complains about this scorched-earth campaign of bloodthirsty vengeance to eliminate “systemic racism.”

Jim Hoft notes that one of the mob leaders spent five months as an intern to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. These young totalitarians represent the Progressive Future. The ranting campus mobs are expressing the zeitgeist of a dawning New Age of Intolerance that will suppress dissent and abrogate liberty in the name of Equality. Forcing the authorities into humiliating gestures of abject submission, these impudent student radicals have now imbibed the intoxicating spirit of Total Power and are likely to become lifelong addicts.

Commissars of the New Regime move to squelch any critical scrutiny:

After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, one of the school’s media professors is now furiously trying to “muscle” the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday. . . .
On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. . . .
“You need to get out, you need to get out,” Melissa Click demanded of the person filming the protest. “You need to get out,” she continued before trying to grab the camera out of the videographer’s hands.
“I actually don’t,” the journalist told Click.
“Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” the media professor then hysterically exclaimed to the assembled mob. “I need some muscle over here!”


What sort of scholarship does Professor Click pursue?

Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.

She got her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a dissertation about the “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon.” A quote from pp. 57-58 of her dissertation:

Feminist scholarship, which investigates the social construction of gender and the ways in which power infiltrates the most intimate aspects of people’s lives, grew out of a critique of the foundations of “traditional” research. Reinharz (1992) traces the development of feminist scholarship in “Principles of Feminist Research” to the early 1970s when academia began feeling the effects of the social upheaval of the 1960s outside the Academy, and the critique of positivism in the social sciences inside the Academy. The feminist scholarship that emerged from the early 1970s was founded on a critique of the ways in which scientific discourses, far from being neutral and objective as regularly claimed, were biased, androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist and distorted the experiences of those under study. Feminist scholars argued that scientific research produced partial knowledge that worked as violence against non-dominant groups excluding them and silencing their voices. In this sense, feminist scholarship offered a revision, a transformation of academic knowledge that would encourage new ways of thinking about the processes and goals of theory and research.

Professor Click is engaged in “a transformation of academic knowledge” to end the “violence against non-dominant groups” perpetrated by traditional methods of research, which are “androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist” and thus invalid.

Taxpayers subsidize the universities where young people are indoctrinated by scholars like Professor Click. Do you need any further explanation for why lunatics are running the academic asylum and why dissent against the New Regime will soon be strictly prohibited?

UPDATE: It appears that assistant professor Melissa Click did not have tenure at the university, and the journalism faculty has voted to revoke her appointment. Good.





 

133 comments

  4. I don’t see anarchy; I see Maoism. If this sickness continues to infect western civilization, we’ll be hit with a freight train of unchecked state power that is quite the opposite of anarchy.

    Another concern is that these sheep, unfit to participate in the civil society of a free country, are currently leaderless and directionless. Heaven forbid that some demagogue comes along and learns to harness these animals; then they become the Red Guards of the Maoist cultural revolution. That is already what the mob behavior, their circular reasoning and demands, and their focus on intellectual life resembles.

  6. This is going to be a domino effect. The misguided people who keep saying we’ve reached Peak Leftism and Peak PC are clearly not paying attention.

  7. At least Professor Click is not paid an outrageous salary, according to the Daily caller. Just under 60k a year. Not bad, but not outrageous.

  8. I just came from South Jersey right across the Walt Whitman Bridge from Philadelphia, home to Temple University.

    I was talking to a guy who used to work there. His warning to students was DO NOT leave the campus. (Temple has a large police force, almost as large as Philadelphia proper.), but if you do, go in large groups…don’t go alone.

    Evidently, Temple is smack dab right in the middle of a large housing project, what is commonly known as the “Hood.”

  12. I never thought the insane rantings of a few lesbians a half century ago would travel so far. But then they were themselves declared dinosaurs by black feminists after having declaring equity feminists dinosaurs and so women like Glick work the black side of the street to keep their hand in. Now you have to go transgender or the whole lot are declared dinosaurs. Basically they shame each other in internal shamings, purges and witchhunts even while going after the globe. A nice little scam on this occasion at Mizzou and they even have a media teacher helping them play it by the numbers.

  14. This is something different, an insane cult of the anti-norm which has no Vietnam War and so creates one called “men,” “whites” and “heterosexuals.” They are the decadent which must be sent to be reeducated. They are normal.

  15. What’s fascinating about this is that these people somehow believe they are insulated from the future consequences of this episode. Mizzou is not a private university. Ultimately, it’s resources are derived from the taxpayers. A minimal amount of “Google-fu” will demonstrate the composition of the state legislature, which is responsible for funding. Every so often, serious young students man phone banks trying to hit up alumni for donations to their respective colleges, schools or the university as a whole. Mizzou alumni contemplate ponying up the cash to send their children the state flagship university. To think that there will be no adverse reaction to this travesty is absurd.

    Unfortunately, the curators, aided and abetted by our idiot governor, just wanted to make problem disappear and therefore rushed to pay the Danegeld. They will soon discover both, that they’ve not rid themselves of the Dane and that Mizzou has become instantly less attractive to prospective students and alumni contributors.

  16. It is amusing to track the response to the Mizzou situation at such places as the far left Disney/ESPN garbage scow.

    Dan LeBatard has been his usual arrogant and preening self (ESPNU) in congratulating the good work of the football players etc and he vowed to fight a man who sent him a text requesting nuance be added to the mix; I’ll pay your way to fly down here so I can fight you

    These leftists, like Lebetard, are so predictable (he is a big sodomite supporter also) in there knee-jerk reaction and he predicted the world would be enlightened to the real situation at Mizzou once the media got there.

    And, so when the media gets there…?

    The President of Mizzou has only himself to blame.

    Had he not read Vox Populi and/or read the PDFon what to do when a SJW attacks?

    He di dth opposite of that excellent advice

    C’est la vie

  17. Mizzou is no longer a “safe space” for white students. Like it or not, that will be the real outcome of this as it plays out.

  19. I will NOT stop spending all my youthful energy on protesting racism until Sammy Davis Jr. can rent a room on the Las Vegas strip! Huh? It’s not 1960 anymore?

  20. Really!
    When I read about events these days I often feel as if I was somehow shanghaied while asleep and converted to a character in a novel before I awoke— an exceedingly ill-written and puerile novel—
    and I WANT OUT, NOW!
    . . .
    “Thumpity, thumpity, thumpthumpthump…” **fingers tapping a tatoo on desk**
    . . .
    “Ruttthhht, ruttthhht, ruthrutttthhht…”
    **scratching sound as head’s scratched**
    . . .
    Nope. Still here. ;~??

  21. It’s amusing how many of these people don’t see themselves as targets. Why would they. Post-structuralist gender queer theory is as stupid and obscure as it sounds. It’s gotten to the point where the only proper literary awards will be those named after lesbians. When it’s revealed they didn’t toe the line on transgenderism their names will be stricken from the Egyptian temples as well. In the end, literary awards statues will be a block of inoffensive clay you can mold into whatever you want when you get home, as long as you remember to hide it.

    The lesson here is these people are taking no prisoners and the battle for the moral high ground is very exclusive territory. The territory is so exclusive it will cease to exist as other than a mob. Somewhere in all that will be a rule of law no one respects anymore. Law will be a piece of clay you shape in your living room and defend as best you can… alone.

  22. “Evidently?” The main thoroughfare is Broad Street, Pennsylvania route 611, and once you get north or south of campus — Temple is on both sides of the street — you will be in a dilapidated combat zone area of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia.

  23. Fortunately, the moral high ground is being occupied by people who (claim to) have an aversion to firearms. Eventually they will piss off the normal white people, people who very frequently do have firearms, and who know how to use them.

  25. They know the gov is a proggie so the only thing that could possibly happen is an increase in funding.

    The solution is to defund every * Studies dept, remove every diversity position and otherwise purge the institution. Then impose a code of conduct from the Legislature, one mandating that free speech will be assured, bad feelz will not be protected. Students unable to cope are not suitable for higher education and should be shown the front gate. The football program should be ordered disbanded with an order that a new one may not be organized for five years. The Legislature should also pass a resolution stating their intent to entirely remove tenure and purge the staff should they prove unable to regain control of the institution in short order.

  26. Now we know what this is all about:

    —A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System….

    —Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff…

    This is about setting up a racial gestapo in a public university. My guess is that the university president was resisting it. The Soros-backed activists pushed it with this poutrage.

    This is how we got Black studies, Chicano Studies, Women’s Studies, etc. on campuses back in the 60s and 70s: massive campus unrest by “activists” that didn’t represent anyone’s viewpoint but their own.

  27. I’ve only been to Byrn Mawr once for about a half a day and had 4 trips to SW Philly, trips to the “Hood”, I might add, because that is where my helper lived.

  31. I’ve begun to wonder if the ingrained “you must have a bachelors/masters/doctorate for position x,y,z” really really needs to go away; there are plenty of graduates and postgraduates who are unemployable at anything useful or productive, with costly useless degrees. The excerpt from this loon’s doctoral thesis tends to confirm for me that there simply aren’t enough topics in the humanities for doctorate-worthy consideration, so they long ago started making them up, which credentials the continuance of the downward spiral.

  33. When my niece would have a screaming tantrum, we would get up and leave the room. The tantrum would stop, because she no longer had an audience to hear her cries.
    Move the media out of there. Move everyone not protesting out of there. Let them have their tantrum. Let them burn the place to the ground.

  34. I can’t wait for the backlash. How long before boosters for other SEC schools start asking prospects, “Why would you want to go to Mizzoo? All those racial problems…”

  35. Well I can add Mizzou to the list of colleges I would never hire a graduate from – not that I’ve ever encountered a Mizzou alum…

  36. This is a real problem. I am hoping that by the time my children are of college age that we have a whole new university system that does not involve 4 year residence.

  40. I had the same thought. Good luck trying to get a job, any University of Missouri graduate, but especially an African-American graduate.

  41. On ancestry.com, I was looking at a distant relative who opened the Cincinnati office for a major public accounting firm in the 1940’s and ran it for a couple of decades, after having spent a number of years with them in New York. He was not a high school graduate and learned everything on the job. His obit was in the NYT, so he must have been somewhat of a big deal.

    I worked once for an attorney who never graduated from anything. He went to college early out of high school, was admitted to law school while still in college, went to one year of law school, thought he was wasting his time there, and took the bar exam. You could do that sort of thing back in the day.

    Bill Gates, Matt Damon, and Mark Zuckerberg are all Harvard dropouts.

  42. No, you’ll band together with neighbors in mutual defense. If that’s not possible where you live, you’ll move to a place where you can. Hello, Texas.

    It’s really going to get interesting when the money starts to run out.

  45. I actually hope it does. The more that normal people can have their eyes opened to what their tax dollars are buying, the better.

  47. Really, ‘activist’ is just another word for ‘thug’ — no one who describes himself as an “activist” ought ever to be trusted about anything.

  48. I fear the time is approaching when we begin shooting each other. I don’t look forward to that, but the alternative will be rule by the totalitarian goons.

    Thing is, in Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Hitler’s Germany you didn’t even see this kind of behavior until the revolution had been consolidated. These people are acting as though they’ve already won.

    Have they?

  50. Not “white” students – it isn’t safe for non-Cadre members, for those who refuse the Kool-Aid, for those interested in gaining an education, for those not interested in the smash and grab of modern progressivism.

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