‘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

  1. Well, we still vote and no one’s forcing anyone to go to Mizzou. The NCAA and the colleges are the ones who got themselves into this mess by awarding scholarships to athletes who don’t merit such an education. Why be surprised they have fleas? No one’s making anyone watch college football. It brings in a ton of cash and there’s the problem.

  2. Won’t work; the NFL is 2/3 black and there’s a reason for that. However an interesting thing which may happen is white quarterbacks may be vulnerable to such a question and you could see a drift towards segregated football teams. But the money is with winners so it’s not all cut and dried.

  5. Alas! Given the unswerving devotion of American blacks to the Democratic Party, I see little probability that even the normal black people will do anything other than support the revolution.

  7. Well, even if a “community organizer” is not a thug, it is nonetheless true that none of them ought to be trusted about anything.

  8. I hope that Americans who value liberty wake up and see what’s coming our way.

    I would also observe to the jackboots that people who aren’t allowed their rights tend to get touchy about it. Ask the fellows at Concord Bridge about this.

  10. Quite true. There are other public institutions with higher rankings in STEM and even liberal arts which skim the cream of the crop of in-state students in Missouri. People go there now because of the cachet of being an SEC school and Columbia is nice town with a lot of diversions for those more interested in social life. Still, one can get the same or better education at other public universities in Missouri without having to put up with the B.S.

    And I write as a Mizzou Alum married to a Mizzou alum with five degrees between us from there. Alas, recent events, including some nonsense at the Law School have made the place dead to me.

  11. It harks back to what I call the “Duke Decision.” Duke Power used aptitude tests to determine ability to train for and do a given job. Some black twit thought that was just unfair and went to court. As I recall the decision was based on disparate impact.

  12. And now lesbian activist Sheila Jeffreys is whining? About what? The rats escaped the lab, third wave feminists are assaulting students and asserting a legal jurisdiction they don’t have.

    Third Wave feminism, if extrapolated out into an entire society, would lead to chaos, civil war and eventual conquest by an outside force. That’s right: in Russia they put TWFs in prison.

  13. Black thugs are often well armed. Fortunately, they rarely know how to properly use them or have the discipline to intellect to learn.

  14. Come now. You really expect an SJW to stand up to an attack from SJWs? Really? And, do you really expect an SJW to go to the blog of that Neo-Nazi and Fascist Vox Day? Really? Why, he would be scarred forever just from seeing the splash page alone, much less reading the references to reality there. The poor sod would probably have to institutionalized.

  15. …and they like to label us as the intolerant haters. I have never seen such a vile, hate filled, depraved, angry, irrational and intolerant individual as a slighted progressive. Satan incarnate.

  18. Even if you’re a non believer, seeing these progressives in action will have you re-assessing the true source of good and evil in this world.

  20. I won’t deny that many American “blacks” have bought into the whole victimhood thing, never realizing that progressives need victim groups to guilt people into giving up their freedom.

    But the greatest lie that the progressives use is that the labels are monolithic, that all members of a group will feel and act the same. Anything else ruins their narrative. So most of the media never reports the dissent.

    That’s where progressives are weakest. Their central assumption is a lie and progressives don’t dare let people know.

  23. The case is Griggs v. Duke Power. The sad part is, if you flunked the test, Duke would provide classes and study materials to help you pass it the next time you tried. But this is indeed the case that put paid to aptitude tests.

  25. “When will the world listen to reason?
    I believe it’ll be a long time
    When will the truth come into season?
    I believe it’ll be a long time” — The Offspring

  27. 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.

    And finally, tuition will increase commensurately in order to fund all this crap, which will only ever provide any services at all to (maybe) a dozen loser students, because no normal person is interested in silly stuff like this.

  28. I remember reading that after Kennedy was elected President, in subsequent elections the Catholic vote which had been lock-step Democrat before that started to fragment for the first time. I’m hoping a similar phenomenon happens after the first black President.

  30. Me too.

    I keep hoping that enough people notice that the more government “helps” them, the farther behind they get.

    I spent most of my life near the Diné (Navajo), and I saw it firsthand.

  31. Community Organizers rely on the thugs to get what they want. Where would Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson be without the ever present threat of violence?

  32. As a whole, that group you describe is impossible to measure. But I think you’re overlooking the deliberately racial nature of this latest campus dust-up.

    Anyway, students are still sending their letters out. And I can promise you that Mizzou sees a NOTICEABLE, measurable drop in applications from white students. Because the word is out: The campus is run by a small group of racial agitators who demand defenestrations from whites until they confess their “white privilage” and beg for absolution (which they won’t receive). What white person wants four years of that?

    Just wait until white alumni stop going to games and ponying up cash every year. Mizzou has cooked itself, by kowtowing to this racist mob.

  33. Good grief, don’t even get me started on the loon’s thesis. I started reading it, but midway through, I could sense my brain starting to make a “zzzzzzzz” sound. Then I started thinking about a Bellarive song I liked, and that got me thinking about how I really need better pickups for my guitar. So then I just skipped the rest of it.

    I’m glad McCain indents that crap, so I can just skip down to his commentary. And thank goodness he actually reads and rebuts that garbage so I don’t have to.

  35. I saw her picture and thought, “Outlander! We have your woman, Outlander!”

    Then I read about her actions and thought the same thing.

  37. Just in case you don’t realize it, I couldn’t care less if you disagree. You hold little more than a system of superstition for which I hold utterly no respect.

  38. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of scripture would be brought up short when they honestly consider the direction in which the world is descending.

  39. It exactly trash like that has been one of the major factors in tuition and costs rising as they have over the last 20 years. It is nothing more than utter nonsense which adds no value to the institution or degrees granted.

  41. In MO, if you want a STEM degree got to UM Rolla, now called MUST. Most of its enrollment is in the Engineering School.

  43. If I were running the show, I’d have expelled every student involved. And if anybody started whining about “triggers” or “safe spaces”, I’d expel them, too. Oh, and also the complaining members of the football team; and I’d force complaining tenured faculty members to listen to hours of me lecturing about the differences between a constitutional republic and a communist dictatorship until they learned to shut their damn pieholes and just teach. The only systemic “problem” at my version of Mizzou, would be the systemic expulsions, lol.

    Then again, they DO seem to need a president now. Maybe I should send them my CV.

  44. The poster below who suggests closing the football program for a minimum of 5 years has the right idea. Intercollegiate sports are simply out of control when the idiots on the team can pull off a putsch like this.

  45. After he retired from the Army and became president of Columbia U, Ike said he never went into NYC unless he was armed. Libtard run cities have long demonstrated the social pathologies we see now.

  47. There are three peaks in social movements: when the acceleration peaks, when the velocity peaks, and when the position peaks.

    We are not yet at the third peak (where position declines) of political correctness, but the first (where acceleration declines) was I think a couple of decades ago, and we may be at the second (where velocity declines).

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