Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media at the University of Missouri, ordered a journalist to leave an area where demonstrators had gathered on the Missouri campus.
She then called activists to “muscle” the Asian journalist off campus!
Today the Mizzou journalism faculty voted to revoke the appointment of activist professor Melissa Click. The Columbia Missourian reported:
Faculty in the Missouri School of Journalism were voting Tuesday to revoke a courtesy appointment for Melissa Click, an assistant professor in MU’s Department of Communication.
The journalism school’s Executive Committee, including Dean David Kurpius, met Tuesday morning to discuss the vote and prepare a statement on Click’s actions Monday as seen in footage of a confrontation between freelance photographer Tim Tai and protesters near the Concerned Student 1950 camp on the Mel Carnahan Quadrangle.
Click was seen at the end of the video asking for assistance and for “muscle” to remove Mark Schierbecker, who filmed the interaction and uploaded his footage to YouTube.
They may need “muscle” to throw her off campus. Any volunteers?
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;
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.
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!”
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.
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.
"Portrait of a Totalitarian Maniac Who Should Never Be Allowed Near College Students"
pic.twitter.com/NMduBuPUm6
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?
"Systemic Racism" — it's like the Patriarchy, always to blame for everything. https://t.co/DxaJBMZdzp
Butler . . . wants to force Wolfe’s resignation because of a handful of recent incidents which have occurred on the Columbia, Mo. campus. In a letter to school officials posted on his Facebook page, Butler indicated that he began his hunger strike because someone in a pickup truck allegedly shouted a racist insult at a black student government member, because state law prevents Planned Parenthood from performing on-campus abortions and because someone drew a swastika with human feces in a dormitory bathroom. Some observers have suggested that the bathroom swastika may be a hoax. Why, law professor blogger Ann Althouse has asked, for example, would any dedicated racial supremacist create a swastika out of human feces? Butler admits in the letter that none of the incidents he cites are Wolfe’s fault. Nevertheless, Butler has concluded, “as a collection of incidents at the university, they are his responsibility to address.”
This summer, prior to Butler’s decision to go on a hunger strike because of racism allegations, the graduate student’s substantially different agenda focused on a change in University of Missouri policy which ended subsidized health insurance for graduate students. . . .
School officials have said the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — forced them to stop subsidizing grad student health insurance.
So, basically, this is Obama’s fault. It figures. Meanwhile, in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide refuses to be distracted. Arkansas upset Ole Miss on Saturday, thus making it possible for Alabama to hope for a shot at the SEC title, but Tide linebacker Reggie Ragland was so focused on beating LSU that he didn’t even know about the Arkansas game until a reporter told him after ‘Bama had beat the Tigers 30-16:
“So we hold our own destiny,” Ragland said, laughing. Then he turned stone-faced again. “That still really don’t mean nothing. We’ve got to keep playing ball,” he said. “We’ve still got two games left in the West to finish off. We’ve still got to do our job. We’ve got a great opponent in Dak Prescott and [Mississippi State] next week.”
Damn right. You hold your own destiny. One game at a time.
The local classical music station here in Las Vegas is notable for three things: an absence of annoying NPR “news” programs, the most excellent Pipe Dreams program, devoted to music from pipe organs, and the intriguing Music from the Hearts of Space, arguably one of the oldest radio shows devoted to electronic music, especially of the ambient variety. It is the latter that inspires the post title today, reminding us of Jeri Ryan, who played Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager. Here she is, completely de-Borgified.
Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery! Remember, links for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday (tentatively titled The Post-Veterans Day Recovery Edition) are due to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox no later than midnight on Saturday, November 14. Please do not send them to my regular Wombat-socho mailbox; there’s a good chance they’ll be overlooked amidst all the spam from National Review, the Federalist Society, and various other conservative outfits trying to get my attention and/or money.
Every time I mention William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale here, it sells a few copies via the Amazon Associates link, a surprise that is both pleasant (because I need the money) and troubling, because it bugs me to realize that today, in 2015, there are conservatives who have not yet read that 1951 classic. Buckley’s book, published not long after he had graduated from Yale, immediately ignited a firestorm among the liberal elite. God and Man at Yale was published amid the Cold War tempest that history has called “McCarthyism,” and Buckley pointed out the ways in which “the superstition of academic freedom” was used to protect teaching that was clearly hostile to capitalism and Christianity.
More than that, Buckley documented how Yale had become confused about its own mission and, as a result, had betrayed the trust of the alumni whose contributions funded the university. God and Man at Yale, while focused on one particular Ivy League school, was in fact an indictment of American higher education generally, and especially of the academic elite whose embrace of New Deal-era liberalism had made it difficult for them to recognize the menace that Communism posed to our civilization. Though written at a particular time about a particular set of issues at a particular university, God and Man at Yale is nevertheless a work of timeless value and highly relevant to many of the controversies we encounter today, especially in higher education.
The recent absurd racial controversy at Yale, which resulted in an incident with an enraged student shouting obscenities at a dorm headmaster, calls our attention to why we cannot disregard (or treat as a joke) what is being taught at our nation’s universities. The cultural and political climate on campus today will shape the beliefs and attitudes of America’s future leaders, and incidents like this should give us cause for great concern. Yale is run by cowards:
In a closed-door meeting Thursday night, Yale University’s president apologized to a large group of minority students for the school’s failure to make them feel safe on campus.
“We failed you,” Peter Salovey, a psychologist, told more than 40 students gathered in the ornate room where the Yale Corporation meets, on the top floor of the president’s office.
“I think we have to be a better university. I think we have to do a better job,” he said, according to several students in the room who were taking notes.
You can read more at Reason magazine and at Hot Air, where Jazz Shaw points out the meaning of this abject surrender:
So it’s no longer good enough to admonish the actual practitioners of controversial speech . . . Now the faculty needs to go on the chopping block if they don’t proactively go out and squelch any offensive thoughts. This is the price we’re paying for generations of liberal thinkers encouraging the coddling of students and stamping out any competing ideas.
In other words, administrators now must vet their faculty, to make sure they never hire anyone who could harbor opinions that any student might find offensive, and sternly instruct professors to be sure that they do not tolerate any potentially offending expressions. This is the “better university” that President Salovey promised Yale’s students, and all because of Halloween costumes.
The laughably trivial nature of this controversy is, in fact, the point.
Go back to 1951. The Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons, the Rosenberg case had exposed the espionage by which this had happened, the Alger Hiss case and the Amerasia case had further exposed Soviet subversion, which was implicated in the Communist takeover of China, U.S. troops were fighting Red Chinese troops in Korea, and Joe McCarthy was investigating the lax security policies implicated in this national security crisis. Amid this cauldron of controversy, Yale student William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an erudite and thoughtful book about what all this meant for America’s institutions of higher education — he was notscreaming dirty words while demanding that the campus be made a “safe space” to protect him from offensive Halloween costumes.
It's ironic that @Yale University's president is a former psychology professor, considering the pandemic insanity on Yale's campus.
America’s cultural elite is decadent and depraved, and it has become so because our intellectual class failed to heed the warnings that Bill Buckley sounded in 1951. Yale University rejected Buckley’s criticism, and has proceeded in subsequent decades to do the exact opposite of what they should have done, had they taken Buckley’s criticism seriously. The true threat to “academic freedom” is not, as Yale’s defenders in 1951 imagined, from right-wingers like Buckley, but rather from the totalitarian impulses of the Left.
The truth about what is being taught at Yale, and at other colleges and universities, is of concern to every citizen, because it is abundantly evident that the pursuit of soi-disant “academic freedom” has now created a climate that excludes from campus the expression of any fact or opinion which the Left does not approve.
God has been banished from Yale, and the godless men who now exercise authority in academia — pusillanimous neurasthenic cowards like Yale President Peter Salovey — are evidently prepared to surrender to the puerile tantrums of young heathens whose “education” has rendered them incapable of even pretending to be civilized people.
