AFTER PROTESTS, ALUMNI PANNED SCHOOL LEADERS
Black students were already a small minority. They made up 10 percent of the freshman class in 2012, a proportion that fell to just 6 percent last fall.
Whitney Matewe, a black student from Mckinney, Texas, who will be a senior in the fall, said that after the protests, her parents asked if she wanted to transfer, but she decided to stay because she is in Missouri’s prestigious journalism school.
But, she said, she understands why black students might not apply to a campus where they are all but invisible. A friend’s boyfriend obliviously told her she looked like Aunt Jemima, and she was dismayed that her friend did not object.
“Being ‘the other’ in every classroom and every situation is exhausting,” she said.
By sheer numbers, the drop in white students has caused the greatest damage, since they make up a majority of those on campus.
Tyler Morris, a white student from St. Louis, said he was afraid of being stereotyped as a bigot if he went to Missouri.
So he decided to go to Missouri Valley College, “just down the road” in Marshall.
“The discrimination wasn’t against white people, but I didn’t want to be that person who I guess was stereotyped because I was white,” he said.
College counselors said that Missouri might have a hard time recovering from protests because its reputation was largely regional.
“Why would a student from New Jersey go to the University of Missouri instead of Rutgers or Penn State?” said Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college admissions counselor in Washington.
A plant sciences professor, Craig Roberts, said that Missouri was suffering not because it was more racist than other places, but because the rage that had been repressed on other campuses burst into the open.
“It was sparked at Mizzou by Ferguson,” Roberts said.
Ferguson, Mo., of course, is where the killing of an unarmed young black man, Michael Brown, by a police officer in 2014 became a national symbol of tension between police and minority communities.
Ferguson, a two-hour drive away, was still a fresh memory in September 2015, when Payton Head, the student association president, posted on Facebook that people riding in the back of a pickup truck had continuously screamed racial slurs at him.
The post went viral and the outcry escalated through what has become known in the protest world as “intersectionality,” grievances that gain potency by being bundled together. There were demonstrations against racism, and to support Planned Parenthood, which was under attack by state lawmakers.
Days later a white man, apparently drunk, jumped onstage during a homecoming court rehearsal by an African-american group and used a racial slur.
This was followed by the failure of the university president, Timothy M. Wolfe, to speak with demonstrators who blocked his car during the homecoming parade in October, drawing accusations of indifference.
Then the swastika appeared. A movement, Concerned Student 1950, commemorating the year the first black student was admitted to the university, grew out of the protests and set up a tent city. On Nov. 2, a graduate student, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike, spurred by the complaints of racial animosity and official inaction, as well as a cut in graduate student health care funding.
Over the weekend of Nov. 7, the football team, led by its black players, said it would not practice or play unless Wolfe resigned. It was the last straw. On Nov. 9, Wolfe resigned as system president, and the chancellor of the Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin, also announced he was stepping down. Butler ended his hunger strike.
As the protests continued to boil, demonstrators tried to block the media from the encampment, and Melissa Click, a communications professor, called for “some muscle” to oust a student taking a video of the confrontation.
In the minds of many, her outburst and the resignations became symbols of a hair-trigger protest culture lacking any adult control.
The university received a barrage of emails from alumni and families, some of which were published by National Review and Heat Street, a conservative newssite.
In one, the parents of a junior wrote that while they did not underestimate the extent of bigotry in the world, “the way to effect change is NOT by resorting to the type of mob rule that’s become apparent over the past few days.”
The university, they added, had shown a “complete lack of leadership,” and their two younger children had “all but eliminated Mizzou from their college list.”
The email was forwarded to Ellen de Graffenreid, vice chancellor for marketing and communications, with a brief note saying, “I’m sure you already know this but you have a PR nightmare on your hands.”
De Graffenreid, in turn, forwarded it to other administrators with a note saying, “This is pretty representative of the middle of the road people we are losing.”
While freshman enrollment has plummeted, students at Missouri have not transferred out in large numbers — a sign, administrators said, that the protests looked worse from the outside. Christian Basi, a spokesman, said the university was formulating a marketing campaign to correct what he called “misperceptions” about the extent of the unrest.
Missouri also has appointed a chief diversity officer; promised to double the percentage of minority faculty members by 2020 and recruit more minority postdoctoral fellows; and is requiring diversity training for faculty and staff members and incoming students.
The tent city has been restored to a well-manicured emerald field of grass, but all around campus, signs of the university’s suffering are evident.
The library is asking for donations to buy 400 books that it wants, including a $5,250 copy of “Complete and Truly Outstanding Works by Homer.”
To soften the financial blow, some vacant dorm rooms — spartan suites of two rooms of two single beds, sharing a bathroom and with no TV, are being rented for $120 a night for events like homecoming, the fall family visit and the football game against Auburn University, a Southern rival.
For the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, Columbia is lucky to be one of the prime viewing locations where the sun will be completely obscured by the moon. As of early July, 35 rooms were still available for the event.
Some faculty members are still hoping that the situation can be turned around.
“I think we squandered a rare opportunity that we had to be a local, regional, national, global leader in terms of showing how a university can deal with its problems, including related to race relations,” Berkley Hudson, a journalism professor, said.
The protests could have been turned into an asset — a chance to celebrate diversity. “We still can,” he said.