Racial tensions sink university president
Head of University of Missouri resigns over handling of discrimination complaints
COLUMBIA, Missouri — The president of the University of Missouri system resigned Monday with the football team and others on campus in open revolt over what they saw as his indifference to racial tensions at the school.
President Tim Wolfe, a former business executive with no previous experience in academic leadership, took “full responsibility for the frustration” students expressed and said their complaints were “clear” and “real.”
For months, black student groups had complained that Wolfe was unresponsive to racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white flagship campus of the state’s four-college system. The complaints came to a head two days ago, when at least 30 black football players announced that they would not play until the president was gone. A graduate student went on a week-long hunger strike.
Wolfe’s announcement came at the start of what had been expected to be a lengthy closeddoor meeting of the school’s governing board.
“This is not the way change comes about,” he said, alluding to recent protests, in a halting statement that was simultaneously apologetic, clumsy and defiant. “We stopped listening to each other.”
He urged students, faculty and staff to use the resignation “to heal and start talking again to make the changes necessary.”
The school’s undergraduate population is 79 per cent white and eight per cent black. The state is about 83 per cent white and nearly 12 per cent black.
The university’s Columbia campus is about 200 kilometres west of Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed last year in a fatal shooting that helped spawn the national “Black Lives Matter” movement rebuking police treatment of minorities.
In response to the race complaints, Wolfe had taken little action and made few public statements.
As students levelled more grievances this fall, he was increasingly seen as aloof, out of touch and insensitive to their concerns. He soon became the protesters’ main target.
In a statement issued Sunday, Wolfe acknowledged that “change is needed” and said the university was working to draw up a plan by April to promote diversity and tolerance. But by the end of that day, a campus sit-in had grown in size, graduate student groups planned walkouts and politicians began to weigh in.
After the resignation announcement, students and teachers in Columbia hugged and chanted.
Head football coach Gary Pinkel on Sunday expressed solidarity with players in a Twitter message, posting a picture of the team and coaches locking arms. The tweet said: “The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players.”
Pinkel and athletic director Mack Rhoades linked the return of the football players to the end of a hunger strike by a black student named Jonathan Butler, who stopped eating Nov. 2 and vowed not to eat until Wolfe was gone.
After Wolfe’s announcement, Butler said in a tweet that his strike was over. He appeared weak and unsteady as two people helped him into a sea of celebrants on campus. Many broke into dance at seeing him.
Football practice was to resume today ahead of Saturday’s game against Brigham Young University at Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Cancelling the game could have cost the school more than $1 million US.
The protests began after the student government president, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student.
Frustrations flared again during a homecoming parade, when black protesters blocked Wolfe’s car, and he did not get out and talk to them. They were removed by police. Also, a swastika drawn in feces was found recently in a dormitory bathroom.
Wolfe, 57, is a former software executive and Missouri business school graduate whose father taught at the university.