The University of Missouri has fired Melissa Click, the communications professor who used strong-arm tactics on a student journalist who was armed with a video recorder and then watched her career disintegrate when the video from the encounter went viral last November.
The Board of Curators cited her “dangerous conduct” in calling for “some muscle” to move Mark Schierbecker, the student with the camera, out of the public area on campus where the protesters had gathered. Click, who is white, had argued that she was helping to protect the African-American students who had been protesting what they saw as an administration indifferent to racial incidents on campus.
The board, in a 4-2 vote, dismissed Click and sent her a letter on Thursday saying that her “conduct was wrongful, unjustified and not consistent with the expectations for a University faculty member.”
Click, who did not have tenure, is allowed to appeal the decision, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for her to maneuver. She had been suspended with pay in January after the local prosecutor brought assault charges against her for grabbing for the camera Schierbecker was holding. At that point the board brought in a St. Louis law firm to conduct an investigation. The university posted the full report to its website.
The university moved ahead with the investigation even after the city prosecutor deferred prosecution when Click agreed to do 20 hours of community service and obey all laws for one year. And just two weeks ago yet another video emerged. This time is was Click cursing a police officer who tried to get her to move out of the street at a protest during the homecoming parade in October.
In her written response to the report she asserts that the investigation did not adequately capture the mood on campus last fall. “Racial tension was palpable,” she writes.
“It was a fast-paced, challenging scene,” she writes about the parade in her response. “I was worried about the safety of the students in the middle of that angry crowd, and I was concerned that the one officer’s actions were too aggressive with the students.”
In a scene out of an incredibly solemn version of the homecoming parade in “Animal House,” about a dozen black students affiliated with the group Concerned Student 1950 (that was the year the first black students were admitted to the main campus in Columbia) halted the red convertible carrying Tim Wolfe, then the MU system’s president, and his wife. The protesters linked arms, blocked the intersection and shouted stories of campus racism into a bullhorn for an amazingly long 10 minutes before police arrived. Some parade cars managed to make a detour through a Domino’s Pizza parking lot, but not Wolfe’s convertible.
Click, who had been watching the parade with her family a block away, went to see what was up and wound up linking arms with the students shortly before the police arrived. Body cameras on the police capture her yelling at one officer to “get your f***ing hands off me.”
As tensions escalated over the following month, a student went on a hunger strike and the football team said they would not play unless the administration stepped down. Wolfe resigned on Nov. 9 along with the chancellor. It was the resulting celebration on the public lawn of the public college that Schierbecker and many other journalists had gone to cover.
Republicans in the state legislature had pushed for Click’s dismissal saying she was guilty of “assaulting and suppressing the First Amendment rights of student journalists.” More than 100 of her fellow professors, on the other hand, had signed a petition saying the university was obligated to defend her constitutional right to “protest.”
In the days before the homecoming parade video and the board of curators’ report were released, Click had engaged a public relations firm to help her polish her image. On Feb. 10, Dr. Click, who specializes in pop culture, gave an interview to NPR radio affiliate KBIA, and taught perhaps her most important lesson: “I think all people can probably identify with making a mistake in their life, and you can only hope that when you make that mistake you are not being recorded.”
