WISHING for his death “in a fiery car accident” was only one of many messages directed at Chuck Henson when he became the University of Missouri’s new interim vice-chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity. Mr Henson does not follow social media, but his wife does. Recently she agreed to stop reading the death threats and other missives intended for her husband, and instead to help him focus on his task, which is to end the racial turmoil that has made the university the centre of a nationwide campus protest movement over race for the past three months.

“We have a unique history and we have a unique problem,” says Mr Henson, a law professor. Missouri was a slave state until 1865; its first public university was founded in 1839 by James Rollins, an owner of slaves. It first admitted black students only in 1950 (Yale’s first black student graduated in 1857, Harvard’s in 1870). The relations of African-Americans both with other students, and with the overwhelmingly white faculty, have frequently been uneasy. Anger boiled over in November, leading to the resignation of Tim Wolfe, the university’s president and chancellor, after weeks of protests by students outraged by what they saw as Mr Wolfe’s failure to deal with racism on campus.

Offensive incidents last year included a swastika smeared with faeces on the wall of a dormitory bathroom and racial epithets hurled at black students, including Payton Head, the president of the student body. Cynthia Frisby, a member of faculty, recounted in a Facebook post how, when jogging along a road, a white man in a lorry flying the Confederate flag stopped, spat at her, delivered racist abuse, gave her the finger and drove off. “I have been called the N-word too many times to count”, she wrote, including, she says, by other members of faculty. The student protests gained momentum when Jonathan Butler, a graduate student, staged a hunger strike to force Mr Wolfe to resign. Yet the turning point was the announcement by members of the football team that they would not play or practise and boycott a game against Brigham Young University (BYU) unless Mr Wolfe stepped down. The footballers’ boycott of the game would have cost the university around $1m.

Mr Wolfe was replaced as president of the university, temporarily, by Michael Middleton, a long-standing member of the law faculty and graduate of the university, who founded its Legion of Black Collegians in 1968. Mr Middleton promises to meet all the demands of “Concerned Student 1950”, the group of black students leading the protests, which include the creation of a “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum” and an increase in black members of faculty to 10% from around 3%. Mr Middleton cautions, however, that some demands will be tricky to meet by the deadline the student group proposes, adding that he will explain why.

Mr Middleton insists that racism at the University of Missouri, nicknamed Mizzou, is no worse than at other big universities. He calls the often inadvertent “micro-aggressions” against minority students a “national problem” that is embedded in American history, and adds: “We are the first in finding effective solutions.” So far that has meant a clean-out of the university’s leadership. Seven temporary officials, in addition to Mr Middleton, are now running the university, including Mr Henson and Hank Foley, Mizzou’s new interim chancellor.

Yet while the university is making changes, the student protests have also set off a different kind of reaction. Kurt Bahr, a Republican state representative, says some of his constituents have told him that they regret attending Mizzou and do not want their children to go there, because they do not trust the new leadership of the university. One of his constituents even said that he feared for the safety of his daughter on campus thanks to the “instability” there.

Mr Bahr co-sponsored a bill in December that would strip scholarships from any athlete who “calls, incites, supports or participates in any strike”, and would require colleges and universities to fine coaching staff who encourage them. The bill has been withdrawn since because its author, Rick Brattin, another Republican state lawmaker, realised that the state could not mandate the revocation of privately funded athletic scholarships such as the football scholarships at Mizzou. But Mr Bahr insists that the proposed bill “made its point”, which is that a strike is not a good way to cope with a possible systemic problem. “Are we promoting anarchy within our university system?” he asks.

The backlash against the changes at Mizzou is likely to continue, led by self-styled defenders of the First Amendment (which protects free speech). Yet the First Amendment does not give people a free pass to go round saying hateful things, points out Mr Henson. To help students and faculty realise this, Mizzou has developed a new guide to “inclusive terminology” which ensures a healthy level of respect for all minority groups. It includes terms such as “adultism” (prejudice against the young), “minoritised” (when under-represented groups are made to feel inferior) and intersextionality (obscure). Some will see this stuff as movement in the right direction. But it is also likely to increase the ire of those who watched the protests and thought they saw a group of privileged college students complaining about how terrible their lot is.