MU upheaval means more chaos ahead

The evidence against Mizzou is in the details.

It took a threat by the black students who matter most to end the stalemate. Nobody was all that annoyed by complaints of racial tension until the football team made a stand. But student-athletes, via one tweet with a $1 million potential cost to the university, turned the tide.

Start to admit that reality and it just might lead to attitudinal changes that will make a difference for all students. This is about who matters. And the answer should be every student.

Both the MU system president, Tim Wolfe, and the chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, have been shoved out the door.

The question now is, what’s next?

The cascade of events in Columbia over the weekend deserves a thorough vetting, not gloating from any quarter that two heads rolled. This is a campus upheaval unlike anything that the core group of demonstrators first envisioned. Not everyone will be pleased that Mizzou is being exposed in the national press this way. A real possibility exists for backlash against the students who initiated the dissent; for racial animosity to increase, not decrease.

A small window exists to get a handle on the underlying problems at play. And those issues are murky.

If racial tension was simply the cover to oust a president whom faculty and students had grown disenchanted with, you can bet your diploma that Wolfe’s leaving will not lead to substantial changes in the racial climate on campus. A changing of the guard does not import systemic shifts in organizations as unwieldy as higher education.

Relevant voices — MU administrators, curators and students — have to honestly decipher what the whole episode was actually about. The evidence is conflicting. Racial tension — Wolfe’s inability to converse appropriately with upset students — is the assumed leading cause, but other issues continuously popped up.

There is the question of whether people with careers in business, not academia, are well-suited for such high leadership roles on campus. Wolfe was the second such choice, following Gary Forsee, former CEO of Sprint. Some of that questioning is tied into complaints about how graduate students are treated, with recent changes diminishing their healthcare benefits.

Pressures on the university system have also emanated from the state legislature as well, most recently in the decision ending a campus contract with a Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic. Plenty of evidence exists to charge that university leadership cowers to the legislature, fearing budget cuts.

For their part, the students who’ve labeled themselves Concerned Student 1950 say that they couldn’t get a fair hearing from Wolfe. Wolfe may well have been all tin ear, awkward in his phrases and uncomfortable discussing race. That would make him like about three-quarters of America when it comes to discussing racial and class tensions.

What’s never been established is a better understanding of the racial climate at the university.

Three main incidents have been cited: One person screamed racial slurs at the president of the Missouri Students Association, Payton Head.

Then, members of the Legion of Black Collegians had to face the rants of a man who verbally attacked them.

And it took at least one person to smear feces into a swastika on a bathroom wall of residence hall.

That’s three morons.

There should have been no hesitation for the university’s highest administrators to condemn each incident. And those statements were made, eventually.

What is unclear though, is how indicative these instances are of the overall tenor at the university. Do the morons feel entitled to such blatantly racist actions because they know it will be sanctioned by silence?

At the very least, students should know implicitly that the administration will have their back when a fool unleashes a torrent of ignorance. The students who have protested want what anyone on campus should enjoy: to feel like time has marched forward on their side, not against them.

The university’s reply of diversity-lite, announcing a mandatory online diversity training for staff and incoming students was laughable. That’s surface dressing. These issues are deeper, grounded in real incidents, emotion, perception and history.

That’s why Concerned Student 1950 recounted black students’ fights to even gain entrance to the university during their homecoming parade protest. They were stating MU history, not black history.

College students don’t go from zero to manning bullhorns. People don’t turn to blocking officials’ cars in a homecoming parade as a first reply. And they certainly don’t starve themselves without some lead-up in frustration.

Cooperation melted down long before a pinnacle meeting on Oct. 27 meeting between Wolfe and the student group.

The question of what do these students want has been asked. At one point the demands included enforcement of mandatory racial awareness and inclusion curriculum for all faculty, staff and students, controlled by a board of color. They also wanted an increase in the percentage of black faculty and staff to 10 percent by the 2017-18 academic year, which opens a rabbit hole of issues involving tenure, budgets and personnel changes.

None of this is simple. How the university administration, what’s left of it — and the student body — responds next will be critical.

This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 9:20 PM with the headline "MU upheaval means more chaos ahead."