Students force University of Missouri president to resign over lack of action on racism on campus

At the University of Missouri, a graduate student went on a hunger strike, students and teachers marched and staged sit-ins, and 32 black football players refused to play until the university president, Tim Wolfe, resigned. Today, he did.

Wolfe resigned Monday morning at a press conference, as outrage grew over how he handled matters involving race and racism on campus.

“Please, please use my resignation to heal, not to hate,” he said.

On Saturday, 32 black University of Missouri football players posted a group statement on Twitter that they would not participate in sports unless Wolfe stepped down or was removed.

A week before that, grad student Jonathan Butler, who is black, went on a hunger strike over the same concerns. He said he was willing to starve to death until that goal was met. Butler fasted for 8 days, and spoke to students and reporters today to say that he was ending his personal strike.

Teachers and faculty staged a walkout early today, and joined students who’d been camped outside of Wolfe’s office for a week.

In a statement, university Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin told the Washington Post, “Racism has deep roots at our university.”

Why is everyone so upset? Oh, no big deal, just some swastikas and n-words, cotton balls being left at the black culture center door, death threats, stuff like that.

From reporter Matt Pearce’s excellent coverage at the Los Angeles Times:

There was the anonymous threat University of Missouri students spotted on social media app Yik Yak in December, after riots in Ferguson, Mo.: “Let’s burn down the black culture center & give them a taste of their own medicine.”

This September, the president of the Missouri Student Assn., Payton Head, who is black, said that he was walking through campus when a man in a pickup truck shouted a racial epithet at him.
I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here,” Head said in a Facebook post that went viral, with other students echoing his account with versions of their own.

Last month someone drew a swastika on a residence hall wall, using human feces.

The campus has since been increasingly roiled by protest, and campus observers say the dissatisfaction isn’t just limited to racial incidents.

Students also have accused university administrators of a lack of decisiveness in protecting graduate students’ health insurance plans from elimination and defending the university’s relationship with Planned Parenthood against attacks from conservative state lawmakers.

But race appears to have become the most volatile issue on a campus where racial unease has long simmered among black students and staff.

In 2010, two white students scattered white cotton balls on the lawn of the campus’ black culture center in what black students saw as a racist attack. They were convicted of littering.

Cynthia Frisby, a journalism professor, wrote in the Missourian newspaper this week that in her 18 years at the university, “I have been called the n-word too many times to count.”

Background on what led to this and where it’s going: Mashable, The Root, LA Times, Reuters