HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Not To Recover From A Crisis, Mizzou Edition.
The University of Missouri, where I teach and which I dearly love, is in crisis. Freshman enrollment at the university’s Columbia campus (Mizzou) is down by a whopping 35% from two years ago. Missouri’s governor and legislature slashed Mizzou’s state appropriation by $22 million this year.
Administrators have responded by cutting Mizzou’s operating budget by 12% and laying off 307 employees (474 across the entire University of Missouri system). They’ve also closed seven dormitories to students, instead renting out the rooms for football games and special events like the recent solar eclipse.
Suffice it to say, morale on campus is low.
The primary culprit, of course, is Mizzou’s reaction to the student protests of 2015. In November of that year, a group of students, justifiably angered by three racist incidents on the 35,000-student Columbia campus, presented administrators with a number of unreasonable demands. Among other things, they insisted that the president of the 77,000-student University of Missouri system publicly acknowledge his “white male privilege” and resign his post and that the university adopt patently unconstitutional racial quotas for faculty and staff.
Instead of leading like compassionate, wise adults—joining the protestors’ rightful condemnation of racist conduct but working to convince them that their demands were unreasonable—many Mizzou officials either succumbed to or actively perpetuated the frenzy.
Mizzou’s football coach publicly supported a player boycott by the members of his team. The chancellor encouraged the protestors by allowing them to erect a tent city on a university quad and providing them with electricity generators. One administrator bullied a student reporter and attempted to prevent him from documenting the protests. A professor actually battered a reporter and famously called for “some muscle” to remove him from the protestors’ camp.
Watching Mizzou’s leadership abdicate to the loudest voices from the radical left, most Missourians were aghast. Many decided that their children, donations, and tax dollars should go elsewhere. Hence, Mizzou’s current situation.
One might think, then, that the university’s administration would be doing all it can to get back in the good graces of the people of Missouri.
Not so much. As I keep saying, if some evil genius of the right wanted to destroy the reputation of the academy, xe couldn’t do better than the academy is doing to itself.