Calling University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click’s demand for “muscle” to remove a reporter from a demonstration last year a “regrettable mistake,” several dozen members of the faculty wrote a letter in support of Click that was sent to university administrators.
Apparently, many liberal professors on campus approve of mafia tactics in dealing with the press.
On Tuesday, a group of 116 Mizzou faculty members responded by publicly releasing a letter they had previously sent to school administrators standing in full support of Click. You can read the full texthere. It’s quite amazing:
We wish to state in no uncertain terms our support for Click as a member of the University of Missouri faculty who has earned her position through an outstanding record of teaching and research. We believe that her actions on November 9 constitute at most a regrettable mistake, one that came, moreover, at the end of several weeks during which Click served alongside other faculty and staff as an ally to students who were protesting what they saw as their exclusion from and isolation at the University.
The professors go on to explain that the real victim in all of this has been . . . Melissa Click:
We believe that Click has been wronged in the media by those who have attacked her personally and have called for her dismissal. We affirm our support of her as a colleague, a teacher, and a scholar, and we call upon the University to defend her first amendment rights of protest and her freedom to act as a private citizen.
Note that last bit about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. When the left wants to build “safe spaces” and stamp out “hate speech,” the First Amendment is an outmoded, retrograde element that needs to be bent into submission. Last fall, for instance, Brenda Smith-Lezama, the vice president of Mizzou’s student body, went on MSNBC to defend Click by explaining that, “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here.”
When denying the First Amendment rights of the student journalist Click targeted for muscle didn’t work, the faculty decided to try to wrap the First Amendment around Click herself.
Ain’t it the truth.
Missouri Republican legislators sent a letter to the university president demanding that Click be fired, which is why the faculty members sent their own letter to administrators. Excusing thuggish behavior is one thing. But it’s most worrying that university professors so cavalierly attack the First Amendment. They are turning generations of Americans — future leaders in business, the arts, and politics — against a broad interpretation of freedom of speech, fatally narrowing its scope until it becomes virtually meaningless.
I’d like to say they’re going to regret it someday, but you and I know that won’t happen.
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