Just hours after University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe announced his resignation following allegations that the school has not properly handled incidents of racism, a graduate student who staged a one-week hunger strike in protest spoke out, saying “It is disgusting and vile that we find ourselves in the place that we do”.
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The university’s Board of Curators announced a series of initiatives on Monday to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on all four University of Missouri campuses. Along side him, R. Bowen Loftin, chancellor of the university’s flagship in Columbia’ will also resign at the end of the year.
The Mizzou student group Concerned Student 1950 may have ended its hunger strike in the wake of their president’s resignation, but many students continued their protest into Monday.
Several members of the football team joined the protest over the weekend, refusing to take part in any football activities until Wolfe’s removal. (Michael Cali/San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS) University of Missouri-Columbia head football coach Gary Pinkel speaks to the media during a news conference on the campus of University of Missouri – Columbia on November 9, 2015 in Columbia, Missouri. Forfeiting that game would have cost the school a $1 million fine.
After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, one of the school’s media professors is nowfuriously trying to “muscle” the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday.
“I believe they felt if we don’t help him, if he doesn’t start eating, he’s going to die”, Pinkel said, referring to Butler.
In October, students heavily criticized Wolfe’s reaction to a protest involving protesters blocking the president’s vehicle during MU’s annual homecoming parade.
A host of complex issues have been mounting for Wolfe in recent months, from racial tensions to his handling of cost-cutting moves and issues like health insurance for graduate assistants.
“The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don’t doubt it for a second”, Wolfe stated in his resignation announcement.
It’s not that racial harrassment is increasing at the University of Missouri, says the student body president.
Reddy said UNC’s student-athletes stepped into a role similar to the Missouri players in the 1990s. Wolfe resigned after pressure from students and student athletes over his perceived insensitivity to racism on the university campus.
In his statement, Wolfe called on students and faculty to use his departure as impetus “to heal, not to hate”.
“I know, that’s a really good one”.
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“I like the fact that Missouri stood behind its students”, he said. “This is not, the way change should come about”. “Reporters have got to go”, and a few of them tried to block a freelance student photographer from covering protesters’ celebratory reaction to the system president’s departure. Students, especially those connected with “Concerned Student 1950” were said to feel that the response was “insufficient”. Tuesday brings Carl Dix, national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party, who called for people to “support the actions of the students at the University of Missouri”. “Let’s focus on what we can change today and in the future”.
