But Click’s case is complicated by the surfacing of another video that shows her cursing at a police officer during an earlier student protest when the officer touched her. Click had interposed herself between students and police who were trying to move them to the sidewalk during the university’s Homecoming Parade on October 10.
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Less than two weeks later, the assistant communication professor was captured on video during a separate incident, when she called for “some muscle” to help her eject a student-journalist at protest site on the university’s quad. Taken by a body camera on a Columbia police officer, the video shows Click yelling an expletive at the officers.
During the video, Click can be seen verbally berating members of the Columbia Police Department, even telling one of the officers attempting to corral the crowd, “Get your f-cking hands off of me!”
“We must have high expectations of members of our community, and I will address these new revelations with the Board of Curators as they work to complete their own review of the matter”, said Foley.
Interim Chancellor Hank Foley was not available for comment Tuesday. Then-Chancellor Dr. R. Bowen Loftin and then-System President Wolfe both resigned in November.
Click said she did not realize the person she tried to remove from the quadrangle was a student and that he had only identified himself as “media”.
In suspending Click last month, the university system’s governing Board of Curators ordered an investigation by its general counsel to determine whether additional discipline “is appropriate”.
Republicans in the state General Assembly, especially those with elevated political ambitions, are fixated on University of Missouri assistant professor Melissa Click. Click can be heard shouting at the officers to “back up” and to get their “hands off” her and the demonstrators. “I didn’t ever intend for harm to come to Mark at any point”, Melissa Click said.
“I was drawn to stand in solidarity with these students due to their moving message of racial exclusion and the angry responses of the onlookers”, Click said in a statement released by Status Labs, a crisis management and online reputation management firm.
Click was charged with assault in January. “If my safety is in jeopardy, if there’s someone threatening my school and the students there, the teachers there should not be emailing, ‘Well if you don’t feel like coming to class then there’s still going to be an exam and you’re still going to be held accountable, ‘ that doesn’t make sense to me”, Harris concluded.
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“My mistake is just one part of who I am”, she told the Missourian in a recent interview.
