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Missouri president resigns following protests

Amid racial tensions, a series of protests and a boycott by the football team, Tim Wolfe, the University of Missouri systems president, resigned yesterday. Still, though, the anonymous player thinks the departures of the system president and university chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, who announced his resignation Monday evening, will catalyze change in a way the previous administrators never cared to.

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The Concerned Student 1950 protesters organized a boycott of University of Missouri merchandise, events and dining services, and on November 5, the group organized a protest before the Missouri-Mississippi State football game.

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe “Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.’ We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students” experience”.

Athletics Director Mack Rhoades and head football coach Gary Pinkel said in a joint statement that there will be a news conference later Monday.

Racially charged incidents at the University of Missouri have led to numerous protests, students refusing to speak to reporters and aggressively kicking out photographers, a hunger strike by a graduate student, and at least 30 black football players announcing they were on strike.

Wolfe’s announcement came at the start of what had been expected to be a lengthy closed-door meeting of the school’s governing board.

Foley said that he wants “to make people feel included and make them feel that this is their campus”.

“Mizzou is very, very, very segregated”, said Missouri junior Carli Rabon, who is white.

Other students, including a member of the university staff, formed a barrier with their bodies to keep Tai out.

“If it was not for the stance of the football team”, Chappelle-Nadal said after Wolfe resigned, “this would not have happened”.

Protests against Wolfe followed several racial incidents at Mizzou but escalated after the homecoming parade in Columbia.

It is a regular part of the Missouri football team’s schedule to meet with media at the beginning of each game week, and sure enough, members of the team spoke to media Monday ahead of their game Saturday against BYU.

“We have [had] reactionary, negligent individuals on all levels at the university level on our campus and at the university system level, and so there job descriptions explicitly say that they’re supposed to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all students…but when we have issues of sexual assault, when we have issues of racism, when we have issues of homophobia, the campus climate continues to deteriorate because we don’t have strong leadership, willing to actually make change”, Butler said Sunday night in a Q&A interview with the Washington Post. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student.

The student activist tweeted that he had ended his hunger strike and said, “More change is to come!!”

Wolfe, 57, was hired in 2012 from the corporate world, not academia, an outsider brought in to cut costs in the four-campus system.

Butler published a letter on Twitter signed by Concerned Student 1950 describing the protest. “BACK UP! They have asked you to respect their space, move back”.

“I take full responsibility for the actions that have occurred”. Moore promised his support to Jonathan Butler, the grad student who decided he would not eat until Wolfe stepped down, and then shared his experience with his roommate, Anthony Sherrils. These students are shaped by the startling contrast of the nation’s first black president and the black lives matter movement. “Who among my friends knows someone who would want a scoop on this incredible topic?” wrote Click, who was recognized as an “Outstanding Mentor” in 2011.

The students say there has been an increase in “tension and inequality with no systemic support” since last year’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in Ferguson.

Wide receiver J’Mon Moore said Monday that a friend told him about Butler. But that drew angry reactions from protesters as being too little, too late.

Complaints about racism had been brewing for months at the flagship University of Missouri campus in Columbia.

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Students who pressed for Wolfe’s ouster celebrated it Monday. Ivey is the leader of Mizzou Men for Men, a group for athletes that discusses topics including race and treatment of women. This can happen. After those SAE slurs, Oklahoma players and coaches stood as one.

Tim Wolfe