The agreement was supposed to keep Loftin as chancellor through the end of the year, but on Thursday, the Board of Curators “accelerated the transition of authority” by immediately installing Hank Foley as interim chancellor. One student even engaged in a hunger strike.
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By Sunday, all 124 Tigers players, approximately half of whom are black, had joined the resistance movement and earned the support of head coach Gary Pinkel, who told The NY Times he was moved to action by his team’s concern for a fellow student.
With their mouths duct-taped shut, dozens of students gathered at the University of Cincinnati for a silent protest Wednesday.
“Our campus is open and operating today in full force because that is in the best interest of our community”, Farahi said in his statement, urging students and staff “to continue in your normal routines”.
Bryant called Middleton the “unquestioned choice” for students due to his past leadership in academia and the professional world, along with his commitment to diversity in all of his roles.
The school with the largest percentage of black faculty, the University of MS at 6.29 percent, also had the largest percentage of black students, 15.26 percent.
Now, just months after his retirement on August 31, Middleton is back on campus. I was raised in a town where I knew maybe 10 people of any other race or ethnicity. As a student and person of color, I have watched these events unfold in the news and right here on campus, and I am troubled by the tendency to bring up free speech as an inherent counter to what’s occurring on college campuses.
“(We have to) understand the ugly, ugly history that permeates everything we do in our institutions in this country”, Middleton said at the press conference. But in 2015, I think we are a little too far along historically to immediately discount their outrage. Beginning in 1997 he served as the Interim Vice Provost for Minority Affairs and Faculty Development for the University of Missouri.
“Even though he’s only here for a year, this is a stepping stone”, she said. “The university has reached out to someone who can really make a change and try to fix what’s been broken in the UM System”.
The University of Missouri at Columbia has been rocked by protests over racial incidents and what was seen by many as an inadequate response by the university administration to those incidents. She said Middleton’s experience in law and familiarity with “political processes” made him a good candidate.
After a race teach-in held at Battell Chapel on November 11, student activists at Yale were able to speak with Ayanna Poole, a student at Mizzou and founder of the Concerned Student 1950 organization.
She said GPC endorsed Middleton for the reasons laid out in the MU Policy Now’s letter.
Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity.
Interim University President Michael Middleton seems to be approaching the governing challenge with optimism.
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While students across the country are standing in solidarity with those at UM, a few students at the University of SC are making a call to their own university to be more inclusive. She was upstairs doing her homework when she heard chants from outside and downstairs. Winthrop student sophomore Sandez Werts says while he believes the Rock Hill, South Carolina, school would respond appropriately if a racially motivated crime were to happen, he has not been given a clear and direct way of reporting incidents like these if they were to happen. “At the root of it is not just encouraging but ensuring that high school students and undergraduate students are aware of that as a career path”, Olivares said.
