Anarchy reigns at University of Missouri

Threat: “This is just the beginning”

By now we’ve all heard about the student protests at the University of Missouri resulting in the resignations of the school’s president, Tim Wolfe and chancellor. R. Bowen Loftin. Amid demands for “racial justice” and insistence Wolfe acknowledge his “white male privilege,” the black activist student group known as Concerned Student 1950, made numerous other demands posted here in the Independent Journal.

Racism is not the issue. CNS News reports on the university’s black elected student body president, Peyton Head, discussing “empowerment.” This lunacy is rooted in leftist politics.

The school’s football team joined the fray after a black graduate student from a multimillionaire family,* began a hunger strike, bizarrely saying the dispute would either end with Wolfe resigning or the student dying. But it came down to the team, joined by its coach, using the threat of not playing its game against BYU, which if canceled would have cost the university well over $1 million.

Following Wolfe’s resignation, the university’s athletic department issued a statement that the football team would return to the practice field to prepare for its Saturday game.

After Wolfe weakly complied to the mob, the hunger striking student announced on Twitter that he had cancelled his self-imposed starvation.

“Our demands must be met in totality to create systems of healing within the UM System,” said Marshall Allen, one of the protesters. “In addition to this, students, staff and faculty of color must be involved in the process of deciding who will be our next UM System president.”

As is often the case, the adage “follow the money” works here. Not only is there the immense revenue generated by the football game, but there is also a back story that has received little attention. Unrest actually began in August when the university announced it would no longer be offering health insurance subsidies for graduate students. MU said it can no longer pay for graduate students’ health insurance because of changes in federal health care policy under Obamacare.

To no one’s surprise, the White House praised the protesters, though others regard the model of the football team holding the presidency hostage as setting a dangerous precedent and further proof that political correctness on university campuses has a stranglehold on rational thinking, making administrators who had recently been praised for their stewardship of a complex institution suddenly vulnerable to student mayhem.

Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder denounced a university faculty member who deprived student reporters of their First Amendment rights after she was videotaped harassing and trying to kick the reporters out of their “no media safe space.” Read his statement as reported on Mediaite here. Kinder will be running for governor on the Republican ticket in 2016.

*H/T Joe Holleman St. Louis Today