University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe resigned yesterday after the school’s football team threatened to go on strike. The threatened strike was in support of student protests over alleged “systematic oppression” of blacks at the school.
As at Yale, I have seen no reports of violence directed at any African-American at the University of Missouri. The “systematic oppression” appears to consist of a few incidents of racial slurs directed at a couple of black students (as I understand it, the main offender who was identified, a drunken student, was removed from campus pending formal disciplinary action).
Approximately 35,000 students attend the University’s Columbia campus. How can the University guarantee that no student will ever utter a racial slur?
Rich Lowry argues that the black students are really complaining about not being sufficiently coddled. I haven’t been on campus, but Lowry’s claim finds support in complaints like this one from the Student Association: “In the months [following the Michael Brown shooting], our students were left stranded, forced to face an increase in tension and inequality with no systemic support.”
Why the shooting of a thug who attacked a police officer required the University of Missouri to provide “systemic support” to students is unclear. What was the University supposed to do, postpone exams?
The Student Association also declared:
The academic careers of our students are suffering. The mental health of our campus is under constant attack. Our students are being ignored. We have asked the University to create spaces of healing and it failed to do so.
Translation: coddle us. Oh, and President Wolfe, give us a handwritten apology that acknowledges your “white privilege.”
Concluding that it was no privilege to preside over the infantile, Wolfe resigned.
He never stood a chance in the deranged environment of the politically correct modern university. Unlike so many college presidents, Wolfe made his bones in the real world.
According to his Wikipedia page, Wolfe began his career as a sales rep for IBM in 1980. He worked his way up the industry ladder, becoming president of Novell Americas in 2007. It’s unlikely that anyone demanded coddling from Wolfe during his corporate career.
Wolfe was named president of the University of Missouri in 2011. I imagine that he saw his mission more as maintaining the financial viability of the institution than as promoting “the mental health of [the] campus,” which he probably assumed was okay. Little did he know.
With his resignation, Wolfe can enjoy a return to the sane world, the football players can get on with the business of losing football games (the team is 1-5 in SEC play), and the University can find a spineless career administrator who will hire minority counselors to provide “systemic support” to the fragile and the hysterical.
However, the mental health of the campus seems beyond repair.
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