Communications Professor Melissa Click’s controversial case is making headlines once more after she has been fired from the University of Missouri, as reported in Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In November of 2015, Click called for the forced removal of a student journalist from a protest on campus, violating several of the university’s faculty guidelines and calling into question the freedom of speech on campus. While these violations seem worthy of dismissal to many, whether or not Click’s firing is just is being called into question because of how the decision was made. Both articles describe the University of Missouri Board of Curators’ ruling as a violation of due process in the eyes of other faculty members.
If there was already an approved system in place for faculty review, why did the Board of Curators “ma[k]e one up as it went along,” in the words of Professor Ben Trachtenberg? Well, probably in part due to threats to reduce state budget, as reported by The Kansas City Star. The budget cut plan proposed by House Budget Chairman Tom Flanigan on February 23 of this year outlines $400,000 worth of salary cuts affecting Melissa Click, the chair of the communications department, and the dean of arts and science. An additional $7.6 million of proposed cuts would be aimed mostly at the president’s office and at (surprise, surprise) the Board of Curators. Two days after this plan was proposed, Melissa Click was fired.
As we have been discussing in class, every college today is essentially a business. When a traditional business’s financial backer doesn’t like what it sees, the backer threatens to pull its investment until a compromise can be made. That may be just what’s happening here in an astonishing game of “chicken,” but what does this say about the system of higher education as it stands? If these threats to funding are what caused, or even encouraged, the Board of Curators to make its final decision without following the university’s policy for the formal investigation of a professor, has the University bailed on its principles of defending a professor’s rights for the benefit of funding? Furthermore, now that Click has been fired, will Flanigan repeal his proposal? This seems unlikely to me, as Flanigan’s plan also included cuts of K-12 funds, but perhaps Click’s firing will serve to lessen the severity of the budget cuts. I will be interested to see what, if anything, comes of these recent developments in Missouri.
This is a complicated case. The President of Missouri lost his job in the midst of student protests about racism on campus (remember Ferguson is in Missouri, so that is close to home for many of the minority students). It is a question being widely debated whether Click, who apologized for her behavior in the heat of a demonstration against racism when she tried to get help to remove a student journalist who wanted to photograph the demonstration. This case illustrates a few things about higher education today — one is that presidents can be brought down by what in the wider view are events on campus like protests against national issues (as compared, for example to Graham Spanier losing his job at Penn State over the cover-up of the abuse of children by Jerry Sandusky when it was clear there were serious violations of the law, though some charges against Spanier and colleagues were later dropped). The other is that Boards of Trustees often act on the basis of their own political and butt-covering motives, rather than as wise heads of complex organizations. Whether Click deserved to be fired is still being debated in higher education circles. Whether the Board of Trustees should have used their power over budgets to threaten punishment of Mizzou is also being debated. Clearly, what used to be the view of higher education as an “Ivory Tower” existing separate and above events in the surrounding environment, if it ever was true, is no the situation now.