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.
