Shunning the University of Missouri

How bad is it at the University of Missouri?

It’s so bad that the New York Times has noticed. It’s not just that the news is fit to print. The story is now too big to ignore.

The story began in 2015 when the University was embroiled in student protests against racism.

The Times opens its extensive story:

In the fall of 2015, a grassy quadrangle at the center of the University of Missouri became known nationwide as the command center of an escalating protest.

Students complaining of official inaction in the face of racial bigotry joined forces with a graduate student on a hunger strike. Within weeks, with the aid of the football team, they had forced the university system president and the campus chancellor to resign.

It was a moment of triumph for the protesting students. But it has been a disaster for the university.

It’s called a pyrrhic victory. It shows the downside of trying to use protest and violence, threats and intimidation to advance a cultural program. Or better, to redefine the university mission away from education and toward cultural warfare.

What exactly did empowered leftist students accomplish?

Freshman enrollment at the Columbia campus, the system’s flagship, has fallen by more than 35 percent in the two years since.

The university administration acknowledges that the main reason is a backlash from the events of 2015, as the campus has been shunned by students and families put off by, depending on their viewpoint, a culture of racism or one where protesters run amok.

Before the protests, the university, fondly known as Mizzou, was experiencing steady growth and building new dormitories. Now, with budget cuts due to lost tuition and a decline in state funding, the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting more than 400 positions, including those of some nontenured faculty members, through layoffs and by leaving open jobs unfilled.

Parents and alumni have had it with Mizzou. They are boycotting the school, cutting it out of their wills and sending their children elsewhere. Reputation matters and the University has seen its reputation destroyed. It is not the only university that has suffered this indignity, but the shunning is certainly a step toward sanity. And toward universities becoming places where people could learn, not be indoctrinated in the dogmas of political correctness.

Of course, we all still remember Melissa Click. The sometime professor called for “some muscle” to shut down a student journalist:

As the protests continued to boil, demonstrators tried to block the news media from the encampment, and Melissa Click, a communications professor, called for “some muscle” to oust a student taking a video of the confrontation.

The Times reports:

In the minds of many, her outburst and the resignations became symbols of a hair-trigger protest culture lacking any adult control.

The university received a barrage of emails from alumni and families, some of which were published by National Review and Heat Street, a conservative news site.

In one, the parents of a junior wrote that while they did not underestimate the extent of bigotry in the world, “the way to effect change is NOT by resorting to the type of mob rule that’s become apparent over the past few days.”

To be fair, the Times is promoting the idea that some parents and alumni and students have been shunning the university because it has so much racism. This does not pass the plausibility test.

Yet, the university is responding to the public relations disaster by hiring more diversity officers and more minority faculty.

It’s called doubling down on stupid. One is left with the impression that it deserves its fate.