The whole deal was a clusterduck of the highest order.
The ex-president, Wolfe, was an alum and a failed corporate exec. His hiring was puzzling. He started slow and never gave any indication he was going to catch on. Then he hired a campus chancellor, Loftin, the ex-president at Texas A&M. He was horrible dictator-type against whom deans and faculty rebelled. Wolfe played pocket pool.
At first, Loftin took a warm and fuzzy approach to the protest "camp out" on a main university lawn. The group called themselves Concerned Students 1950. (Eleven students in number, by the way.)
When the group confronted Wolfe with "their demands" at the homecoming parade, Wolfe sat in his car frozen. The crap hit the fan.
One grad student goes on a hunger strike, the football team (egged on, many believe, by a now exS&C coach) takes a powder in support, the prez and the chancellor both hit the exit as a protest support group from Ferguson, Mo. shifts its attention to Mizzou.
Click was a communication instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her area of academic research includes the effect of Martha Stewart on feminism (I kid you not). She seems to forget she is not tenured and works on a campus whose main claim to fame is the world's first journalism school. She attempts to enforce a "safe area" for the protesters to celebrate the resignations of the prez and chancellor and in doing so interferes with a couple of student journalists.
Most of the J-School faculty, to which Click holds only a courtesy appointment, explodes. State politicians wanting to appease the electorate still upset by what they see as "lawlessness" in Ferguson pick Mizzou as an easy political target.
Beyond the J-School, the faculty is cautious. It should have fallen to the faculty senate to whack Ms. Click. The faculty senate dawdled. There was little administrative leadership from the "interim" president and chancellor who were focused on calming the campus. So, as PJ noted, the politicians filled the vacuum. The curators reacted when state appropriations were threatened.
The interim president Choi is replacing, by the way, was one of the leaders of black student protests on campus in the early 1970s. Many of the "demands" presented by the 2016 protested mirrored the "demands" made by his group decades before. That did not play well in the state capital either.
So many misplays, it is hard to count.
The election will be over and I think many have come to grips that the university is a key state asset that needs support and time to heal from largely self-inflicted wounds.
The announcement of Choi as president was made in the state capital, Jefferson City, not on the university's main campus in Columbia. That is seen as a move to start rebuilding bridges to the legislature.
I think Choi has a good chance of making something of it. He is the first "academic" president since 2007, so the faculty should welcome him. The students have been very quiet this academic year as many of the key actors are no longer in town. If Choi is wise in his choice of Columbia campus chancellor, it will help still more. (Like UConn, MU has multiple campuses, the main campus in Columbia, one in STL, one in KC and a science and tech university in Rolla. Each has a chancellor.)
Sorry for the length. Simply saying it was a clusterduck does not adequately explain the situation Choi is inheriting.
