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How Missouri football just took down university president

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 11:49 am
by dead_poet
:shock:
For the past week, a graduate student at the University of Missouri has been on a hunger strike, hoping to force the school system's president to resign his position over a perceived failure to address racist incidents on campus. The student, Jonathan Butler, objects to president Tim Wolfe's lack of response to "racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience" at Missouri, as he wrote in a letter.

It's a dramatic step — and one that Butler pledged to maintain until "either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost." But the issues at the core of his protest didn't gain widespread national attention until a few dozen other students weighed in: the University of Missouri football team, which announced that it would not play until Wolfe left his position. On Friday, there were a few hundred tweets about the University of Missouri. On Sunday, there were nearly 16,000.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... ?tid=sm_tw

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 12:26 pm
by PurpleMustReign
This is a very interesting story, and many are not aware of all of the events that lead up to it. Many are calling for scholarships to be yanked. But there are quite a few incidents that have people upset.

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Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 12:47 pm
by dead_poet
PurpleMustReign wrote:This is a very interesting story, and many are not aware of all of the events that lead up to it. Many are calling for scholarships to be yanked. But there are quite a few incidents that have people upset.

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I haven't looked too much into it but what are the incidents?

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 1:04 pm
by fiestavike
Rubish. I'll bet any incident they cite is a hoax.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 3:29 pm
by DK Sweets
I know a ton of people who have gone to Mizzou and I have heard multiple stories of the student body having a strong showing of racist entitled jerks. I wasn't surprised in the slightest when this happened.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 3:34 pm
by dead_poet
DK Sweets wrote:I know a ton of people who have gone to Mizzou and I have heard multiple stories of the student body having a strong showing of racist entitled jerks. I wasn't surprised in the slightest when this happened.
Any examples?

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 4:42 pm
by fiestavike
dead_poet wrote: Any examples?
Everything I read about in relation to this was impossible to substantiate or to confirm that the source wasn't the person who reported it.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 5:13 pm
by DK Sweets
dead_poet wrote: Any examples?
I don't have anything concrete, no. I'm honestly not even sure I've heard an actual story, but I've heard many comments something to the tune of "Most of the students are ####." Racism was one of the things talked about.

I'm not here to say I can confirm anything, I'm just saying I've heard of a racism issue at Mizzou long before this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if the concerns are real.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 6:33 pm
by fiestavike
DK Sweets wrote:I don't have anything concrete, no. I'm honestly not even sure I've heard an actual story, but I've heard many comments something to the tune of "Most of the students are ####." Racism was one of the things talked about.

I'm not here to say I can confirm anything, I'm just saying I've heard of a racism issue at Mizzou long before this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if the concerns are real.
Even if the stories were true (very unlikely) what was the president supposed to do? At the end of the day, these students are just fascists.

How Missouri football just took down university president

Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:21 pm
by DK Sweets
fiestavike wrote:
Even if the stories were true (very unlikely) what was the president supposed to do? At the end of the day, these students are just fascists.
I've obviously heard the term "fascist" before, but since I wasn't very familiar with it I googled it and honestly, I'm still not entirely sure why that's the term you used. That isn't meant as an insult, I truly am just admitting my ignorance. The two pages I looked at both said that (especially as an insult) the term fascist is vague.

With that admission out of the way, I still disagree with the parts of your response that I understood. I don't know how I feel about everything that's going on at Mizzou, and it seems like the media is getting caught up in the race issue as the whole purpose for this while in reality the racism angle is one of many issues they have. Still, even if we're focusing solely in the racism angle, I don't know why I would have heard about this issue years ago if it was all a political stunt.

Different institutions, for whatever reason, end up having different issues stick around their campus over a period of years. These issues need tackled, and for a long time this one has largely been ignored. It wouldn't have come to this if they had been proactive about the issues, so it's hard for me to feel bad for anybody.

I've skimmed the timeline of issues recently and I'm honestly not sure what needed to be done, but the fact that the students felt like they were being ignored (and in the graduate students' case, there is evidence that they were - 12 years worth of surveys hadn't been reviewed) is what caused the blowup. I can empathize with that.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 8:28 am
by Texas Vike
Nice post, DK.

Additionally, I cannot imagine that the FB team would make the decision to not play in a capricious manner. That's a big statement to make; I would have to think that the coach and his staff did their due diligence on the matter before making that decision.

Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 8:43 am
by PurpleMustReign
The president resigned. I will post a link later.

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Re: How Missouri football just took down university presiden

Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2015 11:59 am
by GoldenBear91
This is just plain wrong. It's a straw man for an issue that could never be solved by the president of a university. One man does not have the ability to seek out and punish these acts. If the police are on the case what is he supposed to do if a suspect is not caught? I guess get fired???