You remember Melissa Click, right? The University of Missouri associate professor of communications hippie fascist who called for “some muscle over here” when a student reporter tried to make his way through a public campus space? You remember:
The Birkenstocks heard ’round the world!
Back in November, Blake Neff brought us “The 9 Most Preposterous Parts Of Melissa Click’s Absurd Résumé.” You can read her whole CV at Mizzou’s website. But the relevant bit here is that among the ridiculous things she “researched,” on the taxpayer’s dime, was the following:
4. “Saving food: Finding the politics of the everyday in food preservation. Environmental Communication, 4, 301-317”
Here, Click manages to spend 15 pages describing how the act of canning food can help destroy capitalism.
“Unlike the dominant discourses of food movements, which encourage an individualistic, consumer-oriented politics, food preservation emphasizes connection and relationships and thus has the potential to subvert the capitalistic logic of the global agro-food industry,” Click writes.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Professor!
It’s a bitter irony, then, that the very same capitalism Click wanted to subvert has now forced her to update that very same résumé.
Thomas K. Lindsay, Real Clear Politics:
Professor Click was fired by the UM Board of Curators last Thursday. But it wasn’t really the board that did her in. It was free markets — prospective students, their parents, donors, and alumni — expressing their displeasure with their checkbooks…
After detailing the crybully bull$#!+ that rocked the Mizzou campus last fall, Lindsay continues:
The continuing unrest came to a head last November, when both President Wolfe and Chancellor Loftin were forced from office. At the same time, the video of Professor Click hit social media…
This assault on the First Amendment rights of a student journalist — by a professor of communications, no less — was the straw that broke the campus’s back. The people of Missouri launched a protest of their own against the school’s handling of the protests. In January, it was reported that student applications had dropped 5 percent in the three months following the protests… Worse, the Columbia campus is suffering a 7.7 percent drop in high-scoring SAT and ACT applicants, and out-of-state applications are down 25 percent from last year…
And then the other shoe dropped: Last week, UM announced that new pledges and donations in December — a key month for university fundraising — fell $6 million, a decrease of roughly 31 percent.
$6 million? That’s a lotta home-canned tomatoes, Ms. Click!
So, they kicked her off the gravy train while there were still a few drops left. They stood behind an associate communications professor, who clearly has no idea how free speech is supposed to work, for as long as they could. But hey, they’ve gotta eat too.
Thomas K. Lindsay concludes by asking if this will be an object lesson for other schools undergoing mass temper tantrums like this. That all depends on whether the grownups want to keep funding insanely overpriced kindergartens for people who are old enough to fight and die for their country, but probably won’t.
Whaddaya say, grownups? Had enough yet?