University of Missouri Pays a Brutal Cost for Appeasing Left Wing Activists

If you’re a university, this should be an exciting season.  Parents are rolling up to dorms, saying tearful goodbyes to their students.  Classes are beginning to start.

But at the University of Missouri, enrollment is down by 2,000 students and some dorms sit empty.  Where vibrant student life once reigned, parts of the school have become a veritable ghost town.  What gives?

Well, it all began two years ago, in the fall 2015, when protests broke out on Mizzou’s campus.  Jillian Kay Melchior at the Wall Street Journal reminds us what happened:

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

The public got angry and alums got even.  People vowed to stop donating money to the school or sending their kids there. Apparently, they weren’t joking:

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.

Good!  Let’s here it for righteous indignation!  Colleges need to realize that bowing down to the demands of radical campus leftists doesn’t make good financial sense.  (They should already realize it doesn’t make common sense, but… alas.)

Melchior sums it up nicely, “Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.”

Watch the report below:

Image Credit: Screen Cap