After an investigation of the firing of Melissa Click, a communications professor who became a divisive national symbol during student protests at the University of Missouri last fall, a committee of the American Association of University Professors has concluded that her termination is a sign that academic freedom is endangered at the university.
The Board of Curators, the governing body that fired Click, strongly defended its actions on Wednesday.
During intense protests over race and other issues at the public flagship university this fall, Click was videotaped yelling at police and later, after demonstrators had forced the resignation of both the chancellor and the university system president, screaming at students trying to report about the protests and pushing one student’s camera away.
Those moments, which went viral, became lasting images of the unrest in Missouri and the protests, which spread to many campuses. To some, Click came to symbolize the willful smothering of free speech in a misguided attempt to protect students from offensive ideas that caused real damage to the public university. The backlash was intense. More than 100 state legislators demanded that she be fired, and state funding was at stake. Click was charged with assault, a charge later dropped in exchange for community service.
Click, who has repeatedly apologized for her actions, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Wednesday. She said earlier this spring that it was easier for people to be angry at her, a white woman with a doctorate, than the black students who had become so powerful and forced so much change. Many faculty members signed a letter supporting her this winter.
The University of Missouri Board of Curators voted in February to fire her, and upheld their decision in March.
Later that month, members of the American Association of University Professors visited the Columbia, Missouri, campus to investigate the termination.
In a report issued publicly Thursday, the investigating committee wrote at length of the circumstances surrounding her dismissal, including the tensions on campus and elsewhere in Missouri after a police shooting earlier that year.
The report cited numerous concerns and concluded that there had been violations of academic due process: She was denied the requisite hearing before a faculty group. She was terminated immediately after her appeal, rather than being given the typical one-year salary or notice.
The committee was not convinced that her actions, even given the most unfavorable view possible, warranted her dismissal.
The board’s unilateral decision to fire her ignored the usual role of the faculty and administration and overstepped its own authority, the committee found.
The committee also suggested that Click’s actions were not the real impetus for her termination and that the legislature was inappropriately interfering with the university.
Pam Henrickson, chair of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, responded Wednesday with a written statement :
“The Board of Curators continues to stand behind our actions, which were in the best interests of the University, regarding Dr. Melissa Click’s misconduct. As the AAUP’s report acknowledges, this case did not involve a denial of Dr. Click’s academic freedom. But the AAUP’s report disregards the seriousness of her misconduct and reaches inconsistent and unsupported conclusions. The facts of this case could not be more clear and the Board’s full response to the final AAUP report will provide detailed facts that support our actions.”
In June, the AAUP will consider whether to recommend censure of the administration and could vote to do so at its annual meeting later that month.
The AAUP noted that the University of Missouri administration has been censured twice before, most recently in 1973-1980, “the facts of which are strikingly similar to the present case. . . . ‘Curators had overreacted massively and ominously’ in taking disciplinary actions, without adequate safeguards of academic due process, against a number of faculty members following campus demonstrations that had occurred in 1970. The investigating committee at the time concluded that the ‘penalties which were imposed, and the manner in which they were imposed, cast a pall on the freedom,'” of faculty there.
The censure was lifted after the university added its current dismissal policy, which the AAUP committee maintains was violated by the firing of Click.
