Professor calls Mizzou administration cowards, enablers

A professor at the University of Missouri published an article addressed to the system’s administration, labeling its handling of the November protests cowardly and enabling.

Professor Marty Rochester, who teaches in the system’s political science department, said he looked on “with a mixture of amazement and horror” at the protests that unfolded on campus last fall.

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“Amazement, because perhaps never before have so few students been able to get so many college administrators to display so much cowardice over so little provocation, as the Mizzou protests have emboldened the radical left to hold campuses hostage to threats of disruption all across the country. Horror, because perhaps never before have we seen quite this combination of totalitarianism and stupidity at work on college campuses, making a mockery of so-called higher education,” Rochester wrote.

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Rochester went on to articulate the contradiction between the protesters’ demands and their actions towards faculty and staff.

“The same collegians who utter obscenities at university officials and their peers claim a right not to be 'offended' or made ‘uncomfortable’ by even the slightest counterpoint to their worldviews, their psyches so fragile as to require ‘trigger warnings’ in advance of any ideas that might deny them a ‘safe space,’” he wrote, before calling college students “sophomoric” and “snowflakes.”

Rochester concluded his article by pointing out the many diversity initiatives already achieved by the Mizzou administration, which led Rochester to think “one can never do enough to remedy discrimination.”

The professor noted that former University of Missouri System President Elson Floyd was black; Payton Head, the current student body president, is black; and one of the students responsible for leading a hunger strike during the protests, Jonathan Butler, was raised by an affluent father who earned over $8 million in 2014. Butler claimed he was protesting “systems of oppression.”

“No ‘Animal House’ movie sequel could do justice to the current campus follies,” Rochester wrote, lambasting the irony of Butler’s involvement in the protests. He proceeded to say student protesters and their corresponding demands are turning universities into “mentally challenged” institutions.

Rochester published his article on Heterodox Academy, a blog site founded by a group of college professors devoted to dispelling political homogeneity on campus.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski