Online threats heighten tensions at University of Missouri

One post on anonymous social media app Yik Yak resulted in MU students being concerned for their safety and an increased police presence on campus.

In a longer version of the video of the confrontation posted on Tuesday, Click can be heard mocking the objections of a student reporter identified as Mark Schierbecker, who told her that the protest grounds are “public property”.

In this November 9, 2015 frame from video, Janna Basler, right, who works in the University of Missouri’s office of Greek life, tells photographer Tim Tai, to “leave these students alone” in their “personal space”, in Columbia, Mo.

A University of Missouri professor who is seen in a video requesting “muscle” to kick out a journalist from the scene of a protest has given up her journalism appointment. The arrest comes two days after the university’s president resigned following protests over school administrators’ response to reports of racism on campus.

Click issued a statement that she shared with the university’s Department of Communication that she wanted to “offer both apology and context for my actions”.

Students who pressed for Wolfe’s ouster celebrated Monday.

Soon after Tim Wolfe, president of the university, announced he would step down on Monday, a crowd of more than 1,000 gathered peacefully at the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, for a “March of Resilience”, in solidarity with Missouri.

The 19-year-old man arrested for allegedly making online threats against black students and faculty at the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus is a student at one of its other campuses.

The suspect is in MUPD custody and was not located on or near the MU campus at the time of the threat.

“We had additional officers on patrol last night and the campus remained safe”, Major Brian Weimer said in a statement.

David Kurpius, the dean of Mizzou’s lauded School of Journalism, said on Twitter that Click would likely lose her courtesy appointment in the journalism department (which is separate from the communications department) following her actions.

Park was taken by University of Missouri police to Columbia, where he is jailed. But by the end of that day, a campus sit-in had grown in size, graduate student groups planned walkouts and politicians began to weigh in.

The governing board also promised a full review of other policies, more support for victims of discrimination and a more diverse faculty.

Task forces addressing inclusion will be required on all four of its campuses.

State Rep. Brandon Ellington, a Democrat from Kansas City, says the caucus also plans to meet with university officials later Tuesday after they meet with the students on the Columbia campus.

Numerous protests have been led by an organization called Concerned Student 1950, which gets its name from the year the university accepted its first black student.

Sophomore Katelyn Brown said she wasn’t necessarily aware of chronic racism at the school, but she applauded the efforts of black students groups.

“It spread quickly through social media, and soon, a few black students were leaving their dorms out of fear, preferring to spend the night with friends off campus”.

Mike Sickels, another doctoral student, also credited protests in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb about a two-hour drive from Columbia, as inspiration.