Online threat suspect mimicked wording of OR campus killer, police say

Emboldened by the resignation of the University of Missouri’s president over the school’s handling of racist incidents, students from Yale to Vanderbilt have been staging protests to call attention to racism on college campuses. The university initially said Loftin would stay as chancellor until the end of the year. And most of all, they felt that disconnect from the white leadership of the university, whose ignorance of or indifference to the lived experience of many students and faculty of color made them seem out of touch at best.

Wednesday night, MU Policy Now, a graduate professional student activist group, submitted a formal letter to the Board of Curators advocating for Middleton.

Concerned Student 1950 seeks to liberate black college students, according to the organization’s Twitter page.

Middleton is one of the first black graduates of the Missouri law school and thus familiar with the University’s complicated and fraught history with black students.

He also spoke candidly about the challenges the four-campus system faces and the broader societal divide that he’s spent most of his adult life trying to bridge, including a stint in Washington as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He became deputy chancellor in 1998 and retired in August. In that role, he was credited with turning the women’s studies and black studies programs into their own departments. Because the county courts were closed for Veterans Day, he was not expected to appear before a judge until at least Thursday.

“Don’t go to campus tomorrow”, “Well tomorrow Mizzou will really make national news”, and “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see”.

“Not only do we wish to highlight the systemic oppression faced by black and brown students in collegiate institutions, but also to emphasize the impact they have on their surrounding communities”, they said.

Those records noted that Park was a student at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, where Heckmaster confronted Park early Wednesday in the computer-science major’s dorm room. “I just … deep interest”, Heckmaster wrote. Heckmaster said he asked if the threats amounted to “saber rattling”, and Park responded, “pretty much”.

Questioned specifically what he meant by the phrase: “Some of you are alright”.

“I take this opportunity to affirm our commitment to diversity as we continue to explore ways to express that commitment to members of the Ball State Community”, Ferguson wrote in an email.

Authorities also were investigating another threat on Yik Yak, this one leveled at the Rolla campus by someone saying, “I’m gonna shoot up this school”.

Connor Stottlemyre, a student at Northwest Missouri State University, was arrested by campus police in Maryville, Missouri, for threatening violence. But, he said, “there’s the danger of us falling back into the status quo”.

Two months of protests for change culminated in Monday’s resignation 36 hours after the involvement of the Missouri Tigers football players. They were made during a time of racial unrest on campus that resulted in the resignations Monday of the university system president and the Columbia campus chancellor.

Black students are also more likely to feel uncomfortable on campus – supposedly one of the most liberal, progressive campuses in the nation – than other racial groups, according to the results of the campus climate survey conducted in 2013.

Then more than 30 members of the Missouri football team refused to practice or play in support of the hunger striker. After Wolfe stated he’d resign, Butler ended his hunger strike – a week after he began.

At schools across the country, leaders of student groups say the Missouri protests are emboldening them to take a harder line.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – The University of Missouri’s governing board on Thursday appointed one of its first black law school graduates to be the university system’s interim president, and he vowed to address the frustrations behind student-led protests that helped force his predecessor from office.

In addition to talking about what the administration or faculty should be doing, a few students at the rally talked about what they could do for each other.