University of Missouri seeks new leadership after poor handling of racial issues

Protests have been led by a group called ConcernedStudent1950, which says black students have endured racial slurs and white students benefit from favouritism in many aspects of campus life.

Tim Wolfe stepped down from office Monday morning, and the school’s chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, announced he will vacate his office in January.

The Concerned Student 1950 name is a reference to the history of the university, which enrolled its first black student in 1950.

Head football coach Gary Pinkel expressed solidarity with players on Twitter, posting a picture of the team and coaches locking arms. A one-game forfeit would cost the school $1 million and the bad press would have hurt athletic recruiting and admissions indefinitely.

The target of their boycott gone, members of the Missouri football team expressed satisfaction Monday and said their refusal to practice or play was an important step toward changing the campus culture. One of the most notorious incidents involved a swastika drawn with feces on a bathroom wall in a campus dorm, although the identity and motives of the perpetrator remain unclear.

Shortly after Wolfe’s resignation, Jonathan Butler, the graduate student who had been on an eight-day hunger strike, tweeted that his strike was “officially over”.

To Butler, Wolfe’s resignation was “just wow”. And so, like Tim Wolfe, he resigned.

“We’ve experienced different acts of racist bigotry as well as toward our B.S.U members and black students on campus”, says black student leader Justice Davis.

“With University of Missouri’s president stepping down, we demand Rochon do the same as it is vital to fight against both covert and overt racism in all places of education and empowerment”, the group said on a Facebook event page it created, where 500 students confirmed their attendance.

“We criticize Mizzou because we love Mizzou”, Ware said.

“They’ve never seen a person dying in front of them”, he said about student athletes.

The reporter gets into a heated exchange with one woman about first amendment rights and later about personal space and respect. They are now calling for the resignation of the Chancellor of all Missouri state universities.

Watch Roland Martin, David Wallace, Student Communications Dir. of the Missouri Students Association and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the resignations of Wolfe and Loftin.

“We are hopeful we can begin a process of healing and understanding on our campus”, the coach said in a statement, Missouri media reported.

Complaints about racism had been brewing for months at the flagship University of Missouri campus in Columbia.

Video of the incident shot by student Mark Schierbecker and posted to YouTube (http://bit.ly/20K6AtG ) had more than 644,000 views as of early Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m not naive to think that internally there were players that put their hand up and said I’m in, but are really in just because of the team”.

Among them is Reuben Faloughi, a third-year doctoral student, who said Monday that his experience with activism after Brown’s shooting death by a police officer “planted the seeds that students can challenge things”.