Video: Mizzou Prof Asks For 'Muscle' To Remove Student Photojournalist

By Emma G. Gallegos in News on Nov 10, 2015 4:56PM

Melissa Click (YouTube)

The University of Missouri, whose president resigned yesterday for his mishandling of racial harassment on campus, has become a battlefield over free speech.

The Mizzou student group Concerned Student 1950 may have ended its hunger strike in the wake of their president's resignation, but many students continued their protest into Monday. They've drawn a lot of attention for their tactics of demanding privacy during their public protest and physically shutting out media. In one video, a student photojournalist, Tim Tai, is seen being shoved away from covering the protest.

"You need to back up, respect the students," Melissa Click, a professor of Mass Media, says in the video. “BACK UP! They have asked you to respect their space, move back. This is their time. You need to step out of here now. You need to go.”

When a videographer manages to break past the wall of protesters, Click gets into a confrontation with him, too. Sounding more like a mafia honcho than someone who studies mass media, she asks, "Hey who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here." This confrontation starts at the 7:10-minute mark:

Click's move has shifted attention away from the protest itself to whether today's campus culture squashes freedom of expression. A Mizzou journalism professor was horrified at Click asking a student journalist to be physically removed:

Some pointed out that just days earlier she was courting media attention. Mark Schierbecker, the student who took the video, spoke out against the "human meat wall" that rolled over him and other journalists:

However, Tim Tai, the photographer in the video, released a gracious statement on Twitter trying to refocus attention back to the protest:

A lot of hardworking journalists were physically blocked from doing their jobs - I just happened to be on video. I didn't ask for notoriety. I don't have any ill will toward the people in the video. I think they had good intentions though I'm not sure why it resorted to shoving. My personal intention has never been to vilify the people in the video and I'm not sure why anyone thought it was OK to send them threats. I wish it could have turned into a learning experience on both ends, like the positive encounter I had with CS1950's Reuben Faloughi later. I'm a little perturbed at being part of the story, so maybe let's focus some more reporting on systemic racism in higher ed institutions.

Update 12:20 p.m.: It sounds like protesters have had a change of heart this morning:

And the students have received some scary blowback: