World’s most-famous Red-Headed Prof refuses to go away quietly
Not happy warrior after firing by Mizzou
Well, this is awkward.
Embattled former Missouri Professor, Melissa Click, is refusing to accept that she is a professor no more.
CNN reported:
Melissa Click appealed the decision and is now getting support from the American Association for University Professors.
The AAUP announced Monday that it would be investigating Click’s firing.
Click, an assistant professor of communications, said she was pleased by the news. She maintains that she was fired without due process when the university’s Board of Curators “overstepped their authority.”
According to a university spokesperson, Click was fired for failing to meet the standards expected of faculty members.
Click might claim she was denied due process, but by all accounts, the University was more than generous in considering her case prior to voting 4-2 to cut her lose.
The statement from Henrickson cited Click’s behavior at the Homecoming parade, when she cursed at a police officer who was moving protesters out of the street, and on Nov. 9 at Concerned Student 1950’s protest site on the Carnahan Quadrangle. Her actions at the protest site, Henrickson said, “when she interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students, we believe demands serious action.”
The investigators hired by the curators reviewed videos, documents and conducted more than 20 interviews, Henrickson said.
“She has the right to appeal her termination,” Henrickson said. “The board went to significant lengths to ensure fairness and due process.”
Click famously “used muscle” against journalists attempting to cover a student protest. Days later she was suspended. In January, Melissa Click was charged with class C assault.
As Professor Jacobson wrote in February, “Click claimed this was an aberration and that she’s not really the wacko she appears to be on the video.” And then video of a nasty police confrontation surfaced.
In Februrary, Click was canned.
As the Columbia Daily Tribune reported, Click had become an expensive political liability. “The House Budget Committee will consider a spending bill next week that cuts $402,000 from the Columbia campus budget — the amount of Click’s salary as well as that of her department chair and the dean of the College of Arts and Science — and $7.6 million from the UM System’s administrative budget,” they reported.
Click responded calling the firing unfair:
Fired Assistant Professor Melissa Click, in her statement to explain her actions during campus protests, challenged the fairness and accuracy of the investigative report used by the University of Missouri Board of Curators to fire her.
In a five-page statement released along with the investigative report and a statement from Board of Curators Chair Pam Henrickson, Click said she should not be judged based on video recordings of her actions at a Homecoming parade protest and at the Concerned Student 1950 protest site on Carnahan Quadrangle.
“While some would judge me by a short portion of videotape, I do not think that this is a fair way to evaluate these events,” Click wrote. “Those videotaped moments (for which I have formally and publicly apologized) deserve to be understood in a wider frame of reference, among all of the momentous events of the fall semester.”
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Comments
Her husband, as I recall, is a Religious Studies professor and department chair at the same University.
Awkward . . .
I bet he has to turn the other cheek all the time.
…and also participated in denying student journalists their right to cover the activities in the public areas.
She has a husband?
I would assume that the husband is a woman claiming to be transgender who dresses as a man.
*snort* You made me laugh!
“There have been many famous red-headed people throughout history. People like…Ron Howard…and…others…” – Cartman
And my brother Alfred E. Neuman, in his younger days.
Just another reason to stay away from gingers in academia.
Except for Doctor Who. Doctor Who has never been ginger.
Doctor Whom?
OK, good. Ron Howard. We already had him, but good…
Loved that episode! “Need more lava?”
Academia doesn’t realize that the tax payers are getting pretty tired of these self-entitled jerks.
Or they realize, but don’t care.
“While some would judge me by a short portion of videotape, I do not think that this is a fair way to evaluate these events”
Really idiot?
The ‘fair way to evaluate these events’ is to believe if you act that way when you KNOW there are cameras and witnesses around, who the hell knows how you act, who you abuse, and how you will abuse them when there aren’t around!
Apparently Click miscalculated her value to the university by about $402,000. Heh.
“…Melissa Click appealed the decision and is now getting support from the American Association for University Professors.
The AAUP announced Monday that it would be investigating Click’s firing.”
This may be a dangerous thing to say as Prof. Jacobson is, well, a professor. But these clowns have me firmly convinced 99.9% of people would be better off going to trade school and learning plumbing or welding or maybe joining the Navy or Air Force and wrenching on aircraft and later getting their FAA qualifications.
You’d have to go quite a distance to convince me the members of the AAUP have something to teach worth learning.
“…maybe joining the Navy or Air Force and wrenching on aircraft and later getting their FAA qualifications.”
Sorry, no. Most civil aviation (airline) maintenance has been outsourced overseas. There are FAA-certified mechanics with years of experience standing in line trying to get a job at McDonald’s.
Rusty Bill, I stand corrected.
My experience, considering I retired in early 2008, is almost 10 years out of date.
Then you have more experience than I do (ex-Air Force communications tech). My info come from:
1. Just finished reading “Attention All Passengers” by William J. McGee. He discusses how outsourcing of maintenance has resulted in loss of stateside jobs, among other things. The book is c. 2012.
2. There has been a noticeable drop-off of activity at the maintenance hangars at San Antonio International. Those hangars are visible from the parking lot at my work. Same at other hangars on the other side of the field, which I pass by coming and going every day (I live on the opposite side of the airport from my job).
3. Boss’s family also runs an HVAC business. They’ve had ex-mechanics calling/coming in looking for work.
4. Co-worker’s husband works for a national tool manufacturer. Sales to the airport have cratered.
Anecdotal, I grant you, but still…
I suppose this means that she won’t be judging police shootings based on short video tapes. She will wait for a full investigation with due process.
In fairness to her, she was almost certainly selected precisely because she was a SJW activist wacko and, in fact, she probably got her position over other candidates precisely because she was the most radical and over-the-top of the candidates available.
I dislike the effort to focus solely on her when it should be beyond clear that persons with her personality are aggressively sought out, selected and promoted for the types of behaviors that, by happenstance in this instance, got her in trouble (an extremely rare event). She could reasonably point out that at many (most?) college campuses behavior like hers or worse (much worse in the case of the many professors who were weather underground members, etc.) is a cause of celebration by the campus radical leadership and many instances grounds for promotion. In other words, she is a scapegoat that helps hide a much larger problem, that we are filling our teaching ranks with radical activists selected precisely because they are radical activists. She was probably doing her job precisely as she understood her SJW bosses and fellow faculty members wanted her to do it. That’s the real scandal.
“She maintains that she was fired without due process”
I don’t know whether to be amused or outraged at the hypocrisy of a feminist academic protesting lack of due process.