Missouri Football players on strike

[Downtown Osprey]

The University of Missouri football team has decided to not participate in anymore games until the schools President is fired. The tension has been mounting for quite sometime, and no matter which side of the fence you are on, these have all been peaceful protests and I applaud the students at this University for taking a stand.

Here is an excellent breakdown of all the events leading up to this point: http://www.themaneater.com/special-sections/mu-fall-2015/

[Downtown Osprey]

UPDATE: The President has officially stepped down.

[The_Choose_1]

Institutions of Higher Victimization Are Getting Exactly What They Deserve
November 09, 2015

RUSH: What's happening on the American college campus, the vaunted academy, to me, takes the top spot in the Stack of Stuff today.  For those of you who are just now getting attuned to what's happening during the day, the University of Missouri's embattled president has resigned. His name is Tim Wolfe.  He just quit, just resigned because of committing the crime of being a white male.

If you dig deep into this, I first heard about this, I think it was Friday after I got home from work.  I got a note from a friend of mine about this whole story and the subject line: "Wow, your home state's a weird place."  And I said, "Well, I already knew that.  What's this about?"  And that's when I started becoming familiar with the story on campus at the University of Missouri.  I did not attend.  The family did, but I am not a member of the alma mater there.

Now, if you haven't been following this story, this is a Social Justice Warriors story.  Some of the students as Mizzou have been calling for the president of the University to resign.  It's all an extenuation, a continuation of what started boiling over in Ferguson, Missouri, which is 120 miles down the road, down I-70.  And of course Ferguson had nothing to do with any of this that's happening on campus.  What's happening on campus had nothing to do with anything in Ferguson, and I wouldn't be surprised if what's happening at the University of Missouri has been imported from Ferguson in terms of leaders of the community organizers and agitators are concerned.

The pressure on the university president, I guess it really began, a student began a hunger strike with a list of demands.  None of them specific.  I mean, if you go through the list of demands here and the complaints, you don't find anything specific.  You find the major problem is that there are too many white people at this place, and they apparently are not nice enough or considerate enough to the 10% of the people there who are black, and so there has to be some changes.  But don't forget, folks, this is the place, it was just a couple of short years ago the University of Missouri got a gold star.  The University of Missouri was the leading, most sensitive university in America because that's where Michael Sam went to school.

Michael Sam, the first gay player to come out in advance of going to the NFL draft, picked up by the St. Louis Rams, didn't make the team, went to the practice squad of the Cowboys, didn't make the team, left to Canada, wasn't gonna make the team, so quit.  He's out of football for now.  But at the time the University of Missouri was heralded as a citadel of tolerance, a citadel of progressivism, a citadel of acceptance.  What happened?  What happened?  How could the place that led the nation in tolerance and love and acceptance for gay athletes on the football team, what could have made it fall so far so fast?

Okay.  Back to the details.  Student goes on a hunger strike after a list of demands, including that the university president quit and ride out of town.  Thirty black members of the Mizzou football team said that they would begin to boycott practices and games until the university president was forced out or until he resigned.  The faculty then joined, and then the head football coach Gary Pinkel then joined, and the die was cast.  Because, you see, the football program runs most major universities.  And if you take the football program out and the money that it generates out, you've got huge financial problems. It's incalculable, the damage.  The coach, I mean, he's gotta go out and recruit at the end of this season.  The last thing he can do is oppose his players.  Of course he's gotta join the players in the boycott.

The faculty did not like the president to begin with, before any of this started.  You know why?  The president, Tim Wolfe, only had a bachelor's degree.  He wasn't properly educated.  He didn't have a postgraduate degree. He didn't have one, period.  He just had a bachelor degree.  Now, they've got no problem with student athletes not learning anything.  The faculty at these places have no problem with student athletes barely attending class and few of them even graduating.  But when it comes to the university president, he was white, and he only had a bachelor's degree.  No specific complaints were actually ever cited.  It was basically a list of complaints about the atmosphere on campus.

The closest thing to a specific complaint that I've been able to find -- and correct me if I'm wrong on this -- the closest thing that I have been able to find to a specific complaint is that Wolf's car, the university president's car allegedly bumped a protester last month while he was surrounded by a crowd of screaming protesters.  And never mind that he apologized for that, quote, unquote, crime.  He apologized profusely.  But his car bumping one of the protesters apparently was an unacceptable, unforgivable crime against humanity.  He even said he should have gotten out of the car and apologized in person, which might have just ratcheted things up even more.  I have a list here of the University of Missouri student demands, and there's nothing specific in it.

Let's, instead, look at this in a different way.  Just to remind you, SB Nation, a sports website, back on February 10, 2014 -- this is just a year and a half ago -- "Michael Sam's Announcement Shines an Incredibly Positive Light on Mizzou."  Yeah, just a year and a half ago.  A year and a half ago, they loved Mizzou.  Well, they had a star linebacker, an African-American who was gay, and everybody knew he was gay but they kept the secret! He confided to the team; the team kept it a secret for whatever reasons, 'cause he didn't want to come out.

But the Missouri University system, the campus at Columbia -- the football team -- was apparently so enlightened a year and a half ago, that someone like Michael Sam was not only allowed to go and attend, but to prosper, succeed, excel, and be given an award.  And now... (interruption) Well, yeah, okay. There is one other thing. That's right.  It was reported in the Drive-Bys that some idiot made a swastika out of feces on a building and that the president didn't do enough about that when he was told about it.

So swastika, feces.  I don't know why that... Well, I don't know. What is racist about that? (interruption) Swastika? I can see a lot of people being offended by it, but is it a racially motivated thing?  I mean, it's no different... You know, the quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, Cam Newton? Did you hear what he did yesterday?  Well, they played the Packers.  They played the Packers in Charlotte and some Packers fans showed up wearing their cheeseheads and Packers jerseys, and they had a banner.

They had a banner that they had slung over the railing at field level. I forget exactly what it said, but it was something promoting the Packers, like: We're in Packer country here.  But they weren't. They were in Charlotte.  So Cam Newton says he saw it and he went over there and he grabbed it and tore it down, and the Packer fans thought he was coming over to talk to 'em and say, "Hey, man, good game," or whatever. He took it away, and they thought it was a joke, and he was gonna be bringing their banner back, but he didn't.

He said, "Look, last time we were in Green Bay, I didn't see anybody with a Panther sign. So I'm not gonna have to look at any Packer signs here in my home stadium.  This is about protecting the building," or whatever he said. He ripped it down.  But the University of Missouri president did not get mad enough at the feces-laden swastika sign.  Those are the two specific events that have taken place.  No, it makes total sense. If you put this in the right context, it makes total sense.  This is not about any specific grievance.

This is just the ongoing attempt by the left to capture what they're losing at the ballot box.  The Democrat Party's losing elections.  Ferguson didn't turn out the way the protestors wanted it to.  People have moved down the road.  You know what's really interesting about this to me (and there are many aspects of it that are interesting) is that if you look at this incident by itself, outside of the context, you would believe that we still live in the 1800s, that we are still pre-Civil War, that we still have slavery; we still have blatant racism and discrimination.

This country has done more to progress from those days, this country has done more to address the legitimate grievances...  We have altered policy.  We have had policies implemented to basically punish achievers because of their race in order to balance things out.  We have lowered entry standards.  We've done everything we can.  Affirmative action.  We've done quotas.  And as you see, it's never enough.  Because it's never really all about that.  And I, frankly, think part of me was all weekend and this morning watching this...

I know people are upset about it and wringing their hands together.  But it's also happening at Yale.  You know what happened at Yale? Some students are very upset by Halloween costumes.  It really... The students at Yale are demanding a safe area where they can be free from having to hear anything that upsets them, including opposing political points of view.  These 19 to 20, 22-year-old children simply need to feel safe and they don't feel safe on the campus, and the tipping point was when they saw some really scary Halloween costumes.

So a faculty member, a female faculty member says, "Well, just turn away if you don't want to look at the costumes." And they said, "Just turn away? We're surrounded by it! We can't turn away," and they surrounded the teacher and threatened the teacher, the professor, or what have you.  And so Yale is caving.  We, last week, talked about the various universities where they are setting up essentially hall monitor-type people to approve or disapprove of each and every Halloween costume on some college campuses.

We're not talking about kindergarten or grade school here. We're talking about college campuses where the students are so upset by some Halloween costumes, that adult supervisors were set up to approve or disapprove various Halloween costumes so that some students wouldn't be scared and upset and offended, maybe.  I think these universities -- these institutions of higher propaganda -- are getting just what they deserve, folks.  I think they are reaping what they've sown.  They turned over the asylum to the inmates years ago, and the inmates have finally figured out how to blackmail 'em.

You do it with the football program.  It's gonna win each and every time 'cause these colleges cannot do without the football program.  Mizzou has a game against BYU this Sunday or this weekend, probably Saturday over at Kansas City at Airhead Stadium.  Now, I'm not... I haven't had the radio on today, but I would wager that all of you listening to sports talk radio this morning in and around Columbia or Kansas City or St. Louis... I would wager that virtually every host has been on the side of the players -- every host -- because they want the game to be played.

They want to cover the game; therefore they're gonna side with the players. They're not... Nobody is gonna stand up.  There was one player who stood up and said, "Hey, there's not unanimity on this team.  There are a bunch of players here that don't think this boycott ought to happen."  But it was too late.  The coach, he's gotta go out and recruit.  He can't possibly do anything but join his players in this boycott if he wants to remain coach, if he wants them to listen to him, if he wants to have control of the team, if he wants to be able to recruit players.

He's got to stand with the players that are causing the trouble here.  He can't side against them. And this is what everybody knows. It's what the protesters know. It's what the striking or what the threatened striking players know.  But really, these institutions of higher learning are anything but that.  They are institutions of higher propaganda, and I really do think they're getting exactly what they deserve.  All of these tirades from the students rooted in anger and fear, the threats, the demands.

You know, we don't have students anymore.

We have institutions of higher victimization.

We are allowing students to adopt victim status as a means of getting what they want, including grades.  In the list of student demands, there is this demand that university be more accepting of "marginalized" students.  That means two things.  Of course "marginalized" is a racial reference, but it also has to with students who might be flunking out.  We're supposed to overlook it.  We're not supposed to punish students who are not getting good grades 'cause it's not their fault.  They're victims of a racist hierarchy and patriarchy on campus, and they're doing the best they can.

And you've got to respect and understand that with all the stress and all the pressure and all the racism, they're doing the best they can. And you can't flunk them.  This is what the university experience has become: Threats, tirades, demands, endless parade of victims, now agitators.  See, I think the universities have had their hands in creating these little monsters.  As far as I'm concerned, they can live with 'em now.  This is exactly it. When they stopped teaching -- when they stopped teaching critical thought, when liberalism overcame every campus, when liberalism overwhelmed everything -- it was the end of independent, critical thought. And it was the beginning of, "You better toe the line or you're out."

And this is what they are reaping.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  No, no.  No, no.  My point is this: When you teach how rotten America is... When you teach students at the university level and at the high school level how racist the country is, how unfair, how unjust, how immoral -- when you have black studies courses and professors who are so extremely radical that you don't even recognize them -- what do you expect to happen after a few years?  You expect to just teach these students that America's horrible, that it's racist, that they don't have a chance, that the white man so dominates it and it's so unfair -- there's such white privilege -- that they don't have a prayer?

You think they're just gonna sit there and listen to it and then leave campus and cause trouble?  No.  At some point, they're gonna realize, "Hey, wait a minute. This campus is the same place as what they're telling me is outside," and they're gonna get mobilized and they're gonna find their agitators who are adults like in Ferguson and so forth and they're gonna try to take over the universities, too.  After all, this is what they've been taught.  The thing is, the rabble-rousers are supposed to wait until they get out of school or maybe graduate and then take all of this misbehavior outside the campus to other parts of American society and culture. But they're not supposed to be doing this on campus.

"No, no, no! We're not the kind of people we've been teaching you about!"

But I guess it's not working.  That's why part of me is kind of smiling over this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, folks, this is academe.  This is the academy. This is education. This is what every parent thinks is the most important thing about their young kids' future: Sending them to places like this, sending them these institutions of higher learning. And they're not institutions of higher learning.  They're institutions of higher propaganda.  And they are places where the malcontents are beginning to run, and it's my contention that the universities have sown their own fate here.

This is the kind of stuff they've been teaching.  This is what they have been putting in these students, these young skulls full of mush. In their heads.  You can't expect year after year to teach people what a rotten country they were born to, what a rotten country they live in.  You can't teach young minority students how unfair their lives are.  You can't make the biggest victims in the world, and you can't expect to teach them and create all this anger and rage and have it not explode.  When your curriculum is based on the multicultural curriculum, which is that everything about this country's illegitimate from the first days of Western European settlers, what do you expect to happen?

We're not raising an era of college-educated people.  We're creating victims. We're creating rage-filled maniacs with a totally distorted view of reality and of history.  We have a president who has such weird economic policies that even if they do manage to graduate from these supposed higher institutions, they don't have any jobs or careers to latch onto.

END TRANSCRIPT   http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/11/09/institutions_of_higher_victimization_are_getting_exactly_what_they_deserve

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

To this point alone:

Because, you see, the football program runs most major universities.

[Tacachale]

To this point alone:

Because, you see, the football program runs most major universities.

Yeah, that looks bad, but who wants to live in a world where the heads of med schools and universities out-earn guys who can make 20-year-old boys move balls better than other 20-year-old boys?

[simms3]

The whole situation is a fiasco.  PC taken too far and a glimpse into the priorities of America/Americans.  Even as a "liberal", this has me on edge.  Apparently it's not too apparent what was done, or not done, and what exactly the events were that led to a football program ousting a university president.  What little I know (and frankly, there seems to be so little to the story, which is what makes this all the more disturbing) is that nothing really out of the ordinary happened and MO is once again back in the spotlight for nothing positive at all.

This has me concerned for overreach on the BLS movement.  I like the basic premise of the movement, but if it's going to result in events such as this, there will certainly be overreach and everyone will very quickly begin to see through the movement.

[simms3]

By the way, the only decent coverage I've read on the issue.  Even if you read NYT, you'll likely come out with the same opinion you would if you caught this from Fox News (that there's not a big deal here and blacks in this state are way overreaching).

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-missouri-campus-racism-20151109-story.html

Read the article above.

Still stands that it's a pathetic sign that athletics, particularly football, rule our publicly funded systems of higher education.  But hey, use what you got to take a stand, right?

I still think there is a risk that as a society we are going down the path of being far too coddled.  There will always be racism or things that hold us all back.  Fight for change, but recognize that being human is tough, humanity is far from perfect, and we are at least at a point where any improvements going forward will be small at best (because we have come so far), just be wary of the price we might need to pay for such marginal improvements to our society (on these fronts).

[Tacachale]

Without speaking to the reasonableness of the protesters' demands, from an administrative perspective this doesn't seem to have been handled well. The university needed to act much more quickly and to get out in front of the message or it was inevitable they'd get bulldozed by it.

[I-10east]

The Mizzou president surely spoke in support of swastikas being drawn on campus to get fired, amirite??"Not enough was done" WTF specifically does that mean?? Did he not have any concerns?? College is liberal hell. White liberals are responsible for all of this faux high racial tension black victimization bullshit, and now they have to lie in the bed that they made. They wanna bring back the 60s (when blacks really really had racial concerns) so bad.

[Downtown Osprey]

This video made my blood absolutely boil. This kid was simply trying to DO HIS JOB. In a public space mind you.

http://www.barstoolsports.com/barstoolu/missouri-protestors-bully-a-student-photographer-and-refuse-to-let-him-take-their-pictures-during-their-public-protest/?utm_source=desktop&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=push

[RattlerGator]

It's genuinely embarrassing; the President at the university punked out and so did the Governor of Missouri. It is completely crazy, as is the craziness that happened at Yale over an eMail about (of all things) what to wear at Halloween.

https://youtu.be/9IEFD_JVYd0

This is a damn good read on the Yale situation --

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

I keep waiting for a significant enough number of enlightened people on the Left to put a halt to this bullying and totalitarian craziness (glad to see simms3' response in this thread). The coddling is out-of-control; it's just so infantilizing.

[fsquid]

College kids seem bored

[fsquid]

The girl in the Yale video needs help

[spuwho]

The Mizzou president said he had made attempts to open dialog with anyone willing to discuss the issues, right up into his resignation speech.

But for other reasons, he had little or no support from the University System Board.  There were some other issues going on here besides a football team making threat strikes.

[ben says]

But for other reasons, he had little or no support from the University System Board.  There were some other issues going on here besides a football team making threat strikes.

I think this is my big take away here.

I'm as liberal/left as they come...fuck it, call me a Marxist...but SOMETHING is off here. There were definitely 'other issues going on here' besides the football team, the strike, etc... Either the reporting sucks or Mizzou/Missouri has the worst PR team in the world (governmental workers + college board + coach being "for" the strike leads me to believe there's somewhere the public is missing).