10 Revealing Details in the Melissa Click Investigation

The University of Missouri’s decision on Wednesday to fire Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communication, followed an investigation of an incident in November, when Ms. Click confronted a student journalist during a protest on the flagship campus, in Columbia.

The investigation, which was commissioned by the university’s Board of Curators and carried out by the law firm Bryan Cave, uncovered details about the incident that were not necessarily apparent in a video of the confrontation that went viral online and sparked national outrage.

The final report on the investigation sheds light on what happened before and after the confrontation, as well as the motivations and reactions of Ms. Click and her colleagues.

Turmoil at Mizzou

In 2015, student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in Missouri and its aftermath.

• Students Should Feel Like ‘Equal Partners,’ Says New Diversity Officer
• Melissa Click, Professor Who Riled Free-Speech Advocates, Is Fired
• What It’s Like to Be Black at the U. of Missouri
• Thrust Into a National Debate on Race, 2 Missouri Chiefs Resign

Here are some of the more interesting details from the report:

Ms. Click said her first interaction with Concerned Student 1950 was “life-changing.”

Ms. Click described feeling an immediate and visceral connection to the activist movement Concerned Student 1950, even before she knew the group by name. Her first serious encounter with the movement, named for the year the university admitted its first black student, occurred at the homecoming parade in October, when student protesters surrounded the car of Timothy M. Wolfe, then the university system’s president. “Frustrated” by the crowd’s negative reaction to the demonstration, she asked to stand with the students. When police officers attempted to force the protesters away from the vehicle to a sidewalk, Ms. Click sparred with one officer. (Video of that confrontation recently surfaced.)

She told investigators that the experience was “an emotional and ‘life-changing’ event for her.”

The day before her videotaped confrontation with a student journalist on the quad, Ms. Click was involved in a “heated conversation” with a professor at the protesters’ encampment.

According to the report, her emotions ran high that day, November 8, as she visited student activists, who by then were staging a hunger strike to push for Mr. Wolfe’s resignation. “A geology professor arrived and, in Professor Click’s opinion, began asking ‘provocative’ questions that frustrated her and led to a heated conversation.” Some students intervened, “stating that the situation needed to be de-escalated.”

At least, that’s how investigators portrayed the incident. In a response to the report, Ms. Click said she was not “the primary conversant.” Instead, she said, she had just encountered a discussion between the geology professor, another professor, and several students, as it became intense.

Ms. Click said that the student journalist, Tim Tai, had “charged” at the protesters, and that she had started a chant in an attempt to defuse the situation.

One of the stranger parts of the investigator’s report is a passage in which Ms. Click interprets her behavior toward Tim Tai, the student who was taking photographs of the protest for ESPN. Mark Schierbecker, a junior, recorded a video of Mr. Tai arguing with protesters about his right to enter the encampment. From the report:

“Professor Click initially could not recall having any involvement in the incident in which student journalist Tim Tai was blocked from entering the area, although she readily recalled that a student beside her said, ‘I am a journalism student, and the journalism department would be disappointed to see the way he’s acting right now.’

“When portions of a transcript of the incident were then read to her reflecting her involvement in yelling at Tim Tai, and encouraging students to chant ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, reporters have to go’ at Tai, Professor Click then stated that Tai had ‘charged’ the perimeter and her chant was intended to defuse the situation and get Tai to back off as the other journalists had. Professor Click said she was yelling because there were a lot of people there and she wanted to manage the crowd.”

Ms. Click resigned her courtesy appointment with the Missouri School of Journalism the next day. Several weeks later, Mr. Tai received a “First Amendment Defender” award from the Radio Television Digital News Foundation.

Ms. Click said she thought Mr. Schierbecker might have had a gun.

Ms. Click told investigators that she feared that Mr. Schierbecker, the student who recorded her encounter with Tim Tai, might have had a gun.

“At first sight, Schierbecker was inside the perimeter and approaching Click, which she perceived as threatening,” the report says. “He introduced himself as ‘media’ and asked to speak with her, but she found his introduction suspicious and did not believe he was media. She noted that Schierbecker had a small camera that appeared unprofessional to her. She advised us that she was concerned he might be armed with a gun, particularly as the Missouri Legislature had recently passed a law allowing concealed firearms on campus.”

One problem: Missouri does not allow concealed weapons on its college campuses. When confronted with the full report, Ms. Click backed away from her comments:

“I never believed that Mark Schierbecker definitely had a gun, but I did acknowledge that he could have and that my fears about his intentions shaped my actions. Also, I knew that the Mo. Legislature had not passed legislation allowing concealed firearms on campus. At the time of the interview, I mentioned that such a law was being debated.”

It’s unclear exactly which piece of legislation Ms. Click was referring to. Roughly a month after the incident, a Missouri senator introduced a bill to allow concealed guns on campuses. In September 2014 the state enacted legislation allowing specially trained employees with concealed-carry permits to bring firearms onto campuses.

Mr. Schierbecker was not a journalism student or working for a news outlet.

Mr. Schierbecker identified himself as a member of the media when he encountered Ms. Click at the November protest; indeed, that identification seemed to be the pretext for her effort to get him thrown out of the protesters’ encampment. In the aftermath of the incident Mr. Schierbecker was frequently identified as a student journalist by media outlets, including The Chronicle.

But the report paints Mr. Schierbecker, a junior at the university, as barely affiliated with any news organization. He told investigators he had initially planned on posting his videos of the protest to Wikipedia.

Mr. Schierbecker told investigators that he had once been a staff photographer at The Maneater, an independent student news outlet. He said he had submitted articles, but none had been published. After receiving many inquiries about its affiliation with the author of the video, the students running The Maneater wrote to Mr. Schierbecker telling him that he did not, in fact, work there.

Mr. Schierbecker apparently did not seem like a journalist to Ms. Click. In interviews with investigators, the professor said that when Mr. Schierbecker asserted he was a member of the media, she did not believe him, creating mistrust that charged the rest of the confrontation.

There was some confusion about what Ms. Click meant when she asked for “muscle.”

The professor’s call for “some muscle” to help her remove Mr. Schierbecker from the protesters’ encampment was considered her gravest sin. But what was she calling for, precisely?

Some people seemed to think there might actually be a person, nicknamed “Muscle” (or possibly “The Muscle”), whom Ms. Click was requesting specifically. After Ms. Click explained her actions in a meeting with the journalism faculty, Esther Thorson, an associate dean at the university’ journalism school, came away with the impression that she was referring to a specific member of the protest group, a large, strong man whom the other students called “The Muscle.” Another journalism professor came away from the meeting thinking Ms. Click meant “a particular gentleman who was a lot bigger than her,” though he did not remember anything about a nickname.

When investigators asked one student if there was a protester whom other protesters called “Muscle,” she said no. Another student responded to the same question with “an involuntary and genuinely hearty laugh.”

In her written response to the board, Ms. Click said she did not believe anyone was nicknamed “The Muscle,” and questioned why the details of that sub-inquiry were included in the report. However, she did tell investigators that it had been “protocol,” based on her observations, to defuse heated situations by summoning large men.

Earlier that day, Ms. Click had been on the other end of a physical altercation with a photographer.

A student told investigators that on the same day she confronted Mr. Tai and Mr. Schierbecker, Ms. Click had been physically contacted by a journalist. When asked about that incident, Ms. Click told investigators that she had gotten between a cameraman and a student who did not want to talk to the media, and that the reporter had then “grabbed her arm and ‘growled’ at her.” Investigators wrote that “she was not hurt, did not consider it a ‘big deal,’ and did not call law enforcement at the time.”

Ms. Click and her department chair didn’t see eye to eye — before and after the incident.

Mitchell S. McKinney, chair of Mizzou’s communication department, told investigators that the professor had “a tendency to be dramatic.”

“Professor McKinney’s initial reaction to Professor Click’s actions depicted in the videotape was not one of great surprise,” the report says, “and he remarked that none of the faculty he spoke with were surprised either. Professor Click frequently gets upset, and she can be loud and aggressive in stating her opinions to faculty and students. When this occurs, she can be heard throughout the building.”

The chair stood up for Ms. Click’s research, which has been much maligned by state lawmakers for dealing with pop-culture phenomena like Lady Gaga and the book 50 Shades of Grey. And he said that Mr. Schierbecker “seems to have an agenda.” But he didn’t offer a defense of Ms. Click’s actions in the video or of her professional comportment in general. The morning after Ms. Click’s encounter with Mr. Schierbecker, he drafted a statement decrying “intimidation” of student journalists; he later told investigators that “this statement was perceived by Ms. Click and her allies as throwing her under the bus.”

Mr. McKinney is not one of her allies, as Ms. Click admitted in her response to the report. “The communication department includes an entire four-floor building with many classrooms, offices, and meeting areas,” she wrote. “Given this, the chair’s suggestion that I can be heard through the communication department seems hyperbolic.”

As for the depiction of her as “dramatic": That, she wrote, stems from the fact that she and Mr. McKinney have “a long history of disagreement about department affairs.”

We know that Ms. Click and Mr. McKinney disagreed on one matter, and Ms. Click turned out to be right. The afternoon of her confrontation with Mr. Schierbecker, the report says, Ms. Click called Mr. McKinney to warn him “that there was a videotape of her and that it might go ‘viral.’” Mr. McKinney hadn’t yet seen the footage. “Let’s not blow this up,” he told her. Quoth the report: “He was certain the issue would pass.”

After Ms. Click resigned her journalism-school appointment, her husband asked Mr. Tai to speak out for her.

Although Ms. Click’s campus home was in the communication department, she held a courtesy appointment at the School of Journalism. That appointment earned the school unwanted attention: An early wave of reporting on Mr. Schierbecker’s video identified Ms. Click as a journalism professor, and “a substantial amount of email and telephone calls from the media and alumni” poured in.

So the morning after the incident, the school’s standing executive-committee meeting turned into a discussion of Ms. Click’s now-problematic appointment. The committee called the professor in that day, and Ms. Click told Tim P. Vos, an associate professor, that she did not want the courtesy title if it would cause problems for the school. Later the group asked her to resign the appointment, and she did so.

But according to the investigators’ report, that decision did not seem to sit well with her husband, Richard J. Callahan Jr., chair of the religious-studies department. Mr. Callahan was also present when tension erupted between student activists and journalists on the quad. There he approached Mr. Tai, who had “had a class with Professor Callahan in 2013,” the report says.

One day after Mr. Tai accepted a telephoned apology from Ms. Click — and two days after the professor resigned her courtesy appointment — he received a call from Mr. Callahan. According to the report:

“Professor Callahan … told Tai that the university had come down too hard on his wife, Professor Click. Professor Callahan asked Tai if he would do something to reduce the severity of the response by the School of Journalism to Click’s actions, but Tai said he did not know what he could say or do that would make a difference or alleviate the criticism of Click.”

Ms. Click apologized, but she never accepted the university’s interpretation of her actions.

Would above-and-beyond displays of contrition have saved Ms. Click’s career at the University of Missouri? Perhaps not. The professor apologized personally to Mr. Tai and Mr. Schierbecker, and said in a statement that “I regret the language and strategies I used, and sincerely apologize to the MU campus community, and journalists at large, for my behavior.” But none of that mollified the many state lawmakers who repeatedly demanded her resignation.

Still, one section in the investigators’ report makes an issue of Ms. Click’s level of contrition. In December, she received a letter of reprimand from Garnett S. Stokes, Missouri’s provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, calling her behavior “completely unacceptable.” Ms. Click wrote back to Ms. Stokes, telling her she was “truly sorry.”

But in a February interview with the investigators, she rebutted points Ms. Stokes made in the letter. It’s one of the most striking passages in the report:

“When asked whether she agreed that her November 9 ‘behavior was completely unacceptable for a Mizzou faculty member,’ she replied ‘no,’ that was too harsh a statement. … When asked whether she agreed that she ‘had failed to exercise appropriate restraint’ on November 9, she replied ‘no,’ that the situation was very stressful, and that she acted out of concern for the students. She said that she had been told by others following November 9 that they would have acted in the same fashion had they been in her position. When asked whether she agreed that she had ‘failed to show respect for the opinion of others’ on November 9, she replied ‘no,’ that she had instead encountered an individual who was not respecting others. She identified the individual she was referring to as Mark Schierbecker. Finally, we asked her whether she agreed that she had ‘made a serious mistake’ on November 9, and she replied ‘no,’ she would not use the word ‘serious.’”

After investigators delivered their report, the Missouri board invited Ms. Click to write a response addressing its findings. You can read that response here.

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.

Brock Read is assistant managing editor for daily news at The Chronicle. He directs a team of editors and reporters who cover policy, research, labor, and academic trends, among other things. Follow him on Twitter @bhread, or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.

Andy Thomason oversees breaking news coverage. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.

Correction (2/26/2016, 8:06 a.m.): This article originally referred incorrectly to Garnett Stokes, the university’s provost. Ms. Stokes is a woman, not a man. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

Correction (2/27/2016, 11:42 a.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Missouri’s journalism school had given Mr. Tai an award. The Radio Television Digital News Foundation bestowed the award. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.