Being Melissa Click

L ast fall, as Melissa Click yelled and pointed her way into infamy, she quickly became a caricature of a radical faculty member who represented everything conservative lawmakers and pundits hate about academe, right down to her research on Twilight.

But while the video of her screaming at a student went viral, turning her into the Melissa Click, the confrontation on a quad during a protest here last year really wasn’t that remarkable, in her mind. The assistant professor of communication at the University of Missouri was just doing what other professors and administrators were doing there, too, she says. So why did she lose her job?

She has one idea. Under pressure from state legislators, she says, Missouri’s Board of Curators fired her to send a message that the university and the state wouldn’t tolerate black people standing up to white people. “This is all about racial politics,” she says. “I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target.”

Ms. Click has avoided the campus since she was fired in February, when she began moving out of her office in the dark so she wouldn’t run into anyone.

Returning this month to the site of her fateful confrontation with the student, she is skittish. Who will spot her? Someone always does. She eyes a family with a stroller and steels herself.

Controversy has overwhelmed Ms. Click since that day last fall, when the student journalist recorded her frantically calling for “muscle” to stop him from filming a campus protest.

She had been helping the protesters camped out on the quad call attention to racism and what they saw as a lack of concern for minority issues at the university. She’d stepped in to organize the students’ supplies, which were stashed in countless Walmart bags. A heavy rain had drenched the students’ tents — plus their clothing and textbooks inside — and Ms. Click was airing them out. Everything, she recalls, smelled of mildew.

Suddenly, the students got word that their chief demand had been met: Timothy M. Wolfe, the university system’s president, had resigned. The exhausted students, who had been living on the quad for a week, wanted to close ranks and regroup before a press conference. While most reporters heeded their request for a time out, Ms. Click says, a few insisted on pushing through the circle the students had formed to keep others out of the quad.

That’s when Ms. Click heard some of them arguing with Mark Schierbecker, a senior majoring in history who was filming the protest. Ms. Click grabbed at his small hand-held camera, telling him: “You have to go!” To which he responded: “I actually don’t.” As Mr. Schierbecker recited his right to be in a public place, Ms. Click invoked her authority as a “communication faculty” and made the call for “muscle” to get him removed. All the while, Mr. Schierbecker was filming, capturing what to many seemed to be an out-of-control professor with flaming nostrils and unruly red hair inciting violence against a university student.

These are actions and remarks that, by now, she has apologized for countless times — both formally and informally. Some, however, point out that Mr. Schierbecker wasn’t the only one Ms. Click clashed with on the quad. She told a geology professor that questions he directed to the black students were inappropriate, he says, and asked him to leave. And she told two other cameramen they weren’t welcome, flinging mocking comments at one (“Wow, you’re so scary”) and leading the students in a chant to banish the other (“Hey, hey, ho, ho, reporters have got to go!”). Exactly why, many have asked, was the assistant professor there that day taking on such a lead role?

While Ms. Click acknowledges that she was certainly frustrated that day, she says she was simply trying to protect the black student protesters. Everything she has come to stand for since the video came out — intolerance, anger, mouthiness, and dismissiveness — is exactly the opposite of who she says she really is. Focusing on her behavior, she says, is a way to take attention away from the demands of Concerned Student 1950, the group of protesters.

“I’m not a superhero,” Ms. Click says. “I wasn’t in charge.” But she’s taken the fall. “When it got out of control,” she says, “I was the one held accountable.”

The media subjected her to withering public scrutiny, she says, making her recognizable wherever she goes. “Batshit Crazy Professor Loses Temper With Student” was the wrong headline, she says. The real story, if you ask her, was “Favorite Professor Fights to Support Black Students on Campus in Dangerous Situation.”

But most of us don’t get to write our own headlines. Ms. Click has tried to regain her voice and cast herself as a brave advocate.

“I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions unfortunately result in imperfect actions,” she wrote in The Washington Post last month. “What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance?”

More gradually, the woman seen as a feminist rabble-rouser has also taken on the role of martyr for the values of due process and academic freedom. She’s less a shrill bully, her supporters say, than a victim of a social-media frenzy and of outside influence on academic affairs.

Ben Trachtenberg, chair of Missouri’s faculty council, says the curators uncharacteristically took a faculty personnel decision into their own hands — skirting the campus’s formal procedures designed to weigh charges against professors while preserving their rights to due process. “It’s pretty clear our rules weren’t followed, and that’s bad for faculty morale,” says Mr. Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law. The American Association of University Professors is investigating Ms. Click’s firing and may censure the university. Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer for the group’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, calls the episode “fundamentally at odds with basic standards of academic due process.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Click is still making sense of what happened to her, while dealing with the pain and chaos it has caused her family. Before any of this happened, she was a 44-year-old mother of three, her tenure bid finally in hand, part of a successful dual-career academic couple. As she sits on her living-room couch, her black cat lying nearby, her tough exterior cracks a bit, and she cries.

“I believed at some point, somebody would care about the truth of what I was doing,” she says. “I am a woman who made some mistakes trying to do what she thought was right.” That, she says, could have been anyone.

B ehind the headlines was a first-generation college student from southwest Virginia. Ms. Click went about an hour from home to James Madison University, planning to work in advertising. But her love for glossy women’s magazines evolved in a more academic and activist direction.

Naomi Wolf, who’d just published The Beauty Myth, a feminist critique of how the media had constructed beauty, came to speak at James Madison. That resonated with the young Ms. Click. While in Washington for a feminist punk-rock concert, she marched for women’s rights, and became the first student, in 1993, to graduate with a minor in women’s studies from James Madison.

Pursuing a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ms. Click studied Martha Stewart Living and why the icon’s domestic perfection appealed to so many women.

When Ms. Stewart was indicted for insider trading, in 2003, Ms. Click thought her research might collapse. But it just expanded. People were still fascinated by the woman in the taupe suit who was going to jail. “They became protective of her,” she says. “It strengthened her fans.” Reflecting on her dissertation subject, Ms. Click finds they have that in common.

While writing her dissertation, she moved to Missouri to follow her now-husband, Richard Callahan, an associate professor of religious studies at the public flagship. The transition from Amherst to the Midwest was difficult. But eventually, Ms. Click found a farmers’ market, she says, became a visiting instructor at the university, and befriended other East Coast transplants.

Still, she didn’t quite fit, even in the communication department, where she got a tenure-track job in 2008. A common textbook used at UMass, Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences (SAGE Publications, 1999), featured a Marxist critique of the media. “I came here and used it, too,” she says, “and students’ heads nearly popped off.”

Introducing controversial ideas and speaking out against policies she considered unfair — like raising undergraduate fees — came naturally to Ms. Click, she says. She was passionate and sometimes annoyingly self-righteous, her former colleagues say. For a person so small — she is about five feet tall — she has a bold laugh that carried through the halls of the communication building.

Her research on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey also departed from the norm. Whereas most of her colleagues’ scholarship has a quantitative focus, Ms. Click does qualitative analyses — including extended personal interviews with fans of popular work. But while Ms. Click was a bit of a rebel in her department, she was known as a good teacher and eager colleague. Her teaching evaluations were better than the department’s average, and she earned several teaching awards. She also mentored three Ph.D. students who graduated last spring, a notable number for a junior faculty member.

If someone in the department was sick or having personal trouble, Ms. Click would often step in. “When my mom died, she was at my house before my husband was,” says Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, who worked with Ms. Click at Missouri before moving to the University of Arizona. “She canceled my kids’ birthday party for me and answered all of my sympathy cards.”

As the academic year began last fall, Ms. Click submitted her tenure file. It was a huge relief. She’d been waiting eight years, two that she took off when her younger children, twins, were born.

“I had been keeping my head down for so long, busting my ass until then. So I was sort of” — she takes a deep breath — “emerging.” In October, the department told her it had voted unanimously to grant her tenure. “Then I could breathe a little more,” she says.

Maybe that’s why Ms. Click felt she had the time and energy to support the growing protest movement over race relations at the university. At a homecoming parade in October, she spontaneously linked arms with black students blocking the president’s car. That had a profound effect on her.

“Am I going to be one of those people who stands and watches another brutal moment against black people, or am I going to step in and make sure they’re safe?” she remembers asking herself. “I found out that day.” She stepped between the students and a policeman, thinking he’d be less likely to push her. But he did, she says, and she was indignant: “Get your [expletive] hands off me!”

When she saw black students camping out on the quad in November, she offered to help, staying for hours and returning day after day. The atmosphere at Missouri was intense. Students were calling on the president to resign, one was on a hunger strike, and dozens of football players had announced that they wouldn’t play until the president stepped down. Some professors and graduate students had canceled classes for a teach-in on racial justice.

Ms. Click took it upon herself to attract media attention to the protest. She posted a request on Facebook: Did anyone know national reporters who might cover “the failure of administrators, a student on day 6 of a hunger strike, and creative, fearless students”?

Despite the eventual swarm of journalists, Ms. Click didn’t worry about being in the thick of a protest, even as she tried to give students a break from cameras and questions. She had seen administrators bringing portable heaters out to the quad. Her husband and other professors were there, too.

“I was in a space where even the chancellor was spending a lot of time,” she says. “There was no reason to think I was doing something that wasn’t sanctioned by the university.”

On the day Ms. Click clashed with Mr. Schierbecker, she arrived home to an email saying her tenure bid had cleared the next hurdle: approval by a college-level committee.

But by that evening, the video had taken off. When the footage of Ms. Click screaming and pointing made national news, friends emailed and called to see if she was OK.

Mixed in with her university email were death threats, and at home, notes appeared about rape. Ms. Click checked in with her department chair, who initially reassured her that the commotion would die down.

I t didn’t. Administrators started speaking out against Ms. Click. The dean of the journalism school, where she had a courtesy appointment, said a faculty member’s role was not to escalate conflict. Under pressure, Ms. Click resigned from the appointment. The provost also reprimanded her, calling her behavior “completely unacceptable.”

In January, Ms. Click was charged with misdemeanor assault for her encounter with Mr. Schierbecker. Two days later, as she was getting her children ready for bed, she got a text message from Hank Foley, the interim chancellor: “Melissa coming out of the BoC mtg today, you are suspended pending further investigation.”

She quickly called him. “I was breathless,” she says. “I asked, With or without pay?” (With.) As for how long the investigation would last, Mr. Foley wasn’t sure. Nothing he said made her feel very good. She rushed to ask colleagues to cover her classes.

“At that point, we were off the rails,” she says. “I didn’t know what would happen.”

A lot did. University administrators asked the communication department to consider whether everything that had happened should be factored into the decision on Ms. Click’s tenure case. The department then reversed its earlier decision to approve her tenure bid, says a university official involved with the process. Ms. Click appealed the reversal.

In addition, more than 100 state legislators were calling on her to resign. They’d cut the university’s budget, they said, if it didn’t fire her. When another video of her surfaced, cursing at the police officer during the homecoming parade, she looked even worse.

She had been mostly quiet, refusing to speak to reporters, but now she resolved to tell her side of the story. She worked with a Texas-based public-relations agency, Status Labs. She put on makeup and smoothed her hair, and, in the month of February, did 25 interviews. Some felt abusive, she says. One reporter asked if she’d ever been forced to take anger-management classes. None of the interviews, she says, helped reform her image.

Her husband, Mr. Callahan, says it’s hard not to be bitter. “Academia is a place where you can follow your conscience,” he says. “Standing up for people who are trying to voice their concerns about their treatment shouldn’t be penalized.”

But on February 24, the curators voted to fire Ms. Click. She was shocked. “The board respects Dr. Click’s right to express her views and does not base this decision on her support for students engaged in protest or their views,” Pam Henrickson, the chairwoman, said in a statement. “However, Dr. Click was not entitled to interfere with the rights of others, to confront members of law enforcement or to encourage potential physical intimidation against a student.”

Michael Sykuta, an associate professor of agricultural and applied economics here, believes Ms. Click should have been punished for her actions. But he blames the university for creating an opening for the curators to act. “If the provost had impaneled a group to investigate, if there was a faculty process that could be pointed to, that would have taken away most of the political punch the curators had,” he says. “A big part of why the curators acted is that the university did nothing.”

With the protest, Ms. Click’s actions, and the resignations of the president and chancellor, the university, too, has suffered from the controversy. The flagship is expecting about a 15-percent decline in freshman enrollment next fall.

Ms. Click now spends her days mostly at home. She is pursuing a research project she started before she became notorious: editing an anthology on fandom. She’s still informally working with Ph.D. students she used to supervise. She hopes to find another academic job someday, but she has no leads at the moment.

When Ms. Click filed for unemployment, she was denied, she says, because the university said she’d been fired for cause. She has appealed. And she is planning to sue the institution, arguing that it denied her due process. A friend started a GoFundMe campaign, Stand With Melissa, to help pay her legal bills (it has raised $13,332 toward a goal of $38,000).

The criminal charge against Ms. Click was dropped when she agreed to perform 20 hours of community service. Most of the staff members at the food bank where she served recognized her, she says. Many voiced their support.

But Ms. Click is wary. She leaves the house bracing for confrontation. Strangers do notice her. “Don’t worry,” said a clerk at the automotive-repair shop, “we don’t hate you.” Wherever she goes, there is judgment. The owner of an antique store and a greeter at the polls each told her they thought the university was wrong. Two young men she passed near the campus asked her if she needed some muscle. She considered it a threat.

As she walks through downtown Columbia, an African-American man yells his support out a car window: “Hey, Melissa!” (“Black people love me,” she tells a reporter.) Later, a black woman runs out of the Campus Bar and Grill headlong into an embrace with Ms. Click. It’s one of the protest organizers. Soon three black students surround the former professor. They sound protective. How is she? They’re concerned. They tell her they love her.

An image she returns to, on Facebook, is of black students who interrupted a Board of Curators meeting to protest her firing. One young woman is holding up a sign: “Ain’t Nobody Messin With My Click.”

But her nerves are perpetually on edge. In the dairy aisle of the grocery store, Ms. Click is vigilant. She takes a quick look around as she glances at the flier, then reaches for two packages of shredded cheese on sale.

She imagines someone watching. “Look,” she says in a high-pitched voice. “There’s Melissa Click, using coupons!” But no one is there.

Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.