Mizzou Tries to Heal a Fractured Relationship With Its Legislature

Justin L. Stewart, Missourian via AP Images

In recent weeks, state lawmakers have threatened a variety of actions against the University of Missouri, including bills to take athletic scholarships away from athletes who protest, to require a course on freedom of speech for all students, and to impose mandatory annual audits and even budget cuts.

Support for some of the proposals has waned as legislators have softened their rhetoric against the university, which erupted in student protests last fall over racist incidents and other problems that prompted calls for the university’s leaders to resign.

But many legislators say they remain embarrassed by the blowup on the flagship campus, in Columbia. And that embarrassment has exposed a deeper rift between the General Assembly and the administration of both the campus and the University of Missouri system.

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

“You don’t want your flagship university drug through the mud,” said State Rep. Don Rone, a Republican who represents a district in the far southeastern corner of the state. “We’re not mad at the kids, but there’s a lot of strained relationships for a number of reasons,” he said.

While both Republicans and Democrats are frustrated with the face of their higher-education system, there is a key difference between the parties. Republicans describe the protests as a symptom of liberal, elitist indifference to the needs of the state; Democrats see systemic racism as the root of the problem.

“Everybody knows that universities are bastions of liberal thinking,” said Rep. Jason Chipman, a Republican who has introduced several bills to make higher education more accountable.

But Rep. Tommie Pierson, a Democrat from a district near St. Louis and a member of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, has a very different view. The university “has a history of being racist and of not taking it seriously enough to do anything about it.”

University officials say they are trying hard to repair the relationship with the General Assembly. Michael A. Middleton, the system’s interim president, has already made several visits to the State Capitol and testified at a two-hour legislative hearing on Wednesday evening, when lawmakers asked pointed questions about freedom of speech on the campus and efforts to improve racial diversity, among other things.

“We certainly recognize that we still have much work to do in rebuilding confidence with our state legislators,” John Fougere, the system’s chief communications officer, said in a written statement before the hearing.

Protests and Responses

The university definitely has its work cut out for it as it tries to recover from months of campus unrest that resulted in the resignations of Timothy M. Wolfe, the system president, and R. Bowen Loftin, chancellor of the campus in Columbia.

In August there was a plan — later aborted — to stop subsidizing the health-care costs of graduate assistants. After that, state lawmakers were up in arms over the university’s contracts with Planned Parenthood.

In November a graduate student, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike to demand the resignation of the top officials after what many black students considered a lack of responsiveness to several racist incidents on the campus. The student protests gained national attention after the university’s football team, which plays in the powerful Southeastern Conference, warned that it would boycott practice and even a nationally televised game unless Mr. Wolfe stepped down.

But the media storm continued even after the senior leaders resigned. It was fueled by the controversy over a communications professor, Melissa A. Click, who was caught on video trying to keep a student journalist away from the protesters.

In response, more than 100 Republican state legislators sent a letter to the system’s Board of Curators demanding that Ms. Click be fired. She was eventually suspended, but the university has remained in the legislature’s sights.

In December a legislator filed a bill that, if it had been enacted, would have required the university to revoke the scholarship of any athlete who refused to play for any reason that wasn’t related to health.

That measure has died, but several other bills introduced in response to the protests remain under consideration.

Rep. Dean Dohrman, a Republican who is vice chairman of the Missouri House of Representatives’ higher-education committee, is pushing a bill that would require all undergraduates at the state’s two- and four-year colleges take a three-credit course on free speech.

“I’ve heard from a lot of journalism students who like it,” Representative Dohrman said of his bill (HB 1637).

For Representative Rone, the problems in Columbia stem from having too many lawyers on the system’s Board of Curators. He has introduced a bill (HB 2179) that would prohibit more than two members of any governing board at a public college to have the same profession.

“When you look at Mizzou and see all the lawyers, you say, ‘Whoa, we need some diversity here,’” Mr. Rone said.

“If it was all farmers, I’d be the same way,” said Mr. Rone, who is a farmer. “We need all kinds of people on these boards.”

Deeper Problems

Representative Chipman, a freshman lawmaker whose district includes the city of Rolla, likes Mr. Rone’s bill and says there’s a lot of antipathy toward lawyers in his part of the state. “We have the fewest number of lawyers in the legislature in 100 years,” he said, “and I think there’s a reason for that: On the campaign trail, voters said, ‘We don’t need any more damn lawyers up there.’”

But Mr. Chipman says there are more-fundamental flaws in how public colleges treat students — problems that he encountered as he passed through the higher-education system as an adult and military veteran.

Mr. Chipman attended a semester of courses at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (at the time, called the University of Missouri at Rolla), then went to a community college to finish an associate degree before completing his bachelor’s degree at Drury University, a private, liberal-arts institution in Springfield, Mo.

He has introduced bills that would prohibit public colleges from requiring undergraduates to live on the campus or to buy meal plans. Another bill would exempt students from paying a health-care fee at a public college if they can show proof of health insurance.

His furthest-reaching bill (HB 2100) would require public colleges to refund a portion of tuition for any course in which the assigned faculty member is not present for more than a quarter of the class sessions.

“I’m not trying to kill the universities, I’m not trying to take money away from them,” Mr. Chipman said. But the institutions need to be more responsive to the core mission of teaching and graduating students, he said.

Representative Pierson, the Democrat from near St. Louis, says his Republican colleagues are missing the point with their measures, which are well meaning but sometimes “out of touch with reality” because they fail to address the racial inequity on the campuses.

“Republicans are in the majority, so all they have to do is sit around and think of stupid bills,” Mr. Pierson said. “I would like to see the white legislators sit and talk with the students on campus — black and white — about issues that they have,” he said. “Students are the revenue generators, so why not sit down and talk with them?”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.