There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well

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Updated (7/24/2018, 5:24 p.m.) with comment from the university system and flagship campus.

A “perfect constellation of dangerous conditions” at the University of Missouri, particularly the flat-footed response of its leaders, allowed racial unrest to boil over on the flagship campus in 2015, a forthcoming journal article argues.

Ben Trachtenberg, a former chairman of the Missouri Faculty Council on University Policy, has written one of the early scholarly accounts of a tumultuous period at the university when African-American students criticized university leaders for indifference or insensitivity to a deteriorating racial climate. That period of tension, fueled by a graduate student’s hunger strike and a boycott by the football team, became a national spectacle that did lasting damage to the university’s reputation.

In a draft of his article, “The 2015 University of Missouri Protests and Their Lessons for Higher Education Policy and Administration,” Trachtenberg argues that the university’s race-related problems, while real, are not unique to higher education or sufficient to explain why Mizzou experienced an uncommonly contentious crisis. The difference, he says, is that an emboldened group of student activists, who were denied meaningful engagement with university leaders, resorted to highly public protest when no reasonable alternatives were presented.

“To understand how other universities can avoid the fate of Mizzou – millions of tuition dollars lost, statewide and national reputation harmed, relations with the legislature damaged – one must consider specific factors that made Mizzou susceptible to such bad results,” the article states. “Universities all over America have struggled with race relations, and students have held protests on countless campuses, yet somehow Mizzou suffered harms well beyond those commonly observed at other institutions. University leaders who observe what went wrong in Columbia will have a better chance of reaching better outcomes at home.”

The article, which is expected to be published this fall in the Kentucky Law Journal, observes that Mizzou made itself vulnerable to a full-blown crisis in part because its leaders were either at war with one another or too slow to respond to students. R. Bowen Loftin, who was the campus’s chancellor at the time, was in open conflict with his deans, who sought Loftin’s ouster over administrative matters that had little if anything to do with race relations. Those tensions, while largely unrelated, heightened a sense of unrest.

Timothy M. Wolfe, who was then the system’s president, appeared reluctant to engage with the protesters, who placed Wolfe’s resignation among their key demands. (Before it was over, both Loftin and Wolfe would resign.)

Missed Opportunities

There were missed opportunities, particularly for Wolfe, to defuse the situation, Trachtenberg argues. After the president clashed with protesters at a Homecoming parade, where students surrounded his car, Wolfe waited too long to respond to them, and he did a poor job of it when he finally did, the article states.

“It is possible,” writes Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law, “that had university leaders responded quickly to the Homecoming protest – even with an uninspiring response of chatting respectfully with protesters and then appointing a ‘blue ribbon’ panel to suggest how the university could promote racial justice – that tensions could have been reduced.”

Trachtenberg’s article is part of a growing body of scholarship centered on recent racial unrest on college campuses. The Journal of Negro Education, for example, published a collection of articles in 2017 that focused on these issues, including the incidents at Mizzou. The volume, titled “When Voices Rise: Race, Resistance, and Campus Uprisings in the Information Age,” was guest edited by Ty-Ron M.O. Douglas, an associate professor in Mizzou’s College of Education, and Kmt G. Shockley, an associate professor in Howard University’s department of educational leadership and policy studies.

Trachtenberg, who is the white son of a former university president, acknowledges the dangers of a “white moderate” presuming to tell civil-rights activists how best to conduct themselves. In a particularly cautious bit of prose, Trachtenberg responds to a critique, popular in conservative political circles, that the students themselves share in the blame for why things got so out of control at Mizzou. Nonetheless, he says, there are reasonable incentives for students to use “highly confrontational tactics only as a last resort.”

“If coverage of protests convinces parents of prospective students that your campus is some kind of racist nightmare, even the best administrators will have trouble recruiting a diverse student body,” Trachtenberg says. “And if coverage reduces enrollment more generally, then the resulting financial pain will ripple throughout campus.”

Yet, Trachtenberg says, the university is ultimately responsible for the conditions that created unrest in the first place. The lesson for other universities, he says, is that the time to build bridges is well before the protests begin.

“Trust is a currency that rivals money in value,” Trachtenberg writes. “Administrators should remember too that one cannot make withdrawals from a bank without having previously paid deposits. If a crisis arises, administrators who have built real relationships can draw upon accumulated good will; those who have not will have no luck.”

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the system and the flagship campus said that Trachtenberg had presented a “fair and accurate portrayal of what happened at Mizzou.”

“The advice and counsel from faculty leaders such as Prof. Trachtenberg have helped leaders make informed decisions about moving Mizzou forward, and administrators are very proud of the progress made in less than a year,” the statement says. “MU also remains committed to diversity and inclusion of every student, faculty, and staff. The diversity of race, thought, geography, sexual orientation, gender, religion, etc. will continue to enhance the learning experiences.”

Update (7/26/2018, 10:36 a.m.): This article has been updated to include previous scholarship on the Mizzou protests.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.