Missouri Lawmaker Takes Aim at Salaries of Melissa Click and 2 Others in Budget Plan

A budget proposal unveiled by a senior Missouri legislator on Tuesday would strip the salaries of Melissa A. Click, the communication professor suspended after she was charged with assault for her role in an altercation at a campus protest, and two other University of Missouri employees, The Columbia Missourian reports.

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Tom Flanigan, a Republican, said on Tuesday that the committee would seek to cut the Columbia campus’s appropriations by the exact sum of the salaries of Ms. Click, the chair of her department, and the dean of the College of Arts and Science.

Mr. Flanigan said that the proposal, which also would cut $7.7 million from the Missouri system, was not “made lightly,” but that “recent events have proved to Missourians that existing performance measures are not the only indicators of a university’s performance.”

Ms. Click was suspended in January after being charged with misdemeanor assault for a videotaped incident in which she infamously called for a student journalist to be physically removed from an area where students had been protesting. She later reached a deal to avoid prosecution.

Recently, a second video of Ms. Click surfaced. In it she curses at police officers, behavior that the interim Columbia chancellor, Henry C. (Hank) Foley, called “appalling.”

The budget proposal represents the latest development in a tense relationship between legislators and the university. In a written statement on Tuesday, the system’s interim president, Michael A. Middleton, said that the current legislative session had not even reached its halfway point, and that “much can change before it ends.”