One-Third of Seats on Missouri System’s Governing Board Are Now Empty

A second member of the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators has resigned in less than a week, leaving a full third of the seats empty as the system struggles to move past the upheaval that claimed the jobs of its president and flagship chancellor last year.

The Columbia Missourian reports that David L. Steward resigned on Monday for personal reasons, leaving the board without a single African-American member. Last week Yvonne Sparks, the board’s other black curator, resigned just two months after she was appointed.

Ms. Sparks’s resignation came during the same meeting in which the curators voted to suspend Melissa A. Click, the communications professor at the Columbia flagship who was charged with assault for an incident in which she called for “some muscle” to remove a student journalist from a protest in November.

Concerned Student 1950, the student movement that toppled the system president, Timothy M. Wolfe, over allegations of racism at the flagship, has said the board is treating Ms. Click as a scapegoat:

Click is NOT the issue. Dismantling systems of oppression within the @Umsystem is the issue pic.twitter.com/6J8eHb4Edd

— ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950) January 28, 2016

A spokesman for the system, John Fougere, told the Missourian that the board still had enough members to meet and take votes.