Black Mizzou football players go on strike

That video is infuriating!!!!

 

Damn, I've told off high school football fans who tell photographers to stop shooting an injured player. (I mean, it's their friggin' JOB.)

I don't know what I would have done here.

 

It gets better. The second mewling yenta at the end, the one calling for "muscle" to get rid of the reporter filming this whole deal, was identified by CNN as a professor in mass media!
She's since made her Twitter account private. Maybe she should form a human Twitter shield.



Gawker has some other collected tidbits, including that she was trying to get national media outlets to cover the protestors as recently as a couple of days ago. Suppose that has its limits.

 

Mewling Yentas would be a great fantasy football team name.

 

More irony. This is her Twitter banner, snapshotted before it was set to private:

 

The students trying to bar the media don't bother me all that much. They're college kids -- they're going to do stupid shit with no real idea of how it's going to make them look. (Many years ago I was in nearly an identical situation to this photog, so I sympathize. He handled it very well.)

But that professor? Fuck her, hard. If I'm her boss she's out of a job immediately, and I publicly hang her out to dry. She has no business being in a mass media classroom, and did about as much as one assistant professor can do to destroy the reputation of what is, or was, one of the most respected J schools in the country.

 

Many years ago, before I graduated, my alma mater actually required everyone to pass a swimming test in order to graduate. And, as several professors said, there were actually people who didn't graduate on time because they didn't know how to swim.

 

I'm with you 110 percent. And unfortunately, if she gets canned right now, the radicals are just going to start another shitstorm.

 

I fucking hate self entitled college kids.
And you know what I would have done in that situation? I would have kept shooting.
I know this because I've done this. (Never on something as emotionally charged as this but still.)
Each and every time someone tells me NOT to do something, I will do it twice as much and twice as obnoxiously because fuck you, that's how journalism works.

 

It might be the case that she's already on the way out. Mizzou's tenure policies look fairly run-of-the-mill, and generally if you're in your seventh year as an Assistant Professor (which she is) that means you got denied tenure last year and are looking for another gig. Of course I'm not an expert on her field, but if you compare her research record to those of her colleagues who've been tenured recently, it doesn't look too good.

 

Are there any good guys in this story?
The system president had no business being in that position in the first place. Like many new hires in public universities and systems, he's a tool of a red state legislature. No experience in higher ed? No problem. Just, ya know, raise no objections when we terminate Planned Parenthood contracts and generally try to neuter anything in the libruhl arts. So his departure is no great loss.
At the same time, it's a bit frightening. Any campus with a couple of rotten applies could have a rhetorical bayonet at its head at any time.

 

She'll have an MSNBC talk show by Christmas