“It is not about creating an intellectual space!” one student shouted at him. Another possible epigraph comes from a confrontation between a group of students and Professor Nicholas Christakis, master of Silliman College, one of the residential colleges at Yale. Yale University was the next campus to suffer convulsions. The campaign eventually included one student’s hunger strike and the football team’s threat to refuse to play a scheduled game. The president and chancellor ultimately resigned after protesters claimed the administration had been insufficiently vigorous about preventing and condemning racially offensive acts. Missouri was the first campus disordered by demonstrations last fall. After a video of their confrontation went viral, Click issued a statement, saying that she had apologized to the journalists and expressed regret that her plea to physically intimidate them had diverted attention from the protesters’ “campaign for justice.”
These were the words shouted by Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Missouri, when reporters attempted to cover a demonstration on the university’s campus. “I need some muscle over here” is one candidate. Someday, a historian writing a book on the protests that brought normal activities to a halt on dozens of American college campuses in 2015 will ponder the choice of an epigraph.