Being Melissa Click - The Chronicle of Higher Education

8/18/2019 Being Melissa Click - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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W h i t n e y C u r t i s f o r T h e C h r o n i c l e

T h e f o r m e r a s s i s t a n t p r o f e s s o r o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n w a s f i r e d f r o m

t h e U .

o f M i s s o u r i i n F e b r u a r y .

Being Melissa Click By Robin Wilson A p r i l 2 4 , 2 0 1 6

COLUMBIA, MO.

ast fall, as Melissa Click yelled and

pointed her way into infamy, she

quickly became a caricature of a

radical faculty member who represented

everything conservative lawmakers and

pundits hate about academe, right down to

her research on Twilight .

But while the video of her screaming at a

student went viral, turning her into the Melissa

Click, the confrontation on a quad during a

protest here last year really wasn’t that

remarkable, in her mind. The assistant

professor of communication at the University of Missouri was just doing what other

professors and administrators were doing there, too, she says. So why did she lose her job?

She has one idea. Under pressure from state legislators, she says, Missouri’s Board of Curators

fired her to send a message that the university and the state wouldn’t tolerate black people

standing up to white people. "This is all about racial politics," she says. "I’m a white lady. I’m

an easy target."

Ms. Click has avoided the campus since she was fired in February, when she began moving

out of her office in the dark so she wouldn’t run into anyone.

http://chronicle.com/article/Being-Melissa-Click/236226?key=IRl5FpT4lpxJgzGAws5eXYOGhQiqMPu7iVHVQEPa025YdTdsMTl6aVlMa3FTTW5DWS1jV19aUHozT3FIOG1NSjB4RGt2X3EwT2Fzhttp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k9qYa0Mc3OYJ:chronicle.com/article/Being-Melissa-Click/236226%3Fkey%3DIRl5FpT4lpxJgzGAws5eXYOGhQiqMPu7iVHVQEPa025YdTdsMTl6aVlMa3FTTW5DWS1jV19aUHozT3FIOG1NSjB4RGt2X3EwT2Fz&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0&vwsrc=1http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:k9qYa0Mc3OYJ:chronicle.com/article/Being-Melissa-Click/236226%3Fkey%3DIRl5FpT4lpxJgzGAws5eXYOGhQiqMPu7iVHVQEPa025YdTdsMTl6aVlMa3FTTW5DWS1jV19aUHozT3FIOG1NSjB4RGt2X3EwT2Fz&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=cached&answer=1687222http://chronicle.com/article/Being-Melissa-Click/236226?key=IRl5FpT4lpxJgzGAws5eXYOGhQiqMPu7iVHVQEPa025YdTdsMTl6aVlMa3FTTW5DWS1jV19aUHozT3FIOG1NSjB4RGt2X3EwT2Fzhttp://chronicle.com/article/Being-Melissa-Click/236226?key=IRl5FpT4lpxJgzGAws5eXYOGhQiqMPu7iVHVQEPa025YdTdsMTl6aVlMa3FTTW5DWS1jV19aUHozT3FIOG1NSjB4RGt2X3EwT2Fz


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Turmoil at Mizzou

Last fall student protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri's flagship campus, in Columbia, and

spawned a wave of similar unrest at colleges across the country. Read more Chronicle coverage of the turmoil in

Missouri and its aftermath.

Inside How Missouri’s Leadership Scrambled to Quell a Campus Crisis

10 Revealing Details in the Melissa Click Investigation

What It's Like to Be Black at the U. of Missouri

Returning this month to the site of her fateful confrontation with the student, she is skittish.

Who will spot her? Someone always does. She eyes a family with a stroller and steels herself.

Controversy has overwhelmed Ms. Click since that day last fall, when the student journalist

recorded her frantically calling for "muscle" to stop him from filming a campus protest.

She had been helping the protesters camped out on the quad call attention to racism and

what they saw as a lack of concern for minority issues at the university. She’d stepped in to

organize the students’ supplies, which were stashed in countless Walmart bags. A heavy rain

had drenched the students’ tents — plus their clothing and textbooks inside — and Ms. Click

was airing them out. Everything, she recalls, smelled of mildew.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Its-Like-to-Be-Black-at/234771?cid=rcsidebarhttp://chronicle.com/article/10-Revealing-Details-in-the/235502?cid=rcsidebarhttp://chronicle.com/article/Inside-How-Missouri-s/236208?cid=rcsidebarhttp://chronicle.com/specialreport/Turmoil-at-Mizzou/15


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B

But most of us don’t get to write our own headlines. Ms. Click has tried to regain her voice and

cast herself as a brave advocate.

"I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions

unfortunately result in imperfect actions," she wrote in The Washington Post last month.

"What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance?"

More gradually, the woman seen as a feminist rabble-rouser has also taken on the role of

martyr for the values of due process and academic freedom. She’s less a shrill bully, her

supporters say, than a victim of a social-media frenzy and of outside influence on academic

affairs.

Ben Trachtenberg, chair of Missouri’s faculty council, says the curators uncharacteristically

took a faculty personnel decision into their own hands — skirting the campus’s formal

procedures designed to weigh charges against professors while preserving their rights to dueprocess. "It’s pretty clear our rules weren’t followed, and that’s bad for faculty morale," says

Mr. Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law. The American Association of University

Professors is investigating Ms. Click’s firing and may censure the university. Hans-Joerg

Tiede, senior program officer for the group’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and

governance, calls the episode "fundamentally at odds with basic standards of academic due

process."

Meanwhile, Ms. Click is still making sense of what happened to her, while dealing with the

pain and chaos it has caused her family. Before any of this happened, she was a 44-year-old

mother of three, her tenure bid finally in hand, part of a successful dual-career academic

couple. As she sits on her living-room couch, her black cat lying nearby, her tough exterior

cracks a bit, and she cries.

"I believed at some point, somebody would care about the truth of what I was doing," she

says. "I am a woman who made some mistakes trying to do what she thought was right." That,

she says, could have been anyone.

ehind the headlines was a first-generation college student from southwest Virginia.

Ms. Click went about an hour from home to James Madison University, planning to

work in advertising. But her love for glossy women’s magazines evolved in a more

academic and activist direction.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/17/melissa-click-what-would-our-world-be-like-if-no-one-ever-took-a-chance/


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J u s t i n L .

S t e w a r t ,

M i s s o u r i a n

M e l i s s a C l i c k (

t o p l e ꋀ )

w a l k s a l o n g t h e “

n o m e d i a ”

l i n e a t s t u d e n t

p r o t e s t s o n N o v e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 5 .

Naomi Wolf, who’d just published The Beauty Myth , a feminist critique of how the media had

constructed beauty, came to speak at James Madison. That resonated with the young Ms.

Click. While in Washington for a feminist punk-rock concert, she marched for women’s rights,

and became the first student, in 1993, to graduate with a minor in women’s studies from

James Madison.

Pursuing a Ph.D. in communication at the

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ms.

Click studied Martha Stewart Living and why

the icon’s domestic perfection appealed to so

many women.

When Ms. Stewart was indicted for insider

trading, in 2003, Ms. Click thought her

research might collapse. But it just expanded.

People were still fascinated by the woman in

the taupe suit who was going to jail. "They

became protective of her," she says. "It

strengthened her fans." Reflecting on her dissertation subject, Ms. Click finds they have that

in common.

While writing her dissertation, she moved to Missouri to follow her now-husband, Richard

Callahan, an associate professor of religious studies at the public flagship. The transition from

Amherst to the Midwest was difficult. But eventually, Ms. Click found a farmers’ market, she

says, became a visiting instructor at the university, and befriended other East Coast

transplants.

Still, she didn’t quite fit, even in the communication department, where she got a tenure-

track job in 2008. A common textbook used at UMass, Media/Society: Industries, Images and

Audiences (SAGE Publications, 1999), featured a Marxist critique of the media. "I came hereand used it, too," she says, "and students’ heads nearly popped off."

Introducing controversial ideas and speaking out against policies she considered unfair —

like raising undergraduate fees — came naturally to Ms. Click, she says. She was passionate

and sometimes annoyingly self-righteous, her former colleagues say. For a person so small —

she is about five feet tall — she has a bold laugh that carried through the halls of the

communication building.


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Her research on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey also departed from the norm. Whereas

most of her colleagues’ scholarship has a quantitative focus, Ms. Click does qualitative

analyses — including extended personal interviews with fans of popular work. But while Ms.

Click was a bit of a rebel in her department, she was known as a good teacher and eager

colleague. Her teaching evaluations were better than the department’s average, and she

earned several teaching awards. She also mentored three Ph.D. students who graduated last

spring, a notable number for a junior faculty member.

If someone in the department was sick or having personal trouble, Ms. Click would often step

in. "When my mom died, she was at my house before my husband was," says Jennifer Stevens

Aubrey, who worked with Ms. Click at Missouri before moving to the University of Arizona.

"She canceled my kids’ birthday party for me and answered all of my sympathy cards."

As the academic year began last fall, Ms. Click submitted her tenure file. It was a huge relief.

She’d been waiting eight years, two that she took off when her younger children, twins, were

born.

"I had been keeping my head down for so long, busting my ass until then. So I was sort of" —

she takes a deep breath — "emerging." In October, the department told her it had voted

unanimously to grant her tenure. "Then I could breathe a little more," she says.

Maybe that’s why Ms. Click felt she had the time and energy to support the growing protest

movement over race relations at the university. At a homecoming parade in October, she

spontaneously linked arms with black students blocking the president’s car. That had a

profound effect on her.

"Am I going to be one of those people who stands and watches another brutal moment

against black people, or am I going to step in and make sure they’re safe?" she remembers

asking herself. "I found out that day." She stepped between the students and a policeman,

thinking he’d be less likely to push her. But he did, she says, and she was indignant: "Get your

[expletive] hands off me!"

When she saw black students camping out on the quad in November, she offered to help,

staying for hours and returning day after day. The atmosphere at Missouri was intense.

Students were calling on the president to resign, one was on a hunger strike, and dozens of

football players had announced that they wouldn’t play until the president stepped down.

Some professors and graduate students had canceled classes for a teach-in on racial justice.


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Download a Collection of Articles About Race on Campus

A collection of recent news and commentary from The Chronicle, designed to be printed and shared, examines what

might be done to improve the racial cl imate on your own campus. Subscribers can download the booklet here.

Ms. Click took it upon herself to attract media attention to the protest. She posted a request

on Facebook: Did anyone know national reporters who might cover "the failure of

administrators, a student on day 6 of a hunger strike, and creative, fearless students"?

Despite the eventual swarm of journalists, Ms. Click didn’t worry about being in the thick of a

protest, even as she tried to give students a break from cameras and questions. She had seen

administrators bringing portable heaters out to the quad. Her husband and other professors

were there, too.

"I was in a space where even the chancellor was spending a lot of time," she says. "There was

no reason to think I was doing something that wasn’t sanctioned by the university."

On the day Ms. Click clashed with Mr. Schierbecker, she arrived home to an email saying her

tenure bid had cleared the next hurdle: approval by a college-level committee.

But by that evening, the video had taken off. When the footage of Ms. Click screaming and

pointing made national news, friends emailed and called to see if she was OK.

http://chronicle.com/resource/in-context-race-on-campus/5867/


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I

Mixed in with her university email were death threats, and at home, notes appeared about

rape. Ms. Click checked in with her department chair, who initially reassured her that the

commotion would die down.

t didn’t. Administrators started speaking out against Ms. Click. The dean of the

journalism school, where she had a courtesy appointment, said a faculty member’s role

was not to escalate conflict. Under pressure, Ms. Click resigned from the appointment.

The provost also reprimanded her, calling her behavior "completely unacceptable."

In January, Ms. Click was charged with misdemeanor assault for her encounter with Mr.

Schierbecker. Two days later, as she was getting her children ready for bed, she got a text

message from Hank Foley, the interim chancellor: "Melissa coming out of the BoC mtg today,

you are suspended pending further investigation."

She quickly called him. "I was breathless," she says. "I asked, With or without pay?" (With.) Asfor how long the investigation would last, Mr. Foley wasn’t sure. Nothing he said made her

feel very good. She rushed to ask colleagues to cover her classes.

"At that point, we were off the rails," she says. "I didn’t know what would happen."

A lot did. University administrators asked the communication department to consider

whether everything that had happened should be factored into the decision on Ms. Click’s

tenure case. The department then reversed its earlier decision to approve her tenure bid, says

a university official involved with the process. Ms. Click appealed the reversal.

In addition, more than 100 state legislators were calling on her to resign. They’d cut the

university’s budget, they said, if it didn’t fire her. When another video of her surfaced, cursing

at the police officer during the homecoming parade, she looked even worse.

She had been mostly quiet, refusing to speak to reporters, but now she resolved to tell her side

of the story. She worked with a Texas-based public-relations agency, Status Labs. She put on

makeup and smoothed her hair, and, in the month of February, did 25 interviews. Some felt

abusive, she says. One reporter asked if she’d ever been forced to take anger-management

classes. None of the interviews, she says, helped reform her image.

Her husband, Mr. Callahan, says it’s hard not to be bitter. "Academia is a place where you can

follow your conscience," he says. "Standing up for people who are trying to voice their

concerns about their treatment shouldn’t be penalized."

http://chronicle.com/article/Melissa-Click-s-Inbox/234891


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But Ms. Click is wary. She leaves the house bracing for confrontation. Strangers do notice her.

"Don’t worry," said a clerk at the automotive-repair shop, "we don’t hate you." Wherever she

goes, there is judgment. The owner of an antique store and a greeter at the polls each told her

they thought the university was wrong. Two young men she passed near the campus asked

her if she needed some muscle. She considered it a threat.

As she walks through downtown Columbia, an African-American man yells his support out a

car window: "Hey, Melissa!" ("Black people love me," she tells a reporter.) Later, a black

woman runs out of the Campus Bar and Grill headlong into an embrace with Ms. Click. It’s

one of the protest organizers. Soon three black students surround the former professor. They

sound protective. How is she? They’re concerned. They tell her they love her.

An image she returns to, on Facebook, is of black students who interrupted a Board of

Curators meeting to protest her firing. One young woman is holding up a sign: "Ain’t Nobody

Messin With My Click."

But her nerves are perpetually on edge. In the dairy aisle of the grocery store, Ms. Click is

vigilant. She takes a quick look around as she glances at the flier, then reaches for two

packages of shredded cheese on sale.

She imagines someone watching. "Look," she says in a high-pitched voice. "There’s Melissa

Click, using coupons!" But no one is there.

Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Contact her at [email protected].

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Being Melissa Click - The Chronicle of Higher Education