AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF
Emma L. Larkins for the degree of Master of Arts in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies presented on August 26, 2019.
Title: “The Struggle Continues”: An Analysis of the Concerned Student 1950 Demands at the University of Missouri
Abstract approved: ______Ronald L. Mize
In the fall 2015, students at the University of Missouri embarked upon an extended series of protests aimed at calling out the University’s failure to address recent racist incidents against Black students and a larger oppressive campus culture. The protests prompted the creation of a student group led largely by Black students, Concerned
Student 1950. This thesis analyses the set of eight demands issued by Concerned
Student 1950 to the MU administration with the aim of transforming the campus culture for marginalized students. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, the study aims to understand the historical conditions at the state and university level which contributed to the campus environment in 2015 to which the student activists’ demands sought to address and hoped to change. My analysis finds that when examined through the lens of Critical Race Theory, it becomes evident that the “often silenced history of racism and discrimination” that the students write about in the context of Mizzou is in direct relationship to the history of the state of Missouri.
© Copyright by Emma L. Larkins August 26, 2019 All Rights Reserved
“The Struggle Continues”: An Analysis of the Concerned Student 1950 Demands at the University of Missouri
by Emma L. Larkins
A THESIS
submitted to
Oregon State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Presented August 26, 2019 Commencement June 2020
Master of Arts thesis of Emma L. Larkins presented on August 26, 2019.
APPROVED:
Major Professor, representing Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Director of the School of Language, Culture, and Society
Dean of the Graduate School
I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.
Emma L. Larkins, Author
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am mindful that while this project falls under my name, it could not have been possible without the support of a number of individuals. I am thankful for the quiet leadership of Dr. Ron Mize, my chair, who helped make this project possible and personally fulfilling. Thank you for keeping me in the lines. Thank you also to my committee members: Dr. Janet Lee, Kryn Freehling-Burton, and Dr. Janet
Nishihara for your insight, encouragement, and compassion. I am grateful to the
WGSS faculty, my MA cohort, and classmates and friends who have graciously let me think out loud about this project – I have learned so much from the WGSS community and am endlessly inspired by each member of it.
Thank you to my family, closest friends, and my jaan for their support, grace, and patience with me. You are all my world and why I do what I do.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
1 Introduction...……………………………………………………………………… 1
University of Missouri Student Demographics in 2015……………………… 3
Concerned Student 1950 and a Timeline of Events……………………………4
Research Questions………………………………………………………….. 16
Organization of the Chapters………………………………………………… 17
2 Theory and Literature Review……………………………………………………. 19
Critical Race Theory: History and Tenets…………………………………… 19
Student Activism in U.S. Higher Education…………………………………. 24
3 Missouri’s Historical and Legal Context…………………………………………. 29
State Origins: The Founding of Missouri……………………………………. 29
Establishment of the University of Missouri………………………………….34
Trials of Desegregation………………………………………………………. 35
Ferguson and #BLM Movement………………………………………………38
4 Methodology.……………………………………………………………………... 44
Overview of CDA……………………………………………………………. 44
Data Sources…………………………………………………………………. 47
Analysis……………………………………………………………………… 47
Researcher’s Positionality…………………………………………………… 48
5 Analysis…………………………………………………………………………… 51
“The Struggle Continues”: Close Reading of the Concerned Student 1950 Letter 51
We Demand: Concerned Student 1950’s List of Demands…………………. 55
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
After the Demands……………………………………………………….. 66
6 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………... 70
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….. 73
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………….... 82
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Introduction to the project
Student activism is deeply imbricated in higher education; student-led movements have existed nearly as long as higher education itself. A rise in national demonstrations and protests against police brutality led in particular by Black Lives Matter, inspired a resurgence of student- led activism on college campuses across the United States beginning in 2014. Student activists led efforts demanding institutional accountability around racist incidents, memorials, and campus environments for students of color. Student activists drew upon traditional methods of civil disobedience such as marches, sit ins, boycotts, hunger strikes, and more to demand change and brought national attention to their efforts through the strategic use of social media. The
University of Missouri garnered national attention in 2015 due to the prolonged student efforts which included an eight-day hunger strike by one student leader and the football team’s boycott, all of which culminated in the resignation of two of the university’s highest-ranking administrators. Beyond the bounds of the Mizzou campus, the events at Mizzou had national reverberations. Students at over 100 universities across the Unites States built upon the template of the Mizzou student demands to make similar demands. On some campuses, demands were not made, but students began to speak out against racism and marginalization experienced on their campuses.
In November 2015, I sat in Gill Colosseum on the Oregon State University (OSU) campus, one of the 500 other silent listeners taking in student stories of racialized micro aggressions, violence, and injustices experienced in classrooms and other campus spaces. All of us in the audience, OSU community members of some type, had received the invitation from the organizing students to sit down and listen, to really listen to their stories and understand what
2 students of color and those with marginalized identities experience. I was only five months out of my graduate program in higher education administration and still grappling with the transition from student to practitioner. Unlike the hypothetical conversations in a classroom of how to foster student dialogue and create spaces for student voices, the student organizers on their own were leading the change efforts that they needed.
The event’s student organizers reiterated an important lesson around time and place and positionality; in this moment, students did not need my advocacy efforts or my interventions, they wanted me to sit down and listen. Prior to this moment, student activism was something firmly rooted in histories. The text from which I learned about the creation of higher education introduced Harvard students’ 1766 butter revolt in the same chapter as the formation of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. The urgency of the Student of Color
Speak Out brought student-led activism firmly into the present for me, beginning my ongoing interest in the relationship between universities and student activists and what it looks like to be in solidarity with students while also a part of (and recipient of benefits from) the university infrastructure.
At the time of the Speak Out, I had been closely following accounts of student protests at the University of Missouri (MU or Mizzou) related to on-campus racism but did not initially put the OSU and MU events in relationship to one another. The OSU Speak Out and subsequent demands were part of a nationwide trend of students at over 100 campuses building from the MU protests to engage in conversations about racism on their own campuses. The widespread use of social media made it easy for students to share, in real time, the realities of the climate on their campuses and connect with others who may have similar experiences. The hashtag
#StandWithMizzou exemplifies this dynamic; the thread documents messages and images of
3 college students across the nation organizing, marching, standing and sitting in, raising their fists in solidarity with the Mizzou activists. Experiencing OSU students connecting with a message being led from Missouri prompted me to begin asking questions related to student organizing, the relationship between historical narratives and the present, and administrative responses to demands for change – lines of questioning that led me to take up this project. This study aims to disrupt the notion that the Mizzou protests emerged from a single isolated event; rather, the contemporary conditions that prompted the protests are connected to the larger history of racial injustice at the university and state level. Though this study focuses entirely upon Mizzou and the list of demands, the process of constructing ties between the historical context and the present provides a model that could be applied to other campuses and activist movements.
University of Missouri Student Demographics in 2015
The University of Missouri (MU or Mizzou) is located in Columbia, Missouri. Mizzou is one of four universities that comprise the University of Missouri System (UM) and is governed at this state-wide level by a board of curators; the board is led by a system president. The highest-ranking administrator at the university-level is the chancellor. Mizzou was founded in
1839 and is Missouri’s land grant university. Land grant universities were established the Morrill
Federal Land Grant Act in 1862 (and expanded upon in 1890). The Act established support for at least one college in each state “where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts” (7 U.S.C. 301 et seq., 1862, p. 504). Land grant institutions were founded with the mission of promoting the education of the industrial classes – primarily men working in farming and mechanic-based labor – and strengthening scientific approaches to agriculture
(Rudolph, 1990). Building upon the original intentions, land grant institutions have three primary
4 foci – teaching, research, and statewide extension services. It is important to note that the federal land allotments on which land grant institutions were built were lands “acquired” by the federal government through the displacement and/or elimination of Indigenous communities in the decades prior (Stein, 2017).
At Mizzou, 2015 marked the highest student enrollment and fourth-largest freshman class in the university’s history (Mizzou News, 2015) with 35,448 total students enrolled. Relevant to this study, in 2015, Mizzou reported 2,544 Black and/or African American students (this number does not include students who list two or more racial/ethnic identities) of the overall student body (approximately 7% of its student population). For perspective, approximately 76% of the student body was identified as White (n = 26,921) in 2015. At the state level, Black and/or
African American individuals comprised 12.5% of Missouri’s total population (Missouri Census
Data Center). Though race and ethnicity are just one contributing factor in the creation of a diverse environment, it is central to the 2015 student protests which forced the predominantly-
White institution (PWI) to grapple with its continued history of racism, particularly experienced by Black and/or African American students.
Concerned Student 1950 and a Timeline of Events
For the purpose of this project, the current study only considers the events beginning with the alleged verbal attack of the Mizzou student body president, Payton Head, on September 24th,
2015 whose Facebook post about the incident went viral and ending with the resignation of
Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin and UM system president Tim Wolfe in November 2015. These parameters, using two specific events as a starting and concluding point, are not arbitrarily determined, but do construct boundaries around a situation and environment that cannot be contained to a tidy beginning and end date. As I will show, there was not a singular event that
5 sparked the protests, nor did the protests and general campus unrest conclude with the resignation of the high-ranking administrators. A more extended history of the University of
Missouri’s relationship to race-related student protests is offered in Chapter 3 because of its relevance to the history of Jim Crow segregation in Missouri and the discussion of Critical Race
Theory.
The Mizzou protests’ origin varies according to the source and author that you choose. It is likely more accurate to say that there was not a single event or occurrence that sparked the multi-month protest; rather, campus unrest had been percolating for several years due to a combination of direct campus incidents of racial violence as well as incidents in Missouri and the nation. Mizzou may have garnered national media attention (for reasons that I will explain), but it was one example of Black student-led activism among several prominent efforts taking place across the United States. Elite universities such as Yale and Georgetown engaged in processes to acknowledge their university’s histories of slave ownership and/or use of labor. Students at Yale called for the residential hall, Calhoun College, to be re-named given John C. Calhoun’s staunch advocacy for the preservation of slavery (Anderson & Span, 2016). The building also featured stained glass windows with images of Calhoun’s life, including images of Black figures picking cotton. Between 2014 and 2016, students at Harvard, Duke, the University of Michigan,
Dartmouth, and the University of Virginia (among many others; this is certainly not a comprehensive list) issued demands and led protests in efforts to enact policy changes on their campuses, demand accountability, and call out unjust campus environments particularly for historically minoritized populations. The Mizzou protests received a great deal of media attention because of the escalation of the tactics used by students as well as the eventual resignation of prominent university leaders, all of which were detailed and broadcast using social
6 media and widely shared hashtags. (Hashtag refers to a word or phrase preceded by # used on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. For example, the hashtag
#StandWithMizzou was used in 2015 by students across the U.S. to show support for the Mizzou protests. Hashtags make it possible to aggregate and follow content such as text, images, and videos across platforms on a given topic or event.) In the section that follows, I outline a selected timeline of events that comprise the Mizzou protests from September to November 2015. This is not meant to be exhaustive, but comprehensive enough to capture the main events for the purposes of this research. In order to describe the events that comprise the 2015 Mizzou protests,
I draw upon local Missouri and student newspaper reporting published during this time, social media posts and updates published during this time, as well as secondary sources published afterwards.
September 2015
According to some, it was a Facebook post that sparked the campus-wide conversation around racial targeting and systemic injustice at Mizzou. On September 12, 2015, Payton Head, the president of the Missouri Students Association, described walking away from campus when passengers in a truck “started yelling the ‘N-word’ at [Head]” (Serven, 2015, para. 5). Head also described other instances of bias and exclusion described to him by students or witnessed personally, pointing to a larger culture of aggression and exclusion on the Mizzou campus and
Columbia community. Head wrote, “for those of you who wonder why I’m always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it’s because I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here” (Head, 2015). After the Facebook post began to be reposted and shared widely, additional students and campus groups contributed reports of racism and students began to look to campus administrators for a strong message that
7 the culture of discrimination would not be tolerated (Vandelinder, 2015). It is important to note that although 2015 represents a point of momentum for the MU student activists, Kynard (2018) describes overtly racist events happening on campus up to five years prior. In 2010, UM administrators failed to respond when cotton balls were scattered around the Black Cultural
Center. It is important to note that there is not likely a point in Mizzou’s history during which racist encounters and actions were not taking place. I point to the 2010 event to reiterate the
Mizzou activists’ sentiment that Head’s experience of enduring racial epithets was not an anomaly and, more importantly, neither was institutional silence in the face of acts of racism.
From the beginning, Head positioned the statement as more than a simple retelling of his experience. After describing the incident, he went on to connect his experience of being targeted to that experienced by Muslim women on campus who wear hijabs, navigating gendered spaces as a Trans or non-binary student, among other examples. Head also included ways for students to get involved on campus and build more inclusive communities. He encouraged, “If you want to fight for social change at Mizzou there are so many different outlets…educate yourselves and others. Hold your family, friends, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters accountable...It’s time to wake up Mizzou” (Head, 2015). Perhaps not intentionally, Head was creating a message that could become a platform for a coalitional effort, connecting students from across a number of different identities, backgrounds, and experiences to push against the marginalization that he was seeing take place at MU.
October 2015
Only three weeks later, an approximation of this same encounter happened again.
Members of the Legion of Black Collegians Homecoming Court were practicing for a performance when a White, male student shouted the n-word at the group when he was asked to
8 leave (Knott & Loutfi, 2015; McElderry & Hernandez Rivera, 2017). Reiterating Head’s call to the Mizzou community to “wake up”, the LBC’s President Warren Davis wrote, “Dear Mizzou,
Get it together” (@MizzouLBC, 2015). The MU campus was, at this point, beginning to criticize the administrative response to Head’s experience (namely, the significant delay) and two campus protests had been staged; the events were titled “Racism Lives Here” (Gallion & Oide, 2015). In his statement provided on September 17th, Chancellor Loftin opted to refer to Head’s experience
(and others that were subsequently reported) as “recent incidents of bias and discrimination”
(Loftin, 2015, para. 1). Loftin noted, “we support free speech in the context of learning, spirited inquiry and intellectual discussion, but acts of bias and discrimination will not be tolerated”
(Loftin, 2015, para. 3). The chancellor’s failure to name race and racism in his allusion to the events (because he did not name specific incidents) compounded the frustration already felt by some students, particularly Black students. A graduate student who spoke at one of the campus protests was quoted in the MU student newspaper, The Maneater, sharing their dissatisfaction with Chancellor Loftin’s response “‘because it continues to perpetuate the fact that Mizzou doesn’t give a damn about its black students’” (Gallion & Oide, 2015, para. 19).
Efforts became more pronounced and public due to students continued protesting and national coverage of the building campus unrest by the Washington Post and the New York
Times. During the university’s homecoming parade on October 10th, a group of students, many of them students of color, stood directly in front of President Wolfe’s car, blocking the parade.
The students identified themselves collectively as Concerned Student 1950, referencing the first year MU admitted African American students, explicitly anchoring their efforts to a historical point in MU’s racially exclusionist history. Jonathan Butler, a graduate student who emerged as a vocal leader for the group, cited Wolfe’s failure to engage with the student concerns as the
9 reason behind their protest. Butler told the local newspaper, the Missourian, that Concerned
Student 1950 chose the parade
because we need [Wolfe] to get our message. We’ve sent emails, we’ve sent tweets, we’ve messaged but we’ve gotten no response back from the upper officials at Mizzou to really make change on this campus. And so we directed it to him personally. That we are here. We want to make our presence known, that we are here and we deserve respect, we deserve humanity. (Serven & Reese, 2015, para. 9)
Underlining Butler’s statement is an understanding of the limitations of digital activism. Social media messages and emails are easy to dismiss; Butler’s statement suggests that students interpreted the President’s dismissal of their messages as a dismissal of them and their concerns altogether. It was not until they combined their digital messaging with on-campus, in-person disruptions that President Wolfe and other MU administrators began to engage with them.
As previously mentioned, the name “Concerned Student 1950” references the first year that Mizzou admitted Black students. I also provide a more detailed history of Mizzou’s process of racial integration in Chapter 3 because of the role the legal system played in advancing the cause of Black students seeking admissions at Mizzou. In choosing this name, the students placed their efforts in relationship to a history of students of color who have “been excluded within a space we have also thrived and contributed to greatly” (@CS_1950, 2015). At first, the
11 students who created the group resisted requests from journalists to name themselves and in an effort to demonstrate solidarity for the larger group, rather than one member being portrayed as the figurehead. One of the group members, Reuben Faloughi, explained their rationale to the
Chronicle of Higher Education asserting, “the media has a tendency to want to have a hero, but this isn’t about any one of us…It’s about our linked experiences as African-Americans”
(Mangan, 2015, para. 8). Where possible, the group sought to make decisions and statements that reflected the group as a collective, unlike past movements which relied on top-down decision
10 making and used leaders to serve as both spokespersons and figureheads (Mangan, 2015).
Concerned Student described its formation and actions, both online and in-person, as consciousness raising; its efforts to resist attention at the individual level placed the focus on its message and actions rather than the creation of individual hagiographies. This approach also protected the students, even if only for a short time, from being targeted online by opponents and critics of the group.
Wolfe strengthened Butler’s perspective at the Homecoming parade by remaining in the car and not engaging the students. It is also alleged that as the group of students stood in front of
Wolfe’s car blocking the parade’s progress, the driver began to slowly move forward and, in doing so, edged into a student protester (Serven & Reese, 2015). Wolfe did not ever publicly acknowledge the allegations that his driver revved the engine at the students nor that a student was bumped by the car. He did, however, release a statement on November 6th (27 days after the parade) where he noted that he regretted his reaction at the parade. Wolfe wrote, “I am sorry, and my apology is long overdue. My behavior seemed like I did not care…had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today”
(Landsbaum & Weber, 2015, para. 29). Whether or not President Wolfe could have prevented the escalation, by ignoring the students in the moment and subsequent actions (including the significantly delayed apology) fell within a record of failing to publicly acknowledge acts of violence against community members (particularly when directed at historically minoritized populations) and communicate concern for students in these instances.
With little sense that President Wolfe or any other Mizzou administrators intended to engage with students following the events of the Homecoming parade, Concerned Student 1950 delivered a statement on October 21st in which the group demanded a formal apology from the
11 president and published a set of eight demands to begin changing the racial climate on the MU campus. Among the eight demands featured a call to increase the resources on campus for historically minoritized students, hire more Black faculty and staff members (an increase to
10%), and the removal of Wolfe from his role (University of Missouri Demands). This list became a foundational tool that students at over 100 institutions across the United States used to formulate demands on their own campuses in the coming months and well into 2016. In the statement accompanying the list of demands, Concerned Student 1950 noted that it expected the university to respond to the demands by October 28th, 2015 at 5:00PM. If the group did not receive a response, they intended to proceed with the “appropriate nonviolent actions”
(Concerned Student 1950, 2015, para. 5).
A week after the release of the demands (October 27, 2015), members of Concerned
Student 1950 met with President Wolfe. According to the student leaders in this meeting, little action or decision-making came from the meeting. In a statement released after the meeting,
Concerned Student reported out that Wolfe “did not mention any plan of action to address the demands or help us work together to create a more safe and inclusive campus” (Kovacs, 2015a, para. 4). Students continued to demand substantive engagement from campus administrators and their efforts intensified with the call for a boycott on university merchandise, on-campus dining, and ticketed events (Vandelinder, 2015). It was also during this time that Jonathan Butler announced that he would begin a hunger strike. Butler explained his decision to hunger strike as a form of resistance to the “racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dramatically disrupted the learning experience” (Kovacs, 2015b, para. 3) at Mizzou along with the cutting of graduate students’ health insurance subsidies, acts of anti-Semitism, and the university’s cancellation of Planned Parenthood contracts. He was committed to his strike (not consuming
12 and food or nutritional sustenance) until the removal of President Wolfe or his “internal organs fail and [his] life is lost” (Butler, 2015, para. 5 cited in Kovacs, 2015b). Butler’s choice to hunger strike became emblematic of students’ frustration with calls for dialogue. A student is quoted by
The Maneater as telling Wolfe: “We are tired of the dialogue; we are here for action. This is why we are camping out, this is why [Butler] is on a hunger strike” (Sherwin, 2015, para. 16). Butler would strike for approximately eight days.
At the end of October, while Concerned Student 1950 was leading its protests, an anti-
Semitic image was found in a residence hall. For the second time in 2015, a swastika was found drawn on a campus building. On October 24th, the swastika had been drawn in feces on a surface of the residence hall bathroom wall (Wortman, Sherwin, & Edwards, 2015). In a similar pattern to that experienced by students of color after racist interactions, students appeared to be disturbed, foremost, by the act itself and frustrated by the lack of communication from the university. The president of the resident hall association (RHA) released a statement on October
29th in which he notes “I am not only upset that this happened but am also upset that I found out via a flyer posted on the walls of Gateway addressed from the Department of Residential Life”
(@RHAMizzou, 2015, para. 2). Students were dissatisfied with learning of the incident second hand and, importantly, the lack of administrative attention to the incident. A group of 36 student organizations delivered a letter to Chancellor Loftin wherein they decried the Chancellor’s inconsistent record of condemning acts of violence on campus and provided a list of actions for him to take in support of the Jewish community at Mizzou. As unsatisfactory as some students found Chancellor Loftin’s statement released in October after the racist language used against the LBC homecoming court, the absence of any communication related to the swastika was read as a failure to “demonstrate unequivocally [his] commitment to protecting Jewish students no
13 less than other students on [his] campus” (Letter to Chancellor Loftin, 2015, para. 7). No statement from campus administrators appears to have been released. In spite of this, in early
December, the Jewish Student Organization hosted a “solidarity Shabbat” in an effort to align itself with and “show support for the black students on campus” along with “all other minority and marginalized students” at Mizzou (Langland, 2015, para. 4). Out of the violence directed at both communities, students expressed a desire to support one another and build partnerships
(Langland, 2015).
November 2015
By November, members of the Mizzou faculty became involved in the campus actions. A group of faculty members joined under the name (and Twitter handle), Concerned Faculty, publishing statements of support and taking part in campus activism by holding a two-day walk out of their classes. In a statement released on November 8th, Concerned Faculty wrote:
We, the concerned faculty of the University of Missouri, stand in solidarity with the Mizzou student activists who are advocating for racial justice on our campus and urge all MU faculty to demonstrate their support by walking out on Monday, November 9 and Tuesday November 10, 2015 along with other allies such as the Forum on Graduate Rights. (Stolze, 2015, para. 2)
In another Tweet, Concerned Faculty encouraged faculty and students alike to visit the student campsite on Carnahan Quad and demonstrate their support. Faculty wishing to hold class were encouraged to host their class at the campsite. In a Tweet, Concerned Faculty encouraged, “the more faculty on Carnahan Quad tomorrow, the better. Hold class, have office hours, grade papers, listen, help” (@concerndfaculty cited by Stolze, 2015). The teach in that took place on
November 9th and 10th followed other efforts made by faculty members and departments to convey support for students and participate in the protests. Only a week prior, the Department of
English voted no-confidence in Chancellor Loftin’s leadership (several members abstained, but
14 there were no votes of confidence). In a letter to the Board of Curators, the department wrote of the low campus morale and the Chancellor’s failure to uphold the university’s education mission.
The group wrote, “the campus climate is not one in which all members of the community feel included and respected. Because of these failures of leadership, we believe the best course of action is to find a new Chancellor…” (Cohen, 2015 cited by Vandelinder, 2015).
In addition to the many efforts led by students, faculty, and community members that I have outlined, what appears to have had the most decisive impact was the refusal of a group of
African American students-athletes on the football team to participate in team practices and games until university administration acknowledged the protests and accepted Concerned
Students’ demands. This was purportedly prompted by a meeting between members of the football team and Butler in which they learned that supporting the effort would also mean the end of his hunger strike (McElderry & Rivera, 2017). Members of the team announced on
Twitter that they would not play until President Wolfe resigned or was removed from his position. This decision was publicly supported by the MU football head coach Gary Pinkle who
Tweeted out a photo of the team (with the Black players at the fore) and the message: “The
Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players.
#ConcernedStudent1950 GP” (GaryPinkel, 2015). In spite of the references to the Mizzou family and standing united, it is unclear how many of the student-athletes initially intended to engage in the boycott (Vandelinder, 2015). What made the team’s boycott particularly effective was an upcoming game against Brigham Young University (BYU). Per the game contract with BYU, if the team failed to show up for the game it would come at the cost of a $1 million fee, among additional guaranteed costs outlined in the game contract (Wooten, 2015).
15
Around three months after the MU protests began with Head’s Facebook message, on
November 9th, UM system president Tim Wolfe announced that he resigned from his position in response to the ongoing protests. Following this announcement, the UM Board of Curators revealed that MU Chancellor Loftin would be transitioning out of the chancellorship and into the role “director for research facility development” (University of Missouri System, 2015, para. 3).
In addition to the leadership changes, the Curator’s press release outlined a set of initiatives that would take place over the following 90 days including the hiring of a chief diversity officer, accountability metrics by which the CDO would be measured for effectiveness, a review of UM system policies, among task forces that would be implemented and mandatory diversity training for community members. Though some of the initiatives were among the eight demands delivered by Concerned Student 1950, many were not, and the press release neither mentioned the group nor their demands.
Though the ousting of the University’s highest leadership position featured prominently in media coverage of the MU protests, the attention on President Wolfe’s resignation failed to accurately account for the seven other demands which called for more longstanding campus changes. Despite these media portrayals, students continued to use available platforms to resist popular interpretations and construct their own counter-narrative. Kennedy Jones, a MU student, wrote in an opinion piece in the Maneater, “this is only the beginning of our united student front.
Wolfe will step down, and that will only be the beginning of the change that is coming to MU”
(Jones, 2015, para. 4). Concerned Student and all those involved in the protests recognized that demanding President Wolfe step down would not solve the overarching problem of a racist, hostile campus climate. It was only the beginning of a process that would take continued effort and investment. University administrators and students alike would undergo a long, at times
16 contentious process of trying to build relationships and trust while trying to advance change. Due to the scope of this project, these processes are not included here, but I am mindful to not create the false notion that students’ efforts stopped on November 9th.
The constellation of separate, but interconnected efforts followed well established methods of protest, particularly by targeting aspects of the University’s revenue sources. On their own, each of these protests may have been (and were at different points) dismissed by institutional leaders as disgruntled students acting out, but when combined under a unified message and set of demands, they exerted pressure on the university that it could not ignore (in the immediate, at least). With this extensive timeline of events, I hope to establish the pacing of the protests and developments that led to the creation of the student demands as well as an understanding of the varied individuals and communities who came to be involved in the protests. Shaped by the research questions, I establish the Missouri-state and MU historical foundations which affected the 2015 protests in future chapters. The primary research questions are outlined in the following section.
Research Questions
The primary research questions for this study are:
1. What sociohistorical phenomena contributed to the environment in which the 2015
University of Missouri student-led protests took place?
2. What do the Concerned Student 1950 eight demands communicate about oppression
and the student experience in 2015 at the University of Missouri?
Following the Critical Discourse Analysis framework and guided by these research questions, the study aims to understand the historical conditions the contributed to the campus environment
17 at the University of Missouri to which the student activists’ demands sought to address and hoped to change.
Organization of the Chapters
This thesis is organized into six chapters. Chapter Two provides an overview of Critical
Race Theory (CRT) which provides the theoretical structure guiding the project. The chapter also reviews literature related to the history of student-led activism in higher education; a history that the Mizzou students at varying points directly draw upon and reference. And, more importantly, the students add their efforts to this history, continuing in the tradition of students demanding social change and justice from their institutions. The third chapter specifically discusses the history of Missouri and its fraught relationship to slavery from the state’s very origins. Given
CRT’s grounding in legal histories, this chapter provides an overview of legal cases that shaped the conditions for enslaved individuals in Missouri (and the nation at-large) and, later, the fight by Black and/or African American students to matriculate into the University of Missouri. I aim to show that these histories persist in the present, shaping the conditions and experiences that prompted Black students at Mizzou to protest the university and deliver the eight demands at the heart of this project. Following the examination of the Missouri-state historical context, Chapter
Four details Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework and analysis procedures used. In this chapter, I provide an explanation of the strengths and limitation of CDA and how, given the research scope, questions, and theory, it was determined the most appropriate analytical framework. Chapter Five presents an analysis of the Concerned Student 1950 statement of demands. When put in relationship, the list of eight demands and the sociohistorical context of
Missouri and the University of Missouri specifically, shows the history to which the students responded and the conditions that have shaped students’ persistent experience of racism at
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Mizzou. The sixth, concluding chapter aims to bring all of the pieces of the study together; this includes continued discussion of the analysis and findings in relation to the relevant social movement literature, provides an overview of the implications to the field of higher education, as well as suggestions for future research.
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Chapter 2: Theory and Literature Review
The following chapter presents an overview of the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and relevant histories of student protests in the United States which both inform the structure and findings of this study. This study draws upon CRT to illuminate the legal histories of the state of
Missouri and those led by African American students to integrate Mizzou and how these histories reverberate into the present, continuing to shape the experiences of students of color at
Mizzou. In order to do this, I first present the origins of CRT and the tenets of the praxis that shaped this study. Related to the historical perspective at the core of CRT, Ellsworth and Burns
(1970) write, “Respecting the fact that unrest is not a new phenomenon but an insistent restatement of the need for both societal and institutional reform, the academic community can then address itself to the causes of activism and its place in the educational framework” (p. 17).
In the final section of this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the history of student activism in the U.S. higher education system, reiterating Ellsworth and Burns’ perspective that the contemporary wave of campus activism derives from this history and students directly draw upon these histories when building their movements. I also provide a brief overview of two prominent intersectional scholars, Roderick Ferguson and Sara Ahmed, whose analyses of the histories of diversity and the academy offer important interpretive lenses to this study.
Critical Race Theory: History and Tenets
CRT emerged in U.S. legal scholarship in the late 1970s in response to the limitations of legislation enacted during the 1960s, civil rights era (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). In telling one
CRT origin story, Kimberlé Crenshaw (2002) notes “as the Civil Rights Movement segued into various liberationist movements, students and young activists were confronting the reality that formal segregation was not the only mechanism through which racial power would find
20 expression in American institutions” (p. 10). Desiring a way to center race explicitly in legal theorizing and facilitate social change, legal scholars (some of whom were students) began to come together, hosting workshops and working meetings, often held during larger legal conferences (Crenshaw, 2002; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). This group built CRT from Critical
Legal Studies and the limitations of the individual-rights paradigm of civil rights. Delgado and
Stefancic (2017) also point out the influential role of radical feminism in the development of
CRT scholarship.
Depending on the scholar(s), CRT can be attributed with anywhere between three and seven central tenets (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Lawrence, Matsuda, Delgado, & Crenshaw,
1993; Mutua, 2006). Despite this discrepancy over the actual number of core ideas, the starting point for all CRT scholarship and praxis is a recognition of the endemic nature of racism. It is from this overarching tenet that all others stem. CRT “expresses skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy” (Lawrence et al., 1993, p. 6). Each of these qualities are used to develop a narrative specific to the United States in which racism and racial inequities are randomized and/or the result of a single individual’s bigotry, rather than a carefully constructed and protected set of societal structures that preserve white supremacy.
Critical race theorists recognize racial oppression as unquestionably linked to other forms of marginalization based on gender, sexual orientation, class, citizenship status, and religion, among other identities and experiences. In order to challenge the ways by which individuals experience intersecting forms of marginalization, CRT draws on knowledge from a variety of disciplines and recognizes different ways of knowing. For example, looking specifically at the
U.S. educational system, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) note racial inequalities, in education
21 and/or society at-large, are to be expected and regarded as logical when education on race and racism continues to be “muted and marginalized” (p. 47). At its core, CRT “works toward the end of eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression” (Lawrence et al., 1993, p. 6).
Though some CRT scholars use instances of student organizing as points of analysis, student activism does not have a prominent focus in CRT scholarship. However, Cho and
Westley (1999) position organizing and activism led by students of color (the authors focus on the U.C. Berkeley Boalt Coalition for Diversified Faculty) as the model for bringing together antiracist theorizing with practice. The authors assert that examples of student organizing not only contribute to the field of critical race theorizing, but these histories ought to be considered a part of the CRT origin stories. The authors see in histories of student organizing the opportunity for sharing of “subjugated knowledge and repressed movement histories” which show “how even imperfect movements have forwarded the struggle we inherit today, just as our flawed efforts will nevertheless provide a basis for future resistance” (Cho & Westley, 1999, p. 1424-5). Past movements, imperfect though they may be, help to understand the present context and build pathways for future resistance efforts and change-making processes.
Storytelling is at the heart of CRT praxis. The primacy of personal narratives in activism movements makes CRT an apt theoretical pairing. One of the innovations made by CRT scholars was the elevation of narratives, both personal stories and/or those of the marginalized community being documented, as evidence of the impact of moving through racialized systems. CRT recognizes the experiential knowledge of people of color and for this reason recognizes communities of color as important leaders in social change efforts. Histories of student organizing in higher education are a powerful example of experiential knowledge, communicated
22 through storytelling, poetry, art, speeches, writing, and other mediums, as catalysts for local and social change. Movements such as the U.S. racial civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, fraught as it may be, demonstrates the ability of civil disobedience to spur conversation and investment in social change in meaningful and enduring ways. One tension that I grapple with in this project is the large presence of the 1960s Civil Rights in contemporary understanding of what student organizing ought to look like and focus on; this memory becomes the model against which efforts such as Concerned Student 1950 at Mizzou are judged and critiqued by, often in ahistorical and imprecise ways.
CRT centers race and racism but makes space to engage other modes of marginalization and oppression as important and necessary to an analysis. Building upon Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality, Solorzano (1998) writes, “although race and racism are at the center of a critical race analysis, they are also viewed at their intersection with other forms of subordination such as gender and class discrimination” (p. 122). Scholars have used CRT to examine the way in which structures of power and oppression disadvantage individuals who hold multiple marginalized identities or experiences. Racism operates structurally to disadvantage people of color; Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality made it possible to show how sexism works in concert with racism to doubly oppress women of color. Intersectionality has made it possible for scholars to show how power operates in this manner along clusters of “race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017, p. 58) in an additive fashion.
An additional important tenet of CRT, interest convergence, though critiqued as a cynical perspective, posits advances in civil rights are predicated on advances or mutual beneficence for those in the dominant position (most often benefitting White interests). Derrick Bell argued that
“world and domestic considerations” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017, p. 23) prompt legal rulings
23 such as Brown v. Board of Education which pave the way for social change rather than any ethical or moral concern over the social condition and status of oppressed populations. This notion became a powerful tool used by the Mizzou student protestors in 2015 to extract administrative engagement and action to their demands. Mizzou met with the student organizers in an effort to curtail a public escalation. When Mizzou leaders failed, from the student perspective, to demonstrate true interest and concern for the racism experienced by Black students on campus, students continued to take advantage of the institution’s desire to avoid public critique as a way to see their demands met (though this met varying levels of success; not all demands were met or have been met as of 2019). When the Mizzou football team, led by the
Black players and supported by the coaching staff and team, began its strike, refusing to practice or play in any forthcoming games, the combination of financial risk (Mizzou may have been contractually bound to pay Brigham Young University $1 million if they cancelled the game) and sharply increased media attention ultimately led both the MU system president and the chancellor to step down (Wooten, 2015; Yan, Pegoraro, Watanabe, 2018). Prior to the participation of the football team, both leaders were adamant that they would not resign even as
Jonathan Butler began his hunger strike and Concerned Student 1950 led nonviolent actions on- campus and delivered its eight demands to them.
In the section that follows, I offer a concise overview of student activism on collegiate campuses in the United States. The pairing of CRT and histories of collegiate student activism are central to this project and understanding the precedent from which student protestors in 2015 drew upon while also adding their efforts to the larger history of collegiate student movements.
The histories illuminated by both lenses intermingle in this project and I draw upon both to
24 understand the sociohistorical phenomena which shaped the environment to which the Mizzou students were protesting in 2015.
Student Activism in U.S. Higher Education
Student organizing has been a facet of the United State higher education environment from its origins; in its earliest formation, Harvard students led a protest against the disciplinary methods used by Nathaniel Eaton and the quality of food prepared for them by Eaton’s wife
(Ellsworth & Burns, 1970). National conditions and/or events such as economic depressions, global wars (particularly those involving the U.S.), global human rights crises such as apartheid in South Africa, environmental causes such as oil divestment, feminist challenges to women’s exclusion, and the pursuit of civil rights have all been the subject of student activism and advocacy. Students organized (and continue to do so) with the hope of transforming the conditions of their institution as well as the social and political conditions of the nation. A hallmark of student activism in the United States after the 1900s is its emphasis on nonviolence.
Though this has certainly not always been the case, student movements largely relied (and continue to do so) on spoken outcries, written statements of opposition, and physical presence and/or occupation of strategic locations.
The institution of the GI Bill, following World War II, transformed higher education in a number of different ways. According to historians Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender, by 1947-
1948 “the Veterans Affairs Administration paid for almost half of the male college students in the United States, and by 1962 higher education had received $5.5 billion from that source on behalf of veterans of World War II and the Korean War” (p. 2). The physical expansion of universities, research funding, and student bodies is directly the result of U.S. militarization
(Ferguson, 2012). Universities began to move away from the model of small, regional
25 organizations; rather, “education became big business with increased numbers of students and faculty members” (Ellsworth & Burns, 1970, p. 10). For the first time in the history of the U.S. higher education system, access was widening, and universities were beginning to add a range of program and degree options from which students could choose (Thelin, 2004). As might be expected, the student body began to change as result of the GI Bill; higher education was no longer exclusive to those with enough familial wealth to afford it. Although the GI Bill expanded the class boundaries of who could attend college, opportunities during this period favored White male students. Though Black veterans could access GI benefits, colleges took full advantage of the fact that they were not bound to nondiscriminatory practices in order to maintain racially segregated institutions. During this time, the military itself enacted policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. While some universities did take steps to voluntarily integrate before 1954 and the ruling of the Brown v. the Board of Education case, this was limited and the conditions on campus for Black students was oftentimes contentious and students were limited as to what resources and co-curricular benefits they could access.
The student protests of the 1960s and 1970s loom large in historical memory both for what they accomplished and because it was such a departure from the “silent generation” of the
1950s (Ellsworth & Burns, 1970). Student organizing during this time focused on two core topics
– antiwar efforts in protest of the Vietnam War and towards expanded civil rights for Black and/or African American citizens. Ferguson (2017) posits that this period of protest stands apart in cultural memory because it made it possible for increasing numbers of women and students of color to be a part of the academy and (perhaps more importantly) transformed who could be regarded as knowledge producers. Students, by challenging their universities, “were calling for a new social and intellectual makeup of the university and for a new social order in the nation at
26 large” (Ferguson, 2017, p. 9). Student organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) both emerged during the
1960s as models of direct (nonviolent) action at localized levels with a broader political agenda.
Collegiate students were organizing in ways that reached widespread national attention and others that remained at the local level; SDS launched community outreach programs in inner cities designed to provide education and lead efforts for increased social services while SNCC organized the Freedom Summer in Mississippi and voter drives. In contrast to the specificity of the purpose of these efforts and actions led by core groups, Boren (2001) asserts many students were motivated by a more general resistance of “the establishment” (p. 172). As a result, when met with setbacks or demonstrations of force, the majority of students often withdrew (Boren,
2001). Groups often had to decide the extent to which they were willing to capitulate to outside forces such as the U.S. government or university administration; when to change their goals and intended outcomes or look outside of their campus context and join larger social efforts. Though negotiations between students and members of administrations did not always produce the changes that students were demanding, the “impression of a successful protest” would
“encourage a series of similar occupations at other universities and colleges” (Boren, 2001, p.
173). This dynamic can be seen in the Mizzou protests and the spread of the Concerned Student
1950 demands to campus across the nation. Another strategy employed by campus administrators was to institute superficial concessions that were vague enough to bring an end to the conflict while skirting the need for substantial changes. Successful university reform came in large part when conflicts reached a level where public pressure to implement changes reached a point that it could not be ignored and, even then, Boren (2001) asserts that these changes tended to come on campus administrators’ terms.
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I rely on two scholars in particular for the way in which they examine how power operates in higher education and, subsequently, the challenges of working to enact (or demand) change in systems that have been designed to preserve the interests of a select few (i.e.
Whiteness, maleness, wealth). In The Reorder of Things, Roderick A Ferguson interrogates institutional recognition of difference as a new economy of sorts that emerged amidst the campus expansion and changes following World War II. Ferguson underscores a contradiction in student movements that remains legible in the present, including that of Concerned Student 1950 at
Mizzou. This contradiction, as Ferguson writes, rests in students’ efforts to “make themselves legible to power, even as they contest power” (p. 38). And yet, in spite of this contradictory impulse, Ferguson reads the efforts of minoritized students in the 1960s and 1970s that led to the creation of ethnic studies and interdisciplinary programs prompted an alternative network of power in institutions. The presence of these programs and this knowledge in the academy are simultaneously sites of possible resolution and healing as well as rupture (Ferguson, 2012, p.
146).
Relatedly, in On Being Included, Professor Sara Ahmed explores the emergence of
“diversity work” in higher education as work that is held up as exemplification of universities’ commitment to diversity without having to enact these commitments. The language and actions that correspond to “diversity” agendas become, according to Ahmed, focused on changing the perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of the organization. As I will explore in the case of Mizzou, student experiences of racism become exceptionalized and treated as public relations mishaps rather than catalysts for removing barriers and/or transforming campus communities. Both authors present ways to read the rhetoric and actions of universities when faced with student narratives of racist experiences and demands for change to the status
28 quo. The work of Ahmed and Roderick is especially important to my analysis in Chapter 5 and making sense of the administrative engagement and statements in response to the Concerned
Student 1950 organizing.
Ellsworth and Burns (1970) encourage the examination of individual movements in addition to telling the larger history of student-led activism in higher education. As I aim to show with this study, the history of Concerned Student 1950 is also the history of Mizzou. I also expand on this in the chapter that follows where I show how the history of Missouri shaped both
Mizzou and the nature of students’ protests. The 2015 campus protests at the University of
Missouri provide an apt case study through the lens of CRT. Concerned Student 1950 demanded that the university, and the nation to some extent, grapple with the ways that racism continued to manifest in campus policies and practices, both outright and by subtler methods. As I demonstrate in the following chapter, the history of the state of Missouri began with a battle over slavery and, later, over Black individuals’ ability to access the rights of citizenship. As a product of this state history and concerted effort to maintain White supremacy, it is not surprising that students of color do not experience the University of Missouri to be the safe, welcoming educational environment that it purports.
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Chapter 3: Missouri’s Historical and Legal Context
As introduced in Chapter 2, an analysis engaging with CRT insists upon attention to the context and a “historical analysis of the law” (Lawrence et al., 1993, p. 6). In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the state of Missouri starting with its formation and delve into legislative contestations connected to the state related to slavery, emancipation, and later the racial integration of Mizzou. I go on to argue that Missouri’s origins as a slave state and enduring legislative efforts to subjugate Black citizens (the very term citizen a site of contestation) continues to shape students’ experiences of racial marginalization. The murder of Michael
Brown and ensuing Ferguson, Missouri protests and student reports of racial epithets that led to the 2015 Mizzou protests are two examples that I will explore in this chapter from a much larger, enduring culture in Missouri of White supremacy and denial of full citizenship for people of color (Lawrence III, 1990). To understand the campus conditions that prompted the 2015 student protests requires an engagement with the state’s fraught racial history.
State Origins: The Founding of Missouri
The Missouri Compromise, established in 1820 by Congress, was designed to balance congressional power between slave-owning and free states. As such, the Compromise designated
Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Missouri was an exception; the Compromise outlawed slavery in the Louisiana Territory (north of the 36º 30´ latitude line). Robert P. Forbes
(2007) notes that at the time of its origin the Compromise was promoted “as an imperfect but unavoidable expedient to salvage the Union” (p. 3). This imperfect solution – a compromise – was contentious only because of the possible influence it could have upon the dominant position of White landowners, the security of their access to property (in the breadth of its extension), and societal power. This as opposed to any concerns over the morality of slavery. This perceived
30 primacy of property owners’ rights would later be upheld when, in 1854, the Compromise was repealed (by the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and, ultimately, when the U.S. Supreme Court determined it to be unconstitutional three years later in 1857 with the Dred Scott v Sandford decision.
After the establishment of the Missouri Compromise, President Monroe formally admitted Missouri to the Union in August of 1821. Abutting the Mississippi River, Missouri state lore centers its role as the “Gateway to the West” and the starting point for expeditions, including that of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, integral to the national narrative of expansion
(Simeone, 1999, p. 1395). When Justice Joseph J. Simeone writes that Missouri law in its “early days, reflected the society of its time” (p. 1396), he is seemingly alluding to and justifying the state’s slave laws. Missouri has a fraught and uneven legal landscape related to slavery.
The state drew from Virginia and Kentucky slave laws (Boman, 2000). By Missouri state law, “slaves were both property and persons with limited legal rights” (Boman, 2000, p. 406). By law, slaves were considered property and treated accordingly; enslaved individuals were sold, traded, willed, and/or collected as compensation for debts. Enslaved individuals’ “limited rights”, in theory, provided protection from “cruel treatment and murder, and when accused of a felony” granted a trial by jury (Boman, 2000, p. 406). In reality, these rights were not guaranteed and often dependent on the enslaved individual’s location and the attitude of the slaveholder.
Though the Missouri Supreme Court demonstrated a limited willingness to rule in favor of slaves seeking emancipation between 1824 – 1841, after 1841 the Court’s decisions reflected a decidedly pro-slavery attitude. According to Boman (2000), by 1850 the Court was prepared to overturn the prior 30 years of cases where freedom was granted to enslaved individuals. This then became codified by the Supreme Court’s determination in 1857 of the Dred Scott v.
31
Sandford case which denied Black individuals recognition as citizens, among other consequential decisions.
Dred Scott, the eponymous figure in the case, was sold for $500 to Dr. John Emerson who used Scott as a personal valet (VanderVelde & Subramanian, 1997). Dr. Emerson brought
Scott to Fort Snelling located in the Northwest Territory, classified as free territory, where
Emerson served as the post’s surgeon. VanderVelde & Subramanian (1997) note the contradictory nature of Fort Snelling’s location in free territory where slavery was by law prohibited, though contained communities of enslaved individuals nonetheless. While at Fort
Snelling, Dred Scott was married to Harriet Robinson in 1837. During the time that the Scott’s were at Fort Snelling, an enslaved woman, Rachael, who had been brought to the fort in the early
1830s successfully sued for her freedom in St. Louis, MO (VanderVelde & Subramanian, 1997).
At the time of the Scott family’s freedom lawsuit in 1846, they had been living in St. Louis,
Missouri and built upon Rachael’s case. Though Dred and Harriet Scott both issued lawsuits for freedom, their lawyers agreed that only Dred’s case would move forward and the determinations made in the case would extend to Harriet (VanderVelde & Subramanian, 1997). Though there is little information about why the Scott’s opted to sue for freedom in Missouri courts and/or why the Scott’s sued when they did, VanderVelde & Subramanian (1997) posit that the determination of the lawsuit may have differed if it Harriet had been permitted to maintain a separate lawsuit, that she may have had a more compelling case for freedom.
The Court made several determinations in the Dred Scott ruling that would have immeasurable state and national ramifications, particularly for African American individuals.
First, the Court ruled that neither enslaved or freed African Americans “whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves” (60 U.S. 393, 1857, p. 403) could bring cases to
32 federal courts because they were not, in fact, American citizens. Chief Justice Taney argued that the (White) authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution – “great men high in literary acquirements (60 U.S. 393, 1857, p. 410) – were precise in their language and knew how it would be interpreted and, by extension, never meant for these documents to extend to Black, enslaved individuals or their descendants. Taney goes on to add that “the unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property” (60 U.S. 393, 1857, p. 410). Second, the Court determined that though states had the ability to determine citizenship criterion, Congress’ ability to construct national citizenship standards as granted by the Constitution took precedent. Though
Scott may have been able to be considered freed by Missouri state laws, his race precluded his national citizenship. Additionally, because Scott lived in the Wisconsin territory, he could not be considered free. According to the justices, the Fifth Amendment prevented Congress from banning slavery in territories. Enslaved individuals’ status as property meant that outlawing slavery constituted a loss of property for slaveowners without any means of compensation. The
Dred Scott decision, as previously mentioned, in determining that Congressional power did not extend to state determinations of slavery deemed the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.
Jim Crow Laws in Missouri
The period following the Civil War required a number of new laws to undo or amend the state and national legal precedents pertaining to slavery, some of which included those already described in this chapter. The state issued the Ordinance to Abolish Slavery on January 11, 1865
(Progress Amidst Prejudice, n.d., para. 2). It was not until 1868 that the implementation of the
Fourteenth Amendment that nationally Black Americans were granted citizenship and assured of equal protection under the law and associated civil liberties. These assurances and protections on
33 paper, or by law, did not match the lived experiences of Black Americans across the nation,
Missouri included, who struggled to find employment or go to school and simply live in environments steeped in racism, if not direct violence. This combination of violence and the pursuit of work led many to leave Missouri; by 1870, according to the Missouri State Archives,
“there were fewer Blacks in Missouri than there had been before the Civil War” (Progress
Amidst Prejudice, n.d., para. 4). These conditions also led to patterns of migration within the state from smaller, more rural communities to the burgeoning cities, such as St. Louis, with larger African American communities and access to resources (Progress Amidst Prejudice, n.d., para. 6).
The laws that emerged during this time – beginning around 1880 – are referred to as Jim
Crow laws and encompass the laws passed during this period that enforced the separation of
White and Black individuals, both physically and in policy. This White supremacist system touched all aspects of life for Black Americans from their ability to vote to their ability to find work to who could marry and the spaces that they could inhabit. Laws across the South determined where one could live, prohibited interracial marriage, set curfews (in Mobile,
Alabama, Black citizens were prohibited from leaving their homes after 10PM), and many spaces bore signs that designated “Whites Only” or “Colored” ticketing lines, water fountains, and phone booths (CRF, n.d.). Beyond physically separating students by race, some schools went so far as to require separate sets of school books and stored them apart (CRF, n.d.).
Missouri established its own set of Jim Crow laws during this time and they predominantly focused upon the education system and the prohibition of interracial marriage.
The 1865 Missouri Constitution instituted the public education system but required racially segregated schools for White and Black students. Lawmakers changed and added language to
34 these laws and statutes after this point, though these additions only served to reinforce the racial segregation of students. For example, in 1929, a Missouri statute stipulated, “Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school or any white child to a colored school”
(Separate is Not Equal, n.d.). In 1949, the state passed legislation that made it possible for Black students to enroll in courses at Mizzou if there was not a comparable course at Lincoln
University, the university designated to serve Black Missourians (part of the classification of
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs). As I will show in the section that follows, prior to the implementation of this law, when faced with Black students who wanted to enroll in courses that they could not access through Lincoln or wanted the prestige of MU’s programs, Mizzou took steps that made it virtually impossible for those students to gain admission. The legal contestations by several students denied admission by Mizzou academic programs laid the groundwork for future students both in Missouri and U.S. at large to lead integration efforts at the collegiate level.
Establishment of the University of Missouri
The Geyer Act, passed in 1839 by the Missouri state legislature, established the
University of Missouri (MU or Mizzou). The MU historical timeline notes that the university was located in Columbia thanks in part to “the efforts and contributions of 900 Boone County”
(University of Missouri Founded, n.d.). This timeline entry does not highlight James Sidney
Rollins, a prominent lawyer who would serve in the U.S. Congress, and among MU’s founding members owned one of largest portions of enslaved people in Boone County (Bowman, 2009).
MU’s second president, James Shannon, was a vocal defender of slavery and used his position as a preacher to frame it as a matter of morality. In a speech he titled “Domestic Slavery” and
35 delivered at the Pro-Slavery Convention of the state of Missouri in 1855, Shannon argued “all history attests that emancipation would be the greatest calamity that could be inflicted on the blacks themselves; that American slavery has elevated their character, and ameliorated their condition, in all respects…” (p. 8). Shannon’s letters, archived by the university, reference at least two slaves, Moses and Tony, doing custodial labor at the university (“James Shannon
Papers”, n.d.). MU’s development and growth was deeply imbricated with slavery; the process of desegregation, as I will show, was a slow fight: one requiring lawsuits and court-imposed interventions. And even after court mandates, Columbia citizens and university officials pursued various different tactics to delay or prevent desegregation altogether. The 2015 protests demonstrate that the university’s historical relationship to slavery looms in the present climate for the Black community of students, staff, faculty, and community members at Mizzou and in
Columbia.
Trials of Desegregation: Mizzou and Supreme Court Battles over Admissions
Lloyd Gaines and the College of Law
In 1935, Lloyd Gaines, an African American student, applied to the University of
Missouri School of Law. Gaines was denied admission because the Missouri Constitution stipulated “separate free public schools…for the education of children of African descent” (MO
Const., art. XI, § 3). (Missouri determined persons of African descent included anyone with one- eighth “Negro blood” and when this could not be readily determined by family history, a jury of individuals would decide based on the individual’s appearance.) Though Gaines would have been able to receive funding from the state to attend a law school in another state with an integrated law school, he did not pursue that route. Rather, Gaines challenged the MU admission policies, represented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
36
(NAACP). In 1938, the United States Supreme Court, in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada determined in favor of Gaines, reversing the prior determinations made by the Missouri Supreme
Court. On the reversal, Chief Justice Charles Hughes wrote,
By the operation of the laws of Missouri, a privilege has been created for white law students which is denied to negroes by reason of their race. The white resident is afforded legal education within the State; the negro resident having the same qualifications is refused it there, and must go outside the State to obtain it. That is a denial of the equality of legal right to the enjoyment of the privilege which the state has set up, and the provision for the payment of tuition fees in another state does not remove the discrimination. (305 U.S. 337, 1938, p. 349-350)
The Supreme Court decision upheld the segregationist standard of separate but equal facilities but determined that because Gaines would have had to go out of state to attend law school, denial of admission violated the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause (“Lloyd Lionel
Gaines”, n.d.). Missouri needed to have an educational program at a Black-serving university or allow Black students to enroll in the equivalent program at the White-serving institution, such as
MU. Rather than permit Gaines to enroll in the School of Law and desegregate MU, Missouri legislators established a Black-serving law school in 1939 associated with Lincoln University.
Before the NAACP could re-build a case with Gaines and attempt to desegregate MU, he disappeared as did his case. The Gaines case is important to MU’s institutional history, but also served an important national function due to the Supreme Court’s ruling; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada is cited in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case which determined segregation in educational settings unconstitutional (347 US. 483, 1954, p. 492).
Lucille Bluford and School of Journalism
Inspired by Gaines’ case, Lucile Bluford applied to MU’s School of Journalism in 1939 and was accepted. However, the University did not know when they granted her acceptance that
Bluford was African American. Thus, when Bluford visited campus to register for courses and
37 her race was made visible, she was not allowed to register for courses and MU revoked her admittance. In a letter of appeal to university administrators, Bluford described being turned away by the MU registrar; she writes:
I presented myself at the proper time for registration and was prepared to pay the lawful uniform requirements; but I was denied admittance by Mr. Canada, the Registrar, solely because I am a Negro. Mr. Canada said that the case of State ex rel. Lloyd L. Gaines vs. Canada et al. had not been determined and that the policy of the University was unsettled. (Bluford, 1939, para. 2)
The NAACP, once again, returned to MU and took on Bluford’s lawsuit against the university registrar. It took three lawsuits, but in 1941, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of
Bluford’s appeal and mandated MU to grant her admission as there was no alternative journalism program for African-American students in the state. However, rather than desegregate, the
School of Journalism closed its graduate program. The school rationalized the closure with low enrollment numbers and limited faculty due to WWII service (“Lucile Bluford”, n.d.). It would be nine years from Bluford’s ruling before MU admitted the first African American student. On its website, MU includes a university timeline (“The History of Mizzou”, n.d.), highlighting momentous events and achievements across the university’s 180-year history. There are entries highlighting the “Homecoming Queen First Photographed” in 1937 and “Enrollment surpasses
5,000 students” in 1938, but notably no entries that feature the legal fights led by Gaines or
Bluford to gain entry to their respective MU programs.
Mizzou Admits the First African American Student
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Lloyd Gaines, it was not until 1950 –
15 additional years – that MU admitted its first African-American applicant, Gus T. Ridgel to a master’s program in economics. Similarly to Gaines, Ridgel completed his undergraduate degree in business administration at Lincoln University of Missouri, the only African-American serving
38 institution during this time. Ridgel graduated from Lincoln University magna cum laude.
Because Ridgel was not offered financial support in any capacity, he communicated to his advisor that despite the program’s two-year structure, he planned to do it one (Potter, 2013).
Ridgel recounts telling his advisor, “I only have enough money for two semesters” (Potter, 2013, para. 4) and received permission from the department head to move ahead with his plan to complete four semesters’ worth of coursework and his thesis.
Alumni spotlights (Potter, 2013) highlight Ridgel for his role as the “first” African American student to graduate from MU and the feat of completing his program in the two terms that he could fund himself. Aside from a paragraph that mentions that a single coffee shop in Columbia served African American patrons, Ridgel is positioned as someone who thrived in spite of his race. Or, perhaps, because he did not think about his race and how that shaped his experience.
Ridgel, according to Potter (2013), was aware that he was “one of the first black students on campus, but he didn’t focus on it. His objective was just to graduate. ‘My ‘first’ was purely coincidental’” (para. 8). This positioning of Ridgel as a hard-working student who put his head down and focused on his objective – of graduating – rather than the injustice of his racialized experience on campus (he had to live on his own in a campus room because no white students would room with him) or of receiving no financial assistance becomes the behavioral standard against which Black students are measured. If Ridgel, MU’s first Black graduate did not complain, how can the students of 2015 protest, much less demand the removal of the system president?
Ferguson and the #BLM Movement
The murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer, approximately ninety miles from the Mizzou campus in Columbia, and the Black Lives Matter organizing that
39 followed shaped the Mizzou student protests only a year later. Michael Brown was eighteen years old, unarmed and as Robin D. G. Kelley (2018) makes explicit the relationship between the
Ferguson protests and the Concerned Student 1950 actions at Mizzou, he notes “college campuses were engulfed by fires ignited in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri” (p. 153). Darren
Wilson, the Ferguson officer, alleges that Brown matched the description of an individual reported to have shoplifted from a local convenience store (Ransby, 2018). When Brown and his friend did not comply with Wilson’s instructions to return to the sidewalk, the officer alleges that
Brown reached into his car and threatened him; to which Wilson responded with fatal force.
Black Lives Matter became such a compelling slogan in the Ferguson protests because the conditions of Brown’s death and the rationalizing of his murder demonstrated the extent to which various systems and conditions communicated that Black lives do not matter. What began as community-led vigils and memorials grew quickly as Missouri activists congregated to lead protests, local religious leaders led prayers, and groups of organizers and activists from outside the state decided to travel to Ferguson to support the efforts taking place. As Ransby (2018) points out, much of the energy in Ferguson was directed towards peaceful but defiant protests given the longstanding history of the predominantly White police force disproportionately targeting Black residents coupled with the disrespectful handling of Brown’s body. However, it was the incidents of looting, property damage, and damage to vehicles that precipitated the militarized response by local police and state officials, including tanks and combat weapons.
Ferguson became a site of contradictions; organizers experienced a strong sense of community and purpose while at the same fought among themselves over who should lead and represent the movement, money, and tactics, among other challenges of bourgeoning protest effort that seemingly shifted on a day-to-day basis (Ransby, 2018).
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Intrapersonal matters between leading organizers in Ferguson made the need to address the intersection of racism and sexism apparent, by exposing the paternalistic dynamics present in the organizing efforts. Alisha Sonnier, a collegiate-aged local leader-activist, recounted how sexism was not a new or novel experience for her. And yet, some male leaders encouraged her and other women to go home once the sun began to set, insinuating that they would be vulnerable out in the streets through the night (Ransby, 2018). To this, Sonnier told them, “I don’t need you to try and push me to the back. I don’t need you to erase me. I don’t need you to silence me” (Ransby, 2018, p. 65). This sentiment mirrors that at the core of Black Lives Matter
(BLM) which “see[s] and understand[s]” how many movement spaces leave “women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition” (“Herstory”, n.d.). As such, BLM commits to center the leadership of women, queer, and trans people, to bring “those at the margins closer to the center” (“Herstory”, n.d., para. 4).
BLM and other Ferguson organizers developed models of activism from which students could learn and emulate. On the Mizzou campus, a group of three Black queer women- identifying students began leading demonstrations under the name MU4MikeBrown (McElderry
& Rivera, 2017). One of the group’s large-scale efforts included a demonstration to protest the grand jury decision in December 2014 not to indict Darren Wilson. The event drew upon the chants that were used during the summer of the Ferguson protests (“No justice, no peace, no racist police” and “Black lives matter”, among others) and asked attendees to participate in a die in, lasting for four and a half minutes to honor the four and a half hours that Brown’s body lay in the street (Prohov, 2014). Reporting of the student demonstrations and the Mizzou administrative response show signs that student dissatisfaction with administration may have
41 been building. The Mizzou Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs addressed the students and emphasized her awareness of the racial inequities at MU and need for changes
(Prohov, 2014). In spite of Vice Chancellor Scrugg’s mention of the need for solutions, student concerns around transparency and accountability were beginning to surface, particularly from members of the Legion of Black Collegians (Mizzou’s Black student government) and other student leaders/organizers. In spite of private meetings with administrators where students presented a “Call to Action” list (McElderry & Rivera, 2017) and a campus town hall in response to this list, students felt that the university was not concerned about following through on their call to action.
The two conversations began to co-mingle; over time, speaking out against police brutality and racism at the state-level began to encompass the university as well. By 2015,
Mizzou was already the site of student-led protests and conversations around racial violence and injustice. It was the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), led by Black, predominantly women activists, that “laid some of the political foundations that made the large [2015 Concerned
Student 1950] mobilization possible” (Ransby, 2018, p. 80).
Concerned Student 1950 and the 2015 Protests
Only a year after the murder of Michael Brown and the widespread villainization of
Black-led protests (in addition to the militarized response by law enforcement and the National
Guard), the racial insults directed at Head (detailed extensively in Chapter 1) from a passing vehicle likely reiterated the ever-present possibility of violence against persons of color. Though racial insults and instances of hate speech had been reported by students of color and Columbia community members far before 2015, the violence against Head may have served as a tipping point given their proximity to the increased activism both nationally and on Mizzou’s campus.
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In a state where an unarmed Black teenager can be killed and his body left in the streets for hours, the racial insults directed at Head cannot be easily dismissed as harmless words (or may not feel harmless). To this point, Lawrence (1990) writes, “the racist name-caller is accompanied by a cultural chorus of equally demeaning speech and symbols” (p. 453). This was exacerbated by the Grand Jury’s decision in November 2015 not to indict the officer; this violence seemingly sanctioned by the state.
Critical race theorists have written about hate speech and racism through a freedom of speech lens. Scholars show how the first amendment becomes both a tool and shield of white supremacy. On the utility of “low-grade racism”, Richard Delgado (1991) notes how “daily, low- grade largely invisible stuff, the hassling, cruel remarks, and other things that would be covered by the rule [of freedom of speech]” (p. 380) works to the advantage of institutions. The function of these behaviors is to keep “non-white people on edge, a little off balance. We get these occasional reminders that we are different, and not really wanted. It prevents us from digging in too strongly…it prevents us from organizing on behalf of more important things” (Delgado,
1989, as cited in Delgado, 1991, p. 380). Head exemplifies this very dynamic in his Facebook post. Beyond feeling “extremely hurt and disappointed” (Head, 2015) by his Mizzou peers, the racialized, homophobic slurs remind Head that regardless of his accomplishments and leadership titles, others still do not want him to feel that he belongs at the university. Unlike Delgado’s perspective that this language curtails organizing, Head used his post and the sharing of his encounter to call others to action, to join the Mizzou programs focused on building social change, and to begin talking about the impact of racism and hold family members and friends accountable.
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Racial insults are an expedient method of injury (Lawrence, 1990). On the power of giving voice to experiences of verbal violence, Lawrence et al. (1993) write, “when ideology is deconstructed and injury is named, subordinated victims find their voices. They discover they are not alone in their subordination. They are empowered” (p. 13). The eight demands delivered to the Mizzou administration in October 2015, accompanied by students’ stories of microaggressions and outright hate speech shared using social media, press statements, and civil disobedience illustrate the empowerment described by Lawrence and his co-writers. That the demands were picked up by student groups at more than 100 college and university campuses in the United States (and some internationally) show how empowerment can be shared and spread.
The Mizzou students’ demands, though specific to the location and institutional history, gave students language to describe similar dynamics and make demands of their own, to work for change on their own campuses, often at the cost of personal wellbeing. The work of Cho and
Westley (1999) among others as demonstrated in the prior chapter shows us that this is not a new pattern; change in higher education has frequently come only after students took to their campus administration and community demands for change (always at the expense of students’ time, energy, possibly their safety, and education
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Chapter 4: Methodology
Introduction
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a method of analysis used by researchers in cultural studies, education, sociology, and philosophy among others to understand the ways in which discourse can be used to shape and maintain systems of inequity. The use of the term discourse refers “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them” (Weedon,
1987). Discourse can take many forms; some examples include speech, printed text, and media shaping knowledge and environments through policies, public speeches, narratives, classroom curriculum, photos and film, body language, and more (Mullet, 2018). Though there are numerous different ways to engage in a discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis regards discourse as a way by which the status quo (and therefor systems of oppression) is reproduced and sustained. A central tenet of CDA is that language and the use of it, is not a neutral process; words are not simply words, but deeply imbricated in processes of power. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the CDA framework and analysis procedures and its suitability to the study.
Overview of CDA
CDA is a qualitative analytical framework for “critically describing, interpreting, and explaining the ways in which discourses construct, maintain, and legitimize social inequalities”
(Mullet, 2018, p. 116). Its attention to power and the way in which language, specifically, is used as a tool of power makes CDA critical rather than merely a discourse analysis. CDA incorporates “not only the examination of text and the social uses of language” but also involves
“the study of the ways in which the very existence of specific institutions and of roles for
45 individuals to play are made possible by ways of thinking and speaking” (Hodges, Kuper, &
Reeves, 2008). Thus, CDA is an apt pairing with CRT in this study given the research questions and the exploration of the sociohistorical context of the state of Missouri and at the University of
Missouri that shaped the 2015 protests. From both a CRT and CDA perspective, histories shape the present and language and knowledge are not neutral productions, but rather deeply embedded in power relations.
According to Mullet (2018), though CDA is increasingly being used by educational researchers in particular, it might be considered an “emerging research approach” (p. 117). As I will detail in this chapter common practices and approaches have been developed for conducting research using CDA, though there are no prescribed methods or theory. In fact, one of the strengths of CDA is its adaptability and openness to a multiplicity of techniques to study language as both social and cultural practices (Mullet, 2018). Because the focus is on social problems rather than a set disciplinary paradigm, any number of theories or methods may be used to respond to the questions guiding a project using CDA (Mullet, 2018). As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Critical Race Theory and intersectionality are the principal theories used in this project. CDA and CRT are well suited given that both are concerned with tracing the relationship between power, ideology, and discourse as they relate to maintenance of oppression and injustice in environments and relationships.
CDA creates a frame by which it is possible to establish connections between the social context(s) in which the protests took place and the resulting actions and practices. Quoting Potter
(1997), Ritchie (2003) writes of the utility of discourse analysis to examine how “‘versions of the world, of society, events and inner psychological worlds are produced in discourse’” (p. 35).
Though the focal point of this project is the letter and list of eight demands written by Concerned
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Student 1950 and delivered to Mizzou’s system president, Tim Wolfe, I consider additional sources and artifacts from the 3 months of protesting in order to piece together a critical understanding of the campus discourse during this time. By understanding both the context and structure of the conversation that was constructed by the back-and-forth between the MU activists and Mizzou administrative leaders (not to mention the wider public following the protests), discourse analysis facilitates an understanding of both “their cognitive conception and their interpretation for social action” (Ritchie, 2003, p. 35).
Due to the time constraints of my project and location, I selected a method that would enable me to use digital archival materials, the wealth of reporting on the Mizzou activism accessible via the internet, and archived communications released by university officials and student groups alike during the period on which I focus. It is my belief that this project is well- positioned for future expansion and the inclusion of personal narratives garnered through interviews with members of campus involved in the protests. The events of 2015 continue to shape how university administrators prepare for responding to and engaging with student activism and provide models for students who want to advance change on their campuses and larger social contexts. Interviews with those involved in the events could provide poignant reflection and knowledge on contemporary activism, making important interventions in conversations around student activists and the state of higher education in the United States.
Research questions
The study is framed around two research questions: What sociohistorical phenomena contributed to the environment in which the 2015 University of Missouri student-led protests took place? What do the Concerned Student 1950 eight demands communicate about oppression and the student experience in 2015 at the University of Missouri? These questions shaped the
47 research design and implementation, from the analytic framework to the choice of which historical narratives and documents to include, as well as the analysis of the student demands.
Data Sources
Given the research scope and questions, the document delivered with the Concerned
Student 1950’s letter of explanation and list of eight demands serves as the central focus of the project and primary data source. Additionally, the project relies upon archival documents from both the state of Missouri and MU, official public statements, interviews captured by documentarians, and local and national reporting as source materials. The majority of these secondary materials are used to build a rich description for the Concerned Student 1950 statement and list of eight demands. These materials contribute to an understanding of social and historical context behind each of the demands and suggest why the students chose to include them in the list of eight (or to reissue, in some instances).
Analysis
In approaching the analysis of student demands, I followed the cluster of recommended approaches developed in the 1990s by a cohort of CDA scholars and succinctly described by
Mullet (2018). According to this cluster of scholars, approaches to CDA include seven characteristics. These include: (a) a problem-oriented focus; (b) analysis of semiotic data; (c) the view that power relations are discursive to some extent; (d) the view that discourses are situated in time and place; (e) the idea that expressions of language are never neutral; (f) analysis that is systematic, interpretive, descriptive, and explanatory; and (g) interdisciplinary and eclectic methodologies (Mullet, 2018, p. 118). Each of these seven components are interwoven in the recommended seven stages of engaging in CDA, though some stages are less intensive and may
48 not have discrete actions or procedures associated with it. The stages of a CDA analysis are as follows:
1. Select the discourse
2. Locate and prepare data sources
3. Explore the background of each text
4. Code texts and identify overarching themes
5. Analyze the external relations in the texts
6. Analyze the internal relations in the texts
7. Interpret the data
Again, due to the flexibility of the CDA framework, these stages are not fixed or always sequential. In fact, in many instances there may be a need to move back and forth between the stages in the process of analysis (Mullet, 2018). Using CDA, I was able to create an agile process in that I would begin by following the stages but jump forward or backwards in the process as was needed. I repeated this for analyzing the Concerned Student 1950 letter and each of the eight demands. The findings from this analysis are detailed in Chapter 5.
Researcher’s positionality
As previously noted, central to CDA is the perspective that standpoints, particularly that of the researcher, are never neutral and always “embedded in context” (Mullet, 2018, p. 118).
This perspective is not unique to CDA, but a feature shared across qualitative research and feminist practices, at large. In a project where considerations of power and institutionality are central, it is imperative that I am aware of and name the ways in which my identities, experiences, and positionality shape each stage of this project. As I describe in the introduction, my interest in the events at Mizzou stem from my time as graduate student in a higher education
49 program where the curriculum of the program was preparing me to view the situation from the administrative perspective, in spite of my natural inclination towards that of the students. This became amplified once the efforts at Mizzou sparked a similar chain of demands and actions at
Oregon State University. In some ways, I still consider myself in this bifurcated position of being both a student and university staff member. As someone who is deeply critical of the institution of higher education, both by experience and educational training, while also tied to it by profession (and income), this certainly shaped the lens through which I approached this study.
In order to analyze the students’ statement and demands, it was important that I first build a thorough description of the events that led to the creation of the demands and the subsequent actions taken by both the student activists and university officials after they were issued. I relied solely on newspaper archives from local Columbia and Mizzou student newspapers to construct the timeline of events included in Chapter 1. This description of events is an exemplar of discourse. Moreover, it is one undoubtedly shaped by my positionality. Though I made an effort to draw upon multiple reports of the events and to include passages from a variety of different newspapers, the majority of those cited in my description came from reporting done by the local
Columbia newspaper, The Missourian, and the MU student paper, The Maneater. This was primary due to the amount of reporting that both papers did on the protests as well as the ease with which I was able to access the archive. I am mindful due to the research done by Jennifer
Para (2017) that both newspapers largely reported the events from a sympathetic frame – sympathetic to the student protestors. Though I may have explicitly sought out a multiplicity of perspectives and accounts that read as neutral (though knowing that no journalism is ever neutral), it is not difficult to imagine that I felt more comfortable with these sympathetic-leaning accounts because of my own perspectives and biases.
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I am cognizant that the strength of CDA – its flexibility – is also a possible limitation. As
Mullet (2018) writes, the framework of CDA “relies solely on the analyst’s interpretation of the data, and the degree of systematicity of textual analysis is also left to the analyst” (p. 123). I was aware through the stages of this process of the possibility that the study and my findings could be flexed to uphold my anticipated findings and/or biases. To the extent possible, I tried to use reflexive practices to engage in critical reading and questioning as I analyzed the materials and developed a narrative of events. I also incorporated external readers when possible who could similarly ask questions of my analysis and engage in a process similar to that of member checks in an interview or participatory based research process. Though this too, I recognize, is an imperfect solution and was not regarded as the sole method of verification or accuracy.
Concluding Discussion
The CDA framework lends itself to the study’s aim to understand the sociohistorical phenomena that shaped the University of Missouri campus climate and resulted in the 2015 student-led protests, particularly the delivery of eight demands by the student group, Concerned
Student 1950. In spite of the possible limitations, the flexibility of the CDA processes made it a fitting method of analysis for the study. Furthermore, the considerations of power and attention to sociohistorical context in discourse aligns well with the theoretical framework of critical race theory. The following chapter presents the findings culled from the analysis of the Concerned
Student 1950 letter to Mizzou campus administrators and list of eight demands designed to improve the campus climate for students of color at MU. The analysis of the students’ demands explores the document in relationship to the discourse constructed by campus officials around race, oppression, and social change.
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Chapter 5: Analysis
In the second chapter, I outlined the CRT framework. Following this model, I presented a deep exploration of Missourian laws from the formation of the state to the present, particularly how the state used law to shape the lives of Black Americans. The White supremacist roots of the state’s legal system shaped the formation of Mizzou, the efforts led by African American students to access the educational programs at the university, and persist into the present demonstrated by the experiences reported by students who led the efforts at the core of this project. Each of these points in the history of Mizzou shaped the phenomena that led to the 2015 protests. In this chapter, I analyze the letter and eight demands presented to the Mizzou administration by Concerned Student 1950 following the steps prescribed of a critical discourse analysis. The analysis is divided into two sections. I begin by analyzing the letter that accompanied the demands; the document serves as an introduction of Concerned Student 1950 to administrators (and the public readers following the protests as they are aware), why they are protesting, and what they hope to accomplish. This letter provides context before the list of eight demands, which I focus on in the second part of the chapter. Throughout the analysis, the theoretical work of Sarah Ahmed and Roderick Ferguson help highlight the language and methods by which the students are both working to make themselves legible to the university and also pushing against the institutional power of the academy.
“The Struggle Continues”: The Concerned Student 1950 Letter
As noted in the timeline of events in Chapter 1, Mizzou administration received a letter and list of eight demands from a group of students leading the campus protests on October 20,
2015. The full text of the letter and set of demands is included in the Appendix. To understand the demands, the reader must first engage with the letter. It functions at once as a primer, a
52 mission statement, and a call to action. At the top of the letter features “Concerned Student 1950 presents List of Demands to The University of Missouri” (“The Demands”, 2015, header). The multi-lined, blocked styling of the header, in addition to the wording appears akin to the opening credits of a text or a film. Concerned Student 1950 centers its leading role from the start and uses the opening of the letter to give meaning to the name they have taken on and how it gives meaning to their organizing. Additionally, the authors provide a succinct overview of the university context, both historical and present, into which they are intervening as well as their efforts, up to the point of delivering the demands.
In the letter, the students, referring to themselves as Concerned Student 1950, explain the purpose of their demonstrations to expose the “raw, painful, and often silenced history of racism and discrimination on the University of Missouri’s campus” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 1).
The letter did not include a salutation; it was not addressed to a single person or campus entity.
Rather, the header reads: “To: The University of Missouri” with the date, October 20, 2015 underneath it. In doing so, the group seemingly addresses the Mizzou community at-large. In the absence of a singular audience, the students avoid placing blame on a single campus figure or entity for the hostile campus climate while inciting readers to examine their actions and responses for complicity. The letter does make it clear, however, that the organizers place the bulk of the responsibility on campus administrators “who perpetuate that oppression through their inaction” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 2). Moreover, in the absence of meaningful engagement from university administration (vague statements, slow response times to acknowledge incidents, meetings without clear outcomes), Concerned Student positioned their demands as a catalytic agent for the movement; if administration continued to ignore requests for meetings, the students were willing to take steps to try and force their hand.
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Although there were eleven core student organizers leading Concerned Student, the group writes that the name, and presumably their demands “represents every Black student admitted to the University of Missouri since [1950] and their sentiments regarding race related affairs affecting their lives at a predominantly white institution” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 2). It might be possible to dismiss a group of eleven students, but when that small group embodies the voices and experiences of the thousands of Black students who have come into relationship with the university, their collective presence looms a little larger. Concerned Student makes it clear that their efforts are done on behalf of the Black student community, both historically and those who will enroll in the future, though they implicate administration for this very situation. The organizers write, “as students, it is not our job to ensure that the policies and practices of the
University of Missouri work to maintain a safe, secure and unbiased campus climate for all of its students. We understand, however, that change does not happen without a catalyst” (“The
Demands”, 2015, para. 3). In their effort to catalyze change at Mizzou, to shake up the privileged silences of their peers and administration’s “reactionary initiatives” (“The Demands”, 2015, para.
1), the Mizzou group linked themselves to a history of students demanding change on their campus. The students point out that their work comes at great personal expense of their “time, money, intellectual capital, and excessive energy” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 3). The students put this all into context though, writing that their collective expenditure of personal resources has all been in the pursuit of “bring[ing] to the forefront these issues and to get administration on board” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 3).
Before the closing of the letter, the students note that they “expect a response to these demands by 5:00pm on October 28, 2015” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 4). On a practical level the deadline communicates to administrators the expectations for engagement and a
54 responsibility to respond. The deadline also serves as a literary device of sorts, building a sense of anticipation and tension now that a countdown has been introduced. With eight days to go, how will the Mizzou administration proceed? Will they respond at all? The students build upon this tension once again. In the absence of a response to their demands, Concerned Student would
“take appropriate nonviolent actions” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 5). The assurance of nonviolent actions that nonetheless escalate the situation carry significance because of known administrative response patterns.
Early in the letter when describing administrative complacency towards addressing the oppressive campus climate, the authors assert that “the Black experience on Mizzou’s campus in cornered in offices and rarely attended to until it reaches media. Then, and only then, do campus administrators seek reactionary initiatives” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 2). The reader (and members of the administration) can anticipate that in the absence of any response or acknowledgment of the group’s demands, the students would look to escalate the situation using media and other public forums. But what type of response will the students accept? In contrast to the specificity of their deadline, the student group’s expectations around the institutional response is less clear. The demands are such that they cannot be resolved in eight days. And yet, in light of the university’s prior pattern of avoidance and reactionary solutions, it seems likely that the students expect more than mere acknowledgement of their efforts. Given that local and state-wide newspapers were already following the on-campus demonstrations and building unrest, this assurance of escalation was not an empty threat. The administration’s fear of media scrutiny was also something that it had demonstrated to students to be a compelling deterrent.
This makes the ambiguity around the students’ expectation of the institutional response all the more significant, particularly for the university. Without clearly articulating what they expected
55 from an institutional response, the students place themselves in a position to adjudicate whether the university’s treatment of their demands feels of an appropriate tenor.
The students close out their letter, segueing into the list of demands, with “the struggle continues, Concerned Student 1950” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 6). The name of their group itself, Concerned Student 1950, stands apart due to the enlarged font size and serves as a chronological signpost of the longstanding struggle led by Black students to be admitted, let alone welcomed and supported. The students themselves note earlier in their letter that although the name honors the year 1950 and Gus T. Ridgel’s role as the first African-American student to enroll at MU, he was not the first to seek admission or even to be admitted. Rather, for 15 years prior, the university fought openly against desegregation, even when mandated by the Supreme
Court. 65 years later, student organizers demonstrated both on the campus and in writing that at
Mizzou the struggle does, in fact, continue.
We Demand: Concerned Student 1950’s List of Demands
Scholar R.D.G. Kelley (2018) posits “that while trauma can be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a destination and may even trick activists into adopting the language of the neoliberal institutions they are at pains to reject” (p. 154). In many ways the formation of the
Concerned Student 1950 group and the escalation of their actions, culminating in the delivery of the eight demands, followed the trajectory outlined by Kelley. Racist actions were not a new or novel occurrence prior to 2015 for students of color at Mizzou. Rather the organizing that had begun on campus in response to the Ferguson, Missouri protests led by a group of students under the name MU4MikeBrown, coupled with a series of incidents in which White students shouted racial epithets at Black students served as catalytic events for the organizing to come (McElderry
& Rivera, 2017; Prohov, 2014). Students, such as Payton Head, the student body president who
56 shared his experience of being followed by a group of students in a truck, shouting racial and homophobic slurs at him as he walked across campus (Head, 2015), exemplify the power of storytelling in organizing efforts. Head’s experience powerfully captured the racism experienced by students of color at Mizzou and became something tangible for student activists to point to explain their platform and the need to demand change. If Mizzou was not safe for the student body president, for whom was it safe? Black students, let alone Black students at the intersection of additionally marginalized identities (such as Head who openly identified as queer) repeatedly spoke to their feeling of institutional betrayal and that “Mizzou doesn’t give a damn about its black students’” (Gallion & Oide, 2015, para. 19).
Stories of racial violence at Mizzou served as powerful pathways into campus organizing in 2015 and, as Kelley noted, I argue that the demands made by students inadvertently articulated demands that reify contemporary methods of neoliberal multiculturalism. I do not make this argument to critique the students or the movement that they led. Rather, I hope that a close reading of the demands in relationship to the work of scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and R.G.
Kelly who are deeply critical of higher education will draw clarity around the cyclical phenomena of student activism and the persistent calls for systemic change. Concerned Student
1950 demanded that the university pay attention to the culture of racism and violence that persisted for students of color at Mizzou and, in elevating a set of demands from 1969, made clear that this was not a new or novel pattern. The organizing led by Concerned Student 1950 generated a great deal of national attention from media and support from collegiate students at over 100 campuses who recognized similar patterns on their own campuses. Though the protests led to the resignation of the president, it did not seem to build a more welcoming, inclusive, and just campus as the students hoped. The demands underscored the need for continued efforts to
57 recruit and retain students, faculty, and staff of color, resources to support the Black community on campus, and continued education around power, privilege, and oppression. What remains unclear is the extent to which these demands could shift the campus climate in the way students hoped, given the mechanisms in higher education designed to preserve institutional power and financial capital.
In the sections that follow, I have demarcated the text of the demands using italics to help them stand apart from the analysis. In some instances, I have included only an excerpt of the full demand for the sake of space. The Appendix includes the full text.
Demand 1: We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1950 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter…
The first demand makes clear the tension undergirding the Concerned Student 1950 movement between reform and transformation, trying to shift an existing culture and creating an entirely new one. The students demand an apology from President Wolfe both first and foremost because it was the driver of his car who continued to edge towards the student protestors blocking the street during the Homecoming Parade, hitting one of activists (Vandelinder, 2015).
Additionally, as the highest-ranking administrator at Mizzou, an apology from the president is the closest Concerned Student 1950 will get to an apology from the university itself. To this impulse to want an apology or to be seen by the institution, Kelley (2018) cautions student activists from counting on institutions too fully for validation or remorse. He is concerned by the seeming push by “black students to seek love from an institution incapable of loving them – of loving anyone, perhaps” (p. 154), particularly when this must come at the expense of students’ expenditure of personal stories of racial violence and institutional betrayal, an idea that the
58 students themselves articulate in the opening letter. It is not students’ job, as they write, to monitor the efficacy of policies and practices and yet, they open with a demand for an apology and recognition of negligence.
The first call functions as a public acknowledgment of institutional error and the president’s personal role in the escalation of the situation. The push for President Wolfe to host a press conference in the student center reflects a visual shift in power. Unlike an administrative building which often reflects an isolated tower of administrative and financial power, the student union reflects the core of student leadership, organizations, and community. Just as the line of protesters did not move during the Homecoming Parade, the students are signaling that they will not move. They expect President Wolfe to be the one who will move from the administrative privileged position, to acknowledge his individual privileges as well as those that the university has upheld. The emphasis on receiving a handwritten apology is a deeply human and individual act contradicts his positional power and representation of the institution.
Demand 2: We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.
The demand for the removal of the system president became the focal point of national attention and critique of the Mizzou movement. Despite the seeming panic over students demanding the removal of a high-ranking administrator, in a study of student demands at 70 institutions (including Mizzou), Pierson and Pierson (2015) found that only 9% of the demands included a call for the removal of administrators. Furthermore, before the football team announced that players and coaches planned to boycott practices and upcoming games until
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Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike ended and the university presumably agreed to meet their demands, President Wolfe offered no indications that he planned to capitulate to the demand for his resignation. It was the possible forfeiture of the football team’s game against Brigham Young
University and a $1 million dollar fine for breaking that game contract that led to the president’s resignation (Wooten, 2015).
The students push for the “removal” of President Wolfe, though it is not clear who they are calling upon to enact this removal. Between October and November, when Concerned
Student 1950’s efforts were the most concentrated, President Wolfe indicated at numerous points that he had no plans to resign and he appeared to have the support of campus entities including fellow administrators and the Board of Curators. It is fitting then that the concerted effort of
Concerned Student 1950 and the successful support of the Mizzou football team led to President
Wolfe’s resignation and, in a sense, facilitated the removal for which they called. Once the football team announced its boycott, state leaders and representatives began to issue statements urging President Wolfe to step down so that Mizzou might begin “the healing process”
(Landsbaum & Weber, 2015, para. 35). Using the language of healing, the urges for Wolfe to resign reflected an awareness that the students’ “demands [were] greater threats to the racial order before they [were] accepted than after they have been adopted in suitably moderate form”
(Ferguson, 2012, p. 28). By November, MU administrators and state leaders recognized that the student protests were garnering enough national attention to make them more powerful than if the university appeared to give in to them. Though the system lost its two highest positioned leaders, the resignations brought a stop to the protests for the moment and allowed the university to control the process once again. The second demand was met, and the university took this leeway to announce actions that were not among the eight demands so as to preserve institutional
60 power. The Board of Curators announced that it planned to hire a diversity, inclusion, and equity officer, mandate trainings, and charge a task force with creating plans to improve diversity and inclusion at Mizzou. Borrowing from Ahmed (2012), these efforts might be considered what the scholar terms non-performatives because they are meant to signify institutional commitment, but fundamentally serve more as public relational efforts than bringing about the change that they are meant to signify.
Additionally, the students recognized though that the president’s removal would not, in and of itself prompt a campus transformation. For this reason, the students advocated for a policy and practice change that would ensure a high level of involvement in the selection of future campus leaders. This is the first demand to include a call for a committee of students, staff, and faculty of color to sign off on future hiring decisions; though this is a feature in at least two other demands. Ferguson (2017) argues that in the move towards positioning administrators as the most valuable assets and figures at the university, students, faculty, and “disenfranchised communities” become positioned as the “least valuable entities in the university’s eyes” (p. 64).
Given this relationship, by demanding the removal of the president, Concerned Student 1950 is destabilizing the prioritization of the university figurehead and asserting the importance of infusing the perspectives of the most marginalized on campus in future decision-making processes.
Demand 3: We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.
The third demand specifically cites demands given to the University in 1969 by the
Legion of Black Collegians (LBC or the Legion). The Legion is described as “the only Black
Student Government in the Nation” (“Legion of Black Collegians”, n.d.), distinct from Black
61 student unions or organizations on other campuses. On its website, the organization describes how a racist incident in 1968 at a Mizzou football game where a song titled “Dixie” and the unfurling of a confederate flag prompted a group of Black students to form a separate government that would give voice and advocate on behalf of the Black student community
(“Legion of Black Collegians”, n.d.). The LBC was formally recognized by the university as an independent student government in May 1969. This same year, the LBC issued a set of fifteen demands to university administrators, as noted in the 2015 demands. There is not accessible archival information that I could find to measure the extent to which the university responded to or enacted any of the demands.
The 1969 demands focused predominantly on allocating financial resources towards the hiring of Black faculty, to retain Black students with high-financial need, to ensure that academic resources are available to students of color, and the maintenance of the Black Culture House, among others. While the numbers underlying these demands may need to change to reflect contemporary budgets and needs, the relationship between financial resources as an expression of institutional values remains. Students are demanding that the university budget and resources match its rhetoric of valuing racial diversity. By upholding the 1969 demands in their entirety,
Concerned Student 1950 surprisingly upholds a demand for “adequate police protection of all
Blacks in the university family” (Pollock, 2016). Given the student-led organizing around
Michael Brown’s murder by a Ferguson police officer and protests of police brutality only a year prior, it seems contradictory to Concerned Student 1950’s expressed aims to hold up the 1969 demands in their entirety. Aside from this possible diversion, the 1969 document ties the 2015 movement to a longstanding history of Black student leadership and efforts to facilitate change at
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Mizzou towards a more just, inclusive community. Again, the resonance of Concerned Student
1950’s sign off, “the struggle continues” lands distinctly in this demand.
Demand 4: We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.
The call for a mandatory curriculum that is monitored by staff, faculty, and staff of color seems to run the risk of becoming an extension of the institution, that it might be rolled out so thin that it loses its potency as diversity work often can when burdened by institutionality
(Ahmed, 2012). The challenge of trying to build conditions in which individuals are able to learn from one another and operate across difference begs the question, “how does one produce alternative practices and logics within a place like the university, whose history is one of misrecognizing and distorting those differences?” (Ferguson, 2017, p. 61) Is it possible to create and enforce a mandatory curriculum that meaningfully shifts the campus environment as it relates to race and inclusion efforts? Is it fair to rest the responsibility of this initiative on the shoulders of a group of faculty, staff, and students of color? I would imagine that Concerned
Student 1950 did not intend for the responsibility to rest with this group that they envision, though the phrasing of the statement seems to set up the potential for such a dynamic. In spite of the concerns and challenges implicit in this demand, it is possible to see in it a desire to transform the educational mission and vision of higher education, a desire to shift the intellectual climate in higher education and whose knowledges and experiences are recognized and honored as such.
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Importantly, this is the third demand that calls upon individuals of color from Mizzou to create and/or approve of decisions made on behalf of the community. The call for boards and committees comprising of students, staff, and faculty of color presents a potential challenge to those who feel already overworked or tokenized by university committees and service. Certainly, it is important that this work reflect the needs and mission of creating a more inclusive and equitable community. And, until the community reflects greater racial diversity (as several other demands aim to intervene and improve), the calls for committees and boards may add labor to a small group of individuals who already get tapped for university service opportunities because of their race (Maldonado & Guenther, 2019).
Demand 5: We demand that by the academic year 2017-2018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campuswide to 10%.
According to the reporting by the MU office of Institutional Research and Quality
Improvement, there were 55 non-tenure and tenure-track faculty members listed as
Black/African American out of 1973 faculty overall (approximately .03%; IRQI, 2018). It is not possible to access race and ethnicity data for campus staff and, thus, I am not able to approximate what a 10% growth would mean for Mizzou (how many staff and faculty that would reflect, how many hires would need to happen, etc.). That is not to say that the university does not have that information, merely that it is difficult for those outside of the university to quantify this demand or hold the institution accountable. The 55 Black faculty of 1,973 overall brings to mind Ahmed’s use of the phrase, “a sea of whiteness” (p. 35). The challenge in combatting the affective and systemic sense of being overwhelmed by whiteness lies in the tension between hiring individuals of color (adding to the “body count” as Ahmed describes) without any change to the overall systemic conditions. Yet, by incorporating this demand and setting a numerical
64 benchmark (10%), the students emphasize that seeing their identities reflected in faculty and professionals is important to the community, to the knowledge produced at Mizzou, and the wellbeing of the Black student community by taking steps to interrupt (or disrupt) the feeling of singularity (Ahmed, 2012).
Demand 6: We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by
May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote and more safe and inclusive campus.
The call for increased representation of racial and ethnic populations is a recurring, historically rooted demand; it was at the core of campus protests in the 1950s on through the
1970s (Ferguson, 2017), and again peaked in the 1980s and 1990s led by the U.C. Berkeley
Boalt Coalition for Diversified Faculty (Cho and Westley, 1999). Increasing racial and ethnic representation at the student, staff, faculty, and upper administration level is imperative. This must also happen at the intersection of additional diverse identities, experiences, and perspectives. And, this work ought to be tempered by an understanding that if the foundational structures of higher education remain rooted in White supremacy, increased racial diversity will not produce the transformations that drive the work of student activists, including Concerned
Student 1950. Kelley (2018) equates this call for greater racial and ethnic diversity as akin to
“asking for more black police officers as a strategy to curb state violence” (p. 156).
A more racially and ethnically diverse student population may foster students’ sense of community and combat isolation, but it will not fundamentally transform the structures that continue to disadvantage students from historically minoritized populations. Ferguson (2017) argues that the “administrative university works as a guarantor of the status quo” and as a consequence “has negated exactly what increasingly visible minority communities promised: that
65 everything can be rewritten, that history is not set in stone, that an institution’s present does not have to be its future” (p. 63). From this perspective, we might view the demands as stitching together a vision for a different way forward than that currently offered by the Mizzou administration. History does not have to be set in stone, but the students use the model left for them in 1969 by the Legion of Black Collegians to build upon and re-envision what the university might be for everyone, especially for students, staff, and faculty of color.
Demand 7: We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the
University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals; particularly those of color…
Again, the seventh demand, like other demands, raises concerns about the possibility for substantive transformation. That is not to diminish the importance and need for mental health professionals and resources with the skillset to support students of color. And, without substantive changes to the structural elements in higher education that continue to foster a hostile environment for people of color, increased mental health resources will only ever be a stop gap effort. That said, the seventh demand suggests an immediate change that might have a long-term impact. The attention to the mental wellbeing of students runs the risk of appearing less radical than the removal of the university system president, but offers the potential to sustain and transform individual students’ experiences and wellbeing during their time on campus.
Demand 8: We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justice centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus…
The eighth demand mirrors the tenor of the demands issued by the LBC in 1969 given the emphasis on increasing financial resources for services on campus that support students of color
66 as well as advance the social justice education of the entire campus community. Additionally, the students build upon the fifth demand to increase the number of Black faculty and staff hired and call for the hiring of more staff members of color who can support this work. It seems likely as well that the same professionals and resources called for in this demand would connect to the inclusion curriculum advocated in the fourth demand. The final demand resonates with the reminder in the introductory letter that the work of building outreach and educating the campus community is not meant to be conducted by students alone, it is an insistence that Mizzou needs to build a larger community, a coalition of staff who can lead this work alongside students.
After the Demands
“If diversity is to remain a question,” as Ahmed (2012) poses, “it is not one that can be solved” (p. 17). How might understanding of the Mizzou protests shift if it was framed as a continuous, relational process rather than one resolved by meeting the students’ demands or the establishment of a diversity committee? With that said, I am cautious to use the language of process given how it can (and was) used by administrators to explain elongated processes and the move away from students’ demands. For example, several months after the height of the
Concerned Student 1950 organizing, MU’s Interim Vice Chancellor for Inclusion, Diversity, and
Equity, Chuck Henson reminded students that “we’re dealing with issues that took more than
100 years to develop here and is certainly going to take more than 100 days and three meetings to address” (Mizzou News). Statements like Henson’s are designed to temper expectations, while also setting up the students who want to see change led by administrators as unreasonable and unruly. The students’ insistence on “receiv[ing] what is automatically given to others” (Ahmed,
2012, p. 177) – a safe, welcoming learning and living environment in which they see their identities reflected in other students, professors, and staff – becomes something by which Vice
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Chancellor Henson accentuates the impropriety of their demands. In doing so, Henson seemingly
“confirms the improper nature of [their] residence” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 177) at the university, and perhaps, higher education overall.
The emphasis on the “100 years” that it took to embed racism in the university and equally lengthy process to resolve it serves to curtail the expectations of those participating and observing the process. That is not to say that it is an unreasonable perspective; certainly, to resolve an openly hostile racial climate on campus takes time, a great deal of effort by many, and an investment of resources. Yet, Henson’s chastising tone seems less focused on this process and more on patronizing the students for their insistence on genuine engagement from MU administrators and action. The well-worn call for patience and grace mirrors calls for civility and fails to account for (or empathize with) the students’ experiences that precipitated their demonstrations in the fall and sense of institutional neglect. Rather than offering a “narrative of repair” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 17), Henson’s message and tone conveys greater concern for managing the optics of the Working Group’s efforts. The emphasis on “moving forward” (a phrase used five times) and working together respectfully to reach solutions reifies the image of the students as impatient disruptions, obstacles to the progress of the group. Moving forward also pushes aside the historical narratives that Concerned Student 1950 used to ground their demands and their group name. Henson, like President Wolfe, tried to maintain forward-centric rhetoric to convey a sense of progress and in doing so fail to acknowledge the disconnect between the environment experienced by students and the institutional values. It is for this reason that the
LBC’s demands in 1969 (referenced by Concerned Student 1950 in Demand 3) remain so relevant and resonant with those issued by Concerned Student 1950 in 2015.
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Ahmed writes of solidity, of efforts to create changes that are agile while also maintaining their shape. In spite of Henson’s language of change-making, his emphasis on the longstanding nature of racism, of the need for patience and grace, in combination with the visual references of his institutional power construct Henson as solid, helping the institution hold its shape. In this way, the students experience Henson as a wall, obstructing their efforts to facilitate campus change in the same way that Henson seems to position the student protestors who do not follow the outlined behaviors for the Working Group participants. Both Henson and the protestors become “what [they were] judged as being” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 186). By insisting that the other is the obstacle, they both become the blockage point. And yet, Ahmed (2012) insists that through the process of “encountering resistance and countering that resistance” (p. 175) new knowledge is formed about how to move around or through the obstacle (or not, which is equally important knowledge). Mizzou may not meet all of the demands put forth by Concerned Student
1950, just as it failed to comply with all of the demands issued in 1969 by the Legion of Black
Collegians. Yet, each of these movements taught students a little more about how to navigate and transform their institution. I hope campus communities will follow the inquiry offered up by Tav
Nyong’o (2015) and ask, “how can we – those of us who profess to educate – accept the student demand not only as a rebuke, which it is, but also as a gift?”
Concluding Discussion
A close reading of the Concerned Student demands through the lens of institutionality as articulated by Sara Ahmed and Roderick Ferguson begs the question of just how radical the demands really were. The national coverage of the protests projected a sense of panic around the events, of students going wild making demands of campus officials, working to topple the system president (Davenport, 2015). If it can happen in Missouri, your campus might be next.
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And yet, the demands themselves, aside from the call for the resignation of Missouri system president, comprise of demands for cultural competency training, increased mental health resources for students of color, and a plan to increase the enrollment and retention of students of color, among other similar demands. As has been demonstrated in this project, the 2015 MU demands follow a historical trajectory of student protest demands in the U.S. higher education environment that seek to transform collegiate environments for communities of color (not to mention Mizzou itself). This reading is not meant as a critique of the students or of the demands.
Rather, I want to underscore that in spite of the frenzied tenor in national media coverage and the administrative response to the students, the demands themselves reflected a greater desire for recognition and demonstrative support from MU than a complete university upheaval. Through the demands, Concerned Student 1950 used the language of historic protest movements to communicate demands that did more to make them legible to the university than work against it.
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Chapter 6: Conclusion
In the letter introducing their eight demands to the University of Missouri administration,
Concerned Student 1950 wrote that the work of their protests up to the point of their letter had been to make visible “the raw, painful, and often silenced history of racism and discrimination on the University of Missouri’s campus” (“The Demands”, 2015, para. 1). This document and the students who issued those demands are at the heart of this project. And, when examined through the lens of CRT, it becomes evident that the “often silenced history of racism and discrimination” that the students write about in the context of their university is in direct relationship to the history of the state of Missouri. In spite of its origins as the compromise state,
Missouri became a site of contestation, particularly related to the rights of enslaved individuals and who gets to call themselves a free citizen. The establishment of the University of Missouri in
1839 as the institution charged with the education and service of the citizens of Missouri meant that much of its history tracks parallel to that of the state. Beginning in the 1930s, African
American students sought to attend the university (in some instances gaining admission) and even winning court cases mandating their enrollment, and still MU took steps to avoid desegregating. Approximately 80 years later, the challenges facing Black and/or African
American students at Mizzou (and, in the state at large) look and sound different on their face, but echo strains of past challenges. At the heart of the 2015 protests are questions of who gets to feel that they belong in the academy, who is able to feel safe and protected, who deserves to have their experiences and pain acknowledged, who gets input in how resources are allocated and accessed. In this project, I have explored the tension in this movement between the students’ desire for recognition by the university as being a part of it and standing apart from the institution. This is not a tidy dichotomy as I have hope to show throughout my analysis.
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Ferguson (2012) encapsulates the fraught hope at the heart of my analysis of the 2015 protests by encouraging that one be mindful of historical precedent and the challenge of pushing for change in institutions, that one continue to create and push, to build “up visions that are in the institution but not if it, knowing that the dream is still the truth” (p. 18). Like many student movements, the Mizzou protests were most dangerous to the university prior to the acknowledgment of their demands. The media attention that they garnered, though not wholly in support of their movement, brought scrutiny and critique that they could not withstand. The financial risks to the university of the football team’s strike and, in the long-term, possible lower admissions seem to have factored more prominently in the MU administration’s decision to capitulate to Concerned Student 1950 rather than the prior pressure from students, faculty, and community members. And yet, the resignations of President Wolfe and Chancellor Loftin may have provided a greater perception of success. The resignations brought a halt to the student action and ended the football strike; with the pressure lessened, the University unveiled a series of actions by which they would begin to address the campus climate around diversity, many of which the students had not called for, and maintained its control of the timing and process. This perception of success is important in some regards in that as Boren (2001) writes, the perception of success on one campus is often what prompts action and similar engagement by students on other campuses. The movement at Mizzou, particularly the list of demands, encouraged students around the U.S. to issue similar demands and examine the marginalization of students of color on their own campuses. Students were showing that the dream is still the truth.
The Mizzou protests took place alongside a series of additional protests being led largely by Black students who were demanding that universities begin to acknowledge and reckon with histories built upon the subjugation of Black Americans. Concerned Student 1950 too connected
72 their demands, which were rooted in changing the present conditions, to the university’s history of racism. Connected as these efforts were in a larger sense by their efforts to create accountability and disrupt the status quo, each protest, campaign, and boycott was shaped by the distinct history of that campus and state, as I have shown in this project by focusing on Missouri.
As Ellsworth and Burns (1970) advocate, there is a great deal to learn from the close examination of a single movement. An analysis of the Concerned Student 1950 demands offers a way into understanding the history of Mizzou that is certainly not accessible from the university website, and the history of the state of Missouri at large.
Transformation in higher education is deeply interconnected with the history of student activism. As I hope to have underscored in this project, this is a fraught history and one that cannot easily be condensed into tidy categories of victories and/or losses. Progression has often come as a result of concessions and the continuation of practices that benefit the most privileged.
In the time of higher education as “big business” (Ellsworth & Burns, 1970, p. 10) and the repeated cries of students, including those at Mizzou, that those running the university do not care about their wellbeing, efforts like that led by Concerned Student 1950 serve as reminder that, as Ahmed (2012) writes, sometimes “we might need to get in the way if we are to get anywhere” (p. 187).
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Appendix
Concerned Student 1950 presents List of Demands to The University of Missouri
To: The University of Missouri October 20, 2015
During the University of Missouri’s 104th homecoming parade, Saturday, October 10, 2015, eleven Black student leaders on campus interjected themselves into the parade, presenting UM system president, Tim Wolfe, and the Columbia community with a demonstration addressing Mizzou’s history of racial violence and exclusivity. The demonstration covered the raw, painful, and often silenced history of racism and discrimination on the University of Missouri’s campus. This history of racism at Mizzou dates back to 1935 when Lloyd Gaines petitioned the university to be its first Black law student and was denied admission. The actual year that the first Black student, Gus T. Ridgel, was accepted in the University of Missouri wasn’t until 1950, hence where the concept of “Concerned Student 1950” comes from.
Concerned Student 1950, thus, represents every Black student admitted to the University of Missouri since then and their sentiments regarding racerelated affairs affecting their lives at a predominantly white institution. Not only do our white peers sit in silence in the face of our oppression but also our administrators who perpetuate that oppression through their inaction. The Black experience on Mizzou’s campus is cornered in offices and rarely attended to until it reaches media. Then, and only then, do campus administrators seek reactionary initiatives to attest to the realities of oppressed students, faculty, and staff. These temporary adjustments to the university’s behaviors are not enough to assure that future generations of marginalized students will have a safe and inclusive learning experience during their time at Mizzou.
It is important to note that, as students, it is not our job to ensure that the policies and practices of the University of Missouri work to maintain a safe, secure and unbiased campus climate for all of its students. We do understand, however, that change does not happen without a catalyst. Concerned Student 1950 has invested time, money, intellectual capital, and excessive energy to bring to the forefront these issues and to get administration on board so that we, as students, may turn our primary focus back to what we are on campus to do: obtain our degrees.
The following document presents the demands of Concerned Student 1950. This document reflects the adjustments that we feel should be made to the University. We expect a response to these demands by 5:00pm on October 28, 2015.
If we do not receive a response to these demands by the date above, we will take appropriate nonviolent actions. If there are any questions, comments or concerns, you may forward them to [email protected].
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The struggle continues,
Concerned Student 1950 List of Demands
I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1950 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1950 demands. We want Tim Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.
II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.
III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians' demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.
IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.
V. We demand that by the academic year 20172018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campuswide to 10%.
VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus.
VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals; particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming across campus, increasing campuswide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients.
VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing campuswide awareness and visibility.