University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2018 The 2015 niU versity of Missouri Protests and their Lessons for Higher Education Policy and Administration Ben L. Trachtenberg University of Missouri School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/facpubs Part of the Education Law Commons Recommended Citation Ben L. Trachtenberg, The 2015 nivU ersity of Missouri Protests and their Lessons for Higher Education Policy and Administration, 107 Kentucky Law Journal 61 (2018). Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/facpubs/740 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The 2015 University of Missouri Protests and their Lessons for Higher Education Policy and Administration Ben Trachtenberg' ABSTRACT In 2015, student protestors at more than eighty American universities issued administratorsdemands related to racialjustice. Even readers intensely interested in both civil rights and higher educationpolicy could name few ofthese institutions. Yet somehow the University of Missouri ("Mizzou")-along with Yale and a few other universities-became nationallyfamous as a hotbed of racial unrest. At most ofthese eighty universities, presidents did not resign, enrollment did not plummet by thousands of students, nor did relationswith state politiciansdeteriorate terribly. In the traditionof legal narrative and storytelling, this Article explores how the University of Missouri managed to fare so badly after students began protesting during the fall of 2015.