Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Anti-journalism journalism school "professor"

University of Missouri communications professor, Melissa Click, (pronounced 'Clunk') may be getting chucked out of her professorship. 

You remember her--she's the "communications" professor who, back last November, was intolerant of a reporter, Tim Tai, communicating a news story for ESPN of a racially-charged protest on campus.

A video shows her yelling, "Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?" Then with no immediate response coming said, "I need some muscle over here." 

For more on this story check  here.

She wanted the reporter thrown off the campus quad, a public area denying him (and us) his Constitutional rights. In fact, Tai is also a student of the school.

Students were protesting the racial climate on campus and the former school President, Tim Wolfe, resigned over it. But the video (shown here) went viral and sparked a First Amendment debate and brings into question the character and intellectual fairness that seems to be at risk on many campuses across the nation.

Now some state lawmakers demand that Clink be fired and they penned a letter.
"The fact that, as a professor teaching the communication department and the school of journalism, she displayed such a complete disregard for the First Amendment rights of reporters should be enough to question her competency and aptitude for her job."
The idea that a professor not only took part in a student protest, but was also affiliated with the University's journalism school, and tried to stop a journalist from doing his job, caused critics to go ballistic.

The so-called communications professor lost her courtesy appointment in the journalism school and was accused of assault and Title IX violations. 

But she still has her job of teaching communications at the University of Missouri because the buck doesn't seem to stop anywhere.

Not so ironically, it was Republicans most upset with Click's violation of a reporter's Constitutional rights. More than 100 House Republicans and 18 Senate members from the state Legislature signed the letter to the board of curators of the school demanding Click's "immediate firing."

The letter not only questioned her competency to teach at the school of journalism, but it questioned her taxpayer-funded research into Lady Gaga, "Twilight" and "50 Shades of Gray."

I wonder what took those lawmakers so long.


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