Gonzaga hires professor fired after viral U. of Missouri video

[NuclearDem]

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/gonzaga-hires-professor-fired-for-trying-to-block-journalist-at-university-of-missouri-protest/

Last fall, a University of Missouri faculty member was captured on video asking for “some muscle” to chase a photojournalist away from a tense campus protest about racial conflicts. She was put on suspension and fired the following February.

This summer, Gonzaga University hired that professor, Melissa Click, for a one-year, non-tenure-track position in its Communications Studies Department.

A video that went viral on YouTube shows photojournalist Tim Tai, on a freelance assignment for ESPN, trying to take photos and being confronted by demonstrators who tell him to go away. (Prominent college athletes were involved in the protest.) “The First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine,” Tai said. The protesters shouted back: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, reporters have got to go!” Another told Tai: “You got to go, bro.”

Shortly afterward, Click appeared to push another reporter, Mark Schierbecker (he told The New York Times that she grabbed at his camera), and asked for help to eject him from the campus protest — which was on public property.

Didn't expect her to have a job in academia again, much less only a year from her last one.

[Igel]

1. I don't know why you didn't think she'd be ousted from academia.

She still has friends, and a one-year appt. is likely to be replacing somebody on sabbatical or filling in while a search committee coughs up a short list. Perhaps the article says, it's Sunday and I'm still recovering from a long, irritating work week so I'm not going to read the OP in full.

On the other hand, it may not just be a friend helping a friend. It might be a fellow traveler of sorts. Many disapprove of her being fired: Fascism on the side of the "right values" isn't fascism at all, it's not means it's goals. The same sort of reasoning writ large applied to Soviet GULags and Vietnamese re-education camps versus Manzanita, which though had a smaller population and much small death rate was much worse. She was right to be a professor of communications against reporters being around and being free to report what they wanted. True communication is sanitized communication, or at least "right thinking" communication. Or perhaps just "we need safe spaces because then we can say what we think without worrying about what others think." (Yes, that last bit of ambiguity is intentional.)

On the third hand, since we all need at least three, it may be that somebody disagreed not with the reasons for her firing but the lack of due process. After all, if you can fire one professor because of public pressure then no professor is safe. (I can only wonder those professors' views on the appropriateness of public pressure to quickly fire cops who do wrong, subverting due process, and those fire instances in which the mob is placated through extra-judicial punishment.)

[dsc]

2. a year but a world away

one year non tenure track is basically a substitute position for academia.

[TipTok]

3. They must have been hurting....

... if that was the best person they could find to fill any position.