Mizzou president's departure 'an awful precedent'

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson

By Paul Bremmer

The abrupt departure of Tim Wolfe as the president of Missouri University – because of demands from students who claim the campus had a racist atmosphere – likely will lead to more and more demands from the progressives who launched the anti-Wolfe effort, according to a civil rights leader.

Wolfe announced his resignation Monday amid accusations he didn't do enough about alleged racial incidents at the school.

But Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a civil rights activist, talk radio host and WND columnist, said it's a shame the black student protesters scapegoated a capable university official.

"The fact that the president of the university was forced to step down for something that he's not responsible for sets an awful precedent," said Peterson, author of "The Antidote." "It's another example of white people – especially white men – allowing themselves to be falsely labeled as 'racists' and allowing blacks to have their way."

An organization called Concerned Student 1950 had been staging a sit-in on a campus plaza since Nov. 2. More than 150 students gathered there Sunday night.

The immediate crisis was prompted by black graduate student Jonathan Butler who began a hunger strike Nov. 2, promising not to eat until Wolfe was gone.

Then, last weekend, 30 black Missouri football players announced they would abandon their team, its games and all related activities until Wolfe was removed.

Peterson chided Wolfe for caving to the protesters, particularly to the football players.

"This sends a terrible message to the student body, both black and white," Peterson said. "It will encourage other black students to blow small incidents out of proportion and make more unreasonable demands.

"Instead of caving, the university should have told the football team to suit up or they’ll be replaced and lose their scholarships," he said.

The spark for the crisis still remains nebulous.

The student government president, who is black, claimed in September some people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him.

Then the next month, some members of a black student organization said a drunk white student hurled racial slurs at them.

Third, a swastika was found drawn in feces on a dormitory bathroom wall, although the incident's link to any alleged racism remained unclear.

Jack Cashill, author of "Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Exposed," ridiculed the protesting students for overreacting to the perceived injustices.

"The kinds of things that black students used to protest about 50 or 60 years ago were being attacked on campus, being not allowed on campus, being not allowed to play on football teams, being disbarred," Cashill said.

The author, who also writes a column for WND, is skeptical of the student government president's claim.

"Now, do we believe that?" Cashill asked. "There are more racial hoaxes on campus today than there are actual racial incidents, so let's call that a coin flip, 50/50."

Regarding the second incident, Cashill noted the drunk white student who disrupted the black homecoming parade to yell the racial slurs was expelled, and, in any cas,e he did something very few students dare to do.

"OK, so what else should the president do?" he asked. "And how often does that happen? How crazy do you have to be today to do that?"

As for the swastika on the bathroom wall, Cashill doesn't know what that has to do with racism against blacks:

"And that's anti-black exactly how? I mean, were blacks in the Holocaust? I don't get this. And again, who knows who did this?"

Peterson agreed the protesters overreacted to the three incidents.

"If these allegations are true, the incidents were isolated and the university didn't condone them," he said. "There are thousands of students on campus, and there will always be individuals that will do things to incite and cause mischief. The university cannot be held responsible for the actions of a few students."

Peterson said his fellow blacks cry racism so often that the concept of racism is losing its meaning. He offered up his own explanation for why so many young black people are angry.

"Accusations of racism are so frequently thrown out by blacks nowadays that it has become a joke," he said. "Most young blacks have not had the benefit of being raised in solid and loving two-parent homes, and the so-called civil rights leaders have been able to brainwash them into believing that their anger and problems are rooted in 'racism' rather than the lack of love from their parents – especially their fathers."

Cashill, who once taught at the University of Missouri and still lives in the state, said the university's leading officials are virtually all Democrats. He called Wolfe a "mushy, conformist liberal" and the chancellor of the Columbia campus a "typical professorial liberal."

"I can tell you from my own experience that they've been falling all over themselves to try to find and hire and retain black professors and students for the last 40 years," Cashill said. "They pay black professors more than they pay white professors for the same work. They give students every conceivable preference they could have. Student-athletes are treated like they're little princes, and that's not enough. It can never be enough. Progressives, by definition, progress. They always want more."

So the skirmish between the student protesters and university officials, according to Cashill, is a battle between two different shades of leftist.

"The battle now is between the left and the hard left, the idiot left and the semi-sensible left," Cashill stated. "The responsible left, that is, the people entrusted with running the university, and the irresponsible, young, mindless left, who are just destroying things and not even knowing."

Cashill advises conservative students at Missouri who may be thinking of launching a counter-protest not to do so. In fact, his advice was to "graduate and get the hell out at this point."

The protesters claimed Wolfe was not proactive enough in dealing with racial incidents on campus, but they didn't actually accuse him of doing anything wrong, Cashill noted.

On the contrary, Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin had already announced plans to require diversity training for all new students, faculty and staff. Wolfe also agreed with the protesters recently that "change is needed" and claimed the school was working to come up with a plan by April to promote diversity and tolerance.

And yet, the protesters still demanded Wolfe resign and acknowledge his "white male privilege." They also demanded the university adopt "comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum," hire more black faculty and staff, and try to "increase retention rates for marginalized students."

Some people are just hard to please, Cashill noted. In his book "Scarlet Letters," he referred to such intolerant progressives as "neo-Puritans."

"There's no satisfying a neo-Puritan who's on a rampage," Cashill warned. "There''s no satisfying him until they take the guy to the stake like they did in Salem 400 years ago and burn him."

Cashill argued schools like Missouri are where young neo-Puritans get indoctrinated into the faith.

"Universities have become the breeding grounds, the hatcheries," he said. "They incubate these little eggs with protective shells who walk into the world without any sense that their perverse narcissism is wrong or is anti-American or defeats the whole spirit of what we try to accomplish as a nation."

For his part, Colin Flaherty, author of "White Girl Bleed a Lot," said people are missing the real story of Columbia, Missouri.

"The real story on and around campus is just the opposite of what these Black Lives Matter wannabes would have us believe: Crime and violence in Columbia is a big problem – and it's a black thing," said Flaherty, who has reported extensively on black mob violence.

"Just two weeks ago, a local TV station documented all the violence that exists just off campus – with dozens of assaults and robberies in the space of just a few months in this small college town. The reporter did not say what is easily found out in public records at the city police and campus police web sites: the predators are overwhelmingly black."

Peterson believes the racial situation in America will deteriorate if young black people like the Missouri students believe they can punish authority figures by crying racism.

"Until these universities take a stand and push back against these types of allegations, race relations will get worse on college campuses and in our nation overall," Peterson said.