All Episodes
Previous Next
April 27, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
34:18
Problem Professors
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi Media, can I talk to you?
No, you need to get out!
You need to get out!
No, I don't.
You need to get out!
I actually don't.
Alright!
Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?
You're undoubtedly familiar with that viral clip I played at the beginning of the video, but if you're not, that was a protest at Missouri University in 2015, referred to as the Concerned Student 1950 protests.
The woman calling for muscle was an associate professor called Melissa Click, and the man she was calling for muscle against was a student journalist called Mark Scheierbecker.
The protest was taking place on a public space on the campus, so Mark Scheierbecker had every right to be there, and so Melissa Click calling for muscle, who then pushed him out of this area that they'd incorded off, was a violation of Mark Scheierbecker's First Amendment rights.
Specifically, Click was infringing the freedom of the press and interfering with his right to peaceably assemble.
Earlier that day, at the same student protest, Melissa Click had also been involved in an altercation with the police.
Get out of the road, get on the road.
Get out of the way, everybody.
Get out of the way!
Bravo!
Don't get me back!
Get out of the road!
Get out of the road!
Get on the left!
Get out of here.
Get out of the road and get arrested!
Get out of the road!
The University of Missouri board of curators decided to fire Melissa Click not for her involvement in the protest but for actions she took during her involvement with the protest.
The board respects Dr. Click's right to express her views and does not base this decision on her support for students engaged in protest or their views.
However, Dr. Click was not entitled to interfere with the rights of others, to confront members of law enforcement, or to encourage potential physical intimidation against a student.
Click was going to be prosecuted for her actions, but instead agreed to do community service to avoid prosecution.
Click agreed to 20 hours of community service, in exchange for deferring the assault charges against her.
I haven't interjected my own commentary yet, because I just want to establish objective reality.
This is what really happened.
We have video evidence, we have court documentation, and we have a statement from the university.
We can be sure that this has happened.
And nothing about this is incongruous.
Click took action for which we have evidence.
This action directly violates a student's rights.
The university fired her on those grounds, and she was going to be prosecuted for her actions.
Nothing about this requires any other explanation than Melissa Click did something wrong.
Melissa Click was being belligerent when she tried to force Mark Scheierbecker out of a public space.
She is the one who called for Muscle to expel him because she wasn't physically big enough to do it herself.
She is the one who refused a police order to just simply clear the road so cars can go past and thrust herself between her students and the police as if the police were wielding batons and were about to start beating them and telling them to get your fucking hands off me.
She took all of these actions herself and knew exactly what she was doing.
On March the 17th, the Washington Post published an article by Melissa Click called, What Would Our World Be Like If No One Ever Took a Chance?
And it's at this point that we're going to wave goodbye to objective reality, and we're going to indulge ourselves in Melissa Click's subjective interpretation of the events.
As we go through Melissa Click's own words, there are going to be certain things that I will pick out as particularly important, and safe to discuss at the end.
I'll let you know when that happens, so you can be expecting it as it comes.
She begins by explaining to us that she took her family to a parade on the Saturday morning, and at one point the parade unexpectedly stopped.
She says, quote, When I walked the block between us and the impasse, I found myself suddenly in the presence of an unfolding political demonstration.
I was immediately faced with a question of conscience, a question I hadn't anticipated when I hurriedly got ready this morning.
Would I remain a spectator, or would I stand with these students enduring disparagement from the bystanders who wished the parade to continue unhindered?
I already have concerns with this.
From her own words, she doesn't appear to know what the protest is about, simply that there is a student protest.
So instead of interrogating the students and finding out what the protest was in regards to, she simply decides to join them on the grounds that they are students.
And secondly, is there any need to be so melodramatic in what she's saying?
Would I stand with these students enduring disparagement from the bystanders who wish the parade to continue unhindered?
Well, yes, of course they're going to get disparagement.
Let's assume we don't know anything about these protests.
What likelihood is there that there is a justification to interrupt this parade?
Is the parade about the thing they're protesting?
Are they protesting the parade itself?
Or are they simply ruining other people's nice Saturday morning to further their own political agenda?
She continues by saying, Among the debates and judgments the video footage of my mistakes has attracted, well, your crimes, actually Melissa, you can accurately term these as crimes that you have been punished for.
Few have sincerely grappled with sudden choices I had to make in challenging circumstances, and fewer still have earnestly asked whether my protected rights to speak out as a US citizen requires that I must be perfect while doing so.
Now, this is just a very interesting perspective to take on the issue.
For example, you did not have to grapple with a sudden choice.
Other people were protesting.
It was nothing to do with you.
If what you've said here is in any way true, you had no prior knowledge of this protest, therefore you were not involved in the planning of this protest.
This protest is simply not your business, so you didn't have to make choices in a challenging circumstance.
And the circumstance really wasn't that challenging.
It was a bunch of first world student activists blocking a public parade for their own personal goal and being moved out of the road by the police so the parade could continue.
But it's very interesting that she would invoke her rights as a US citizen, that she would say my protected right to speak require that I must be perfect while doing so.
This is simply ridiculous.
Nobody's supposed to be perfect in anything.
What an extreme position to espouse.
No one is suggesting that anyone be perfect, but there is a massive gulf of difference between perfectly exercising your own rights and infringing upon the rights of others.
This is in of itself a false dichotomy.
It's attempting to set up a position that can't possibly be true in order to make the alternate position, what she chose to do, to be the correct course of action.
She can either suppress the rights of students while protesting or be perfect.
And you know that she can't be perfect, don't you?
She continues by saying, As a media studies scholar, I understand how the increased surveillance resulting from the advances in technology like digital recording and wireless broadband has come to mean that our mistakes will be widely broadcast, typically without context or rights of rebuttal, exposing us to unprecedented public scrutiny.
Well, it is true that we can easily be exposed to widespread public scrutiny, but that's pretty much the only thing that's true about this.
For a start, we are not agreed that you made mistakes, Melissa.
That's not the way that we characterize criminal activity.
And we also do not characterize people recording what is in front of their face with their phones as surveillance.
And thirdly, the context was actually pretty clear.
You are at a protest.
It's in the video, it's visible.
You are at a protest bossing people around without any right to do so.
Self-evidently infringing on the rights of another person.
She then says, but I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions unfortunately result in imperfect actions.
What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance?
What if everyone played it safe?
And this is where she begins looking like a complete lunatic.
What on earth is she talking about?
If no one ever took a chance to infringe someone else's rights, there would be a lot less rights infringed.
We saw the footage.
We know that the police were not acting in an oppressive manner.
They were merely moving the protesters out of the road so the parade could continue.
There didn't appear to be any particular risk involved.
The only risk seemed to be coming from the protesters.
But what really annoys me is the attempt to mitigate her responsibility for her own actions, calling them simply imperfect.
No, they were criminal, Melissa.
Criminal actions.
And the impulse to shame those whose best intentions have unfortunately resulted in this.
Well, I'm sorry, I don't care what your intentions are.
Other people have rights and you have no right to infringe them.
That is cut and dried.
There is no interpretation of this that lands on your side of the fence.
The fact that you didn't appear to view Mark Scheibecker as a person with rights in the video and you still don't appear to now is disgraceful.
This is one of the most important parts of this piece though.
While I never used my authority as a professor in the actions I took, the University of Missouri's collected rules and regulations, the guidelines that govern my employment, indicate that standards of excellence do not equate to perfection.
At this point, claiming that anyone is expecting perfection is simply a non-sequitur, but the first part is the most important.
If Melissa Click was not using her authority as a professor in the actions that she took, from where was she deriving this authority?
Why was she stalking around the protest like a general on a battlefield, issuing orders to people, and then summoning extra help when someone resisted this authority?
What did she think she was doing here?
Why was she acting as if she deserved to be listened to by the students?
Why were they so compliant in doing what she wanted?
If she's not using her authority as a professor, what authority is she acting under?
But let's look at the culmination of the narrative of denial that Melissa Click has generated, frankly, in her own head.
While I continue to fight the NU Board of Curators' decision to terminate my employment without due process and in violation of the university policy, I am also working to come to terms with how a few captured moments of imperfection could eclipse 12 years of excellence.
Imagine feeling so justified in your position that violating someone else's rights and then being punished for this can in your mind be accurately described as a few captured moments of imperfection.
This is how important Mark Scheierbecker's rights were to Melissa Click.
She then says, whose interests are served when our drive to combat societal imperfections is defeated by fears of having our individual imperfections exposed.
She is saying here that the ends justify the means.
She has a political goal she is looking to achieve.
These are her interests.
And she wants to know whose interests, if not hers, are going to be served when she is performing her activism and infringing on other people's rights.
Other people having rights does not serve her interests, and she put her interests above someone else's rights.
And I think this is a demonstration of where her priorities lie.
She thinks that societal imperfections, whatever they might be to Melissa Click, can be served by violating the rights of an individual.
And then she says, and what value do our rights as citizens have in a culture increasingly ruled by snap judgments and by regulations that are easily rewritten to suit changing political interests?
A statement which unironically can be applied directly to what she did to Mark Scheierbecker.
What value do his rights as a citizen have if Melissa Click is able to make a snap judgment and enforce it with muscle to suit her political interests which are frankly radical?
What Melissa Click has done here is craft a narrative that makes her the victim of her own actions.
Mark Scheibecker no longer exists in Melissa Click's head.
She doesn't mention him once in the article.
However, she does put herself in exactly his position, despite the fact that she is not in his position whatsoever.
She is the person taking action and committing a crime.
But the victim of her crime appears to be entirely absent from her thought patterns.
She doesn't seem to have any acknowledgement of them at all.
From what we know so far, the following are true.
Melissa Click is denying reality by refusing to accept that she is in fact the perpetrator of a crime.
She was acting as a leader by telling the students exactly what to do and how to do it.
and they were complying with her orders without question.
She is devaluing Mark Scheierbecker by refusing to recognise his rights as an individual that she has violated.
And she is acting directly against Scheierbecker's dissent against her order to comply with the request of the group of concerned student 50 protesters.
This is what we can determine from her actions and article immediately surrounding the events of the Missouri protests.
So let's keep this in mind while we look at a more recent interview with Melissa Click to see if we can spot any consistencies in her position.
On March the 24th, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an interview with Melissa Click called Being Melissa Click.
In it, Melissa Click actually says that under pressure from state legislators, Missouri's board of curators fired her to send a message that the university and the state wouldn't tolerate black people standing up to white people.
This is all about racial politics, she says.
I'm a white lady.
I'm an easy target.
This is of course a ludicrous statement.
We know exactly why Melissa Click was fired.
We know exactly what she did to get herself fired.
There is nothing in this exchange that implies any kind of racial undertones.
Both the victim and the perpetrator were both white, and both the president and chancellor of the University of Missouri have resigned because these incidents happened.
There are nothing but nebulous accusations of institutional racism at Missouri that the protesters are levelling at them.
There are no specific charges against either one of these men, and yet they have both resigned because of this issue.
This is taken very seriously.
The idea that the university and the state won't tolerate black people standing up to white people simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
Not only that, but it's logically inconsistent.
Why would a racist university fire a white person when there were so many black people that they could have chosen to enact a punishment against?
They could have expelled all of these students.
And if they were racist, you would think they would target the black people over the white.
Nothing about what Melissa Click here has said makes sense.
This is a denial of reality.
And the journalist writing the article makes her sound like an unhinged lunatic.
Returning this month to the site of her fateful confrontation with the student, she is skittish.
Who will spot her?
Someone always does.
She eyes a family with a stroller and steals herself.
What is she expecting the family with the baby stroller to do to her?
The answer should be of course, nothing, but she seems to be paranoid.
Apparently, she had been helping the protesters camped out in the quad call attention to racism and what they saw as a lack of concern for minority issues at the university.
She had stepped in to organise the students' supplies, which were stashed in countless Walmart bags.
A heavy rain drenched the students' tents, plus their clothing and textbooks inside, and Miss Click was airing them out.
So someone with authority as a professor has stepped into a student organisation, people who have lower authority than she does, and has begun helping out.
And it may well have begun this way, as she claims.
But self-evidently, this transformed into her taking a leadership role within the group.
Which is exactly what you would expect when someone imbued with authority joins a group full of people who automatically look up to that authority.
You would expect them to take charge.
After hearing that Tim Wolf, the president of the university, had resigned, the students wanted to close ranks and regroup before a press conference.
And while most reporters heeded their request for a timeout, Miss Click says that a few insisted on pushing through the circle of students that had formed to keep others out of the quad.
And this is where the incident where she calls for some muscle occurs.
No, you need to get out!
You need to get out!
No, I don't.
You need to get out!
I actually don't.
Alright!
Hey, you want back up and get this reporter out of here!
I need some muscle over here!
In which Melissa Click is very clearly acting as a leader.
It's interesting in the article that they say that Miss Click invoked her authority as, quote, communication faculty and made the call for muscle to get him removed.
She didn't.
Not only do we have video of her not doing that, but communication faculty don't have the power to call for muscle to remove a citizen from a public area.
She was not acting under her authority as communication faculty when she was acting as a leader and demanding muscle from students who then just simply complied and pushed Mark Shayabecker out of this public area.
So if she's acting like a leader and exercising power over other people, and she's not using her authority as a communications professor, where is she deriving this authority from?
And this wasn't the only example of her doing this that day.
Some point out, however, that Mr. Shayerbecker was not the only one that Miss Click clashed with on the quad.
She told a geology professor that questions he directed to the black students were inappropriate and asked him to leave.
And she told two other cameramen that they weren't welcome, flinging mocking comments at one, wow you're so scary, and leading the students to chant to banish the other, hey hey ho ho, reporters have got to go.
Exactly why many have asked, was the assistant professor there that day taking on such a lead role.
Melissa Click's response to this is exactly the same as her response to being found guilty of violating someone's rights.
She attempts to set up another false dichotomy with her narrative being presented as the reasonable one against the apparently unreasonable suggestion that perhaps she shouldn't have been acting as a leader on that day.
I'm not a superhero, Click says.
I wasn't in charge.
But she's taking the fall.
When it got out of control, I was the one held accountable.
Given that superheroes don't exist and no one is expecting Melissa Click to be one, why would you even say this otherwise?
But to say that she wasn't in charge is flatly dishonest.
She was.
She was giving orders, the students were following these orders, and unsurprisingly, she was held accountable for these orders.
She then says that headlines like Batshit Crazy Professor Loses Temper with Student was the wrong headline.
She thinks the real story should be, Favourite Professor fights to support black students on campus in dangerous situation.
Which as bizarre as this is, is incredibly indicative of her motives.
The students were in a dangerous situation, which it wasn't, because of their own actions.
She may well have been fighting to support black students, but any fight for any group that infringes upon the rights of other people is supremacist.
But the most interesting bit about this is the favourite professor.
I think this is her genuine motivation.
I think she has been cultivating a cult of personality with these students, and that's why she is doing what she's doing.
She says, I believed at some point somebody would care about the truth of what I was doing.
I am a woman who has made some mistakes trying to do what she thought was right.
That, she says, could have been anyone.
Well, it's true that anyone could have done what she has done, but that doesn't make what she's done any less right or wrong.
The way she frames all of this smacks worryingly of zealotry.
She has the truth.
She, the fundamental rightness of what she's doing is just without question.
It's not something that is up for debate.
And it doesn't really matter if Mark Scheierbecker exists or not, whether his rights are inviolable or not, in the pursuit of this goal.
He was an obstacle to be overcome.
He had no value to her group or her cause.
He in fact had negative value.
He was holding them back from what they were trying to achieve.
And therefore, calling for muscle to expel him was completely legitimate in her mind.
And this in-group-out-group mentality and disdain for individual rights can be easily explained in this article.
She describes how she ended up at Missouri and said, she still didn't quite fit, even in the communications department, where she got a tenure-track job in 2008.
A common textbook used at UMass, Media, Society, Industries, Images and Audiences, featured a Marxist critique of the media.
I came here and used it too, and students' heads nearly popped off.
Well, if they're looking through a Marxist lens, of course individual rights are irrelevant.
If she is a Marxist, which she may well be, especially given the fact that she thinks that this is a racial issue rather than an individual issue, I think it's entirely likely that she does think of this as the white bourgeoisie oppressing the black proletariat.
But unfortunately for Click, the United States does not operate on a Marxist system.
It operates on a liberal individualist system, where individual actions count and society is not simply viewed through the lens of class conflict.
Click has been described as passionate and sometimes annoyingly self-righteous, according to her former colleagues.
And this self-righteousness was on full display as she was out in the quad oppressing other people while fighting for her cause.
Click went out of her way to integrate herself with her students as well.
If someone in the department was sick or having personal trouble, Miss Click would often step in.
When my mum died, she was at my house before my husband was.
She cancelled my kids' birthday party for me and answered all of my sympathy cards.
I mean, I understand that this is obviously coming from a place of very good intentions, but now Melissa Click seems like an authoritarian, overbearing, busybody who feels the need to get involved in everyone's business.
And judging by her emotional defense of what she had done, I just thought I was doing what was right.
I'm guessing she's doing this to make herself feel good.
Listen to her describe this.
She says, am I going to be one of those people who stands and watches another brutal moment against black people?
Or am I going to step in and make sure they're safe?
I found out that day.
She stepped between the students and the policeman, thinking he'd be less likely to push her, but when he did, she says, she was indignant.
Get your fucking hands off me.
She is acting as if she is on a moral crusade that has a legitimate foundation that is worth sacrificing other people's rights for.
She clearly perceived herself to be fighting the man.
But the irony of what's happened here is that she kind of set this up.
When she saw black students camping on the quad in November, she offered to stay and help, staying for hours and returning day after day.
The atmosphere at Missouri was intense.
Students were calling on the president to resign.
One was on a hunger strike, and dozens of football players had announced that they wouldn't play until the president stepped down.
Some professors and graduate students had cancelled classes for a teach-in on racial justice.
Miss Click took it upon herself to attract media attention to the protest.
She posted a request on Facebook, did anyone know of any national reporters who might cover the protest?
Even her husband makes the point, academia is a place where you can follow your conscience.
Standing up for people who are trying to voice their concerns about their treatment shouldn't be penalised.
And she wasn't penalised for that.
She was penalised for going far too far.
But academia is a place where you can follow your conscience.
It's like, well, I mean, I'm sure it is, but there are lots of places where you can do that, including private business.
And academia shouldn't be a place for what Melissa Click has done.
And the thing is, this is also a motive.
There appears to be a disturbing emotional bond between the students and Melissa Click.
I mean, they seem to have some kind of emotional dependence on her.
I stand with Melissa Click because she found the protection of the students more important than a paycheck.
I stand with Melissa Click because she knows that just because the media has to make a deadline doesn't mean that they can disrespect stories, narratives, and communities.
And human beings.
You.
I stand with Melissa Click because she tried to give us our human right to privacy when it was violated.
I shout with Melissa Click because she understands how the First Amendment works.
I stand with Melissa Click because, unlike that reporter, she has respect for us.
They were students protesting the firing of Melissa Click, and let's do a bit of armchair psychology and see if we can't see a difference in the mannerisms and attitudes and temperaments of some of these students.
I think these most exemplify what I'm trying to say.
The two very entitled, prissy, bossy girls at the top are clearly not being oppressed.
They clearly don't feel oppressed.
Look at their faces.
They're having a wonderful time doing this.
They're trying to get something that they want.
This is not something they need.
It's just something they are taking advantage of.
However, when you compare that to the expression on the face of the person at the bottom, this person looks lost.
They sound lost.
They look like they are looking for someone to guide them.
They appear to be emotionally dependent on Melissa Click.
And this is how Click herself describes it.
From the article again.
As she walks through downtown Columbia, an African-American man yells out his support from a car window.
Hey Melissa, black people love me, she tells a reporter.
Later, a black woman runs out of the campus bar and grill headlong into an embrace with Miss Click.
It's one of the protest organizers.
Soon, three black students surround the former protester.
They sound protective.
How is she?
They're concerned.
They tell her they love her.
It's not normal for students to tell professors that they love them.
They shouldn't love them.
Frankly, they should be autonomous.
They shouldn't be treating the professors like family members.
And Melissa Click's throwaway comment, black people love me.
Well, that's something you're particularly proud of.
It's clearly something that you have cultivated and built towards.
But making your students emotionally dependent on you is irresponsible.
You're doing it for yourself and not for them.
All of this has contributed to an atmosphere that is clearly deeply unhealthy.
Interpreting the world via a Marxist lens is not always accurate.
If ever, Melissa Click appears to have cultivated a cult of personality with these easily influenced young students who she has been teaching as the authority figure.
And this has been done with little to no oversight.
Michael Saikuta, an associate professor of agriculture and applied economics at Mizzou, believes Ms. Click should have been punished for her actions, but he blames the university for creating an opening for the curators to act.
If the provost had empaneled a group to investigate, if there was a faculty process that could be pointed to that would have taken away most of the political punch the curators had, a big part of why curators acted is that the university did nothing.
When you consider the consistent aspects of Melissa Click's behaviour, and include her deliberate suppression of dissent in the form of Mark Schreierbecker, this really does appear to be a demonstration of cult-like behaviour.
At least according to Dr. Arthur Dieckman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California.
He spent decades studying cults and wrote several books about them.
This is why he thinks people join a cult.
Cults form and thrive not because people are crazy, but because they have two kinds of wishes.
They want a meaningful life to serve God or humanity, and they want to be taken care of, to feel protected and secure, to find a home.
The first motives may be laudable and constructive, but the latter exert a corrupting effect, enabling cult leaders to elicit behaviour directly opposite to the idealistic vision with which members entered the group.
I bet none of these supporters would tell you that they entered this particular group to suppress the rights of other people.
But now this is exactly what they are standing in support of.
Although admittedly perhaps these girls were actually specifically in there for the powerplay, because they look like it, don't they?
Thanks for the smile girls.
Anyway, the other people here really do look like they are trying to do something good.
I'm sure they think they are doing something good.
I'm sure Melissa Click thinks she's doing something good.
But that's the point.
Very few people know they are joining a cult when they join one.
Of course, you already know that I've listed on the left hand side the characteristics exhibited by Melissa Click and her students because they are indicative of cult behaviour.
Diekman suggests we should look out for the following four factors.
Compliance with the group, dependence on a leader, avoidance of dissent, and devaluation of outsiders.
In addition to this, he wrote in the preface of his book, The price of cult behaviour is diminished realism.
Well, we have seen all of this from Melissa Click and her students.
They are not representing reality accurately.
She is acting as a leader.
She is devaluing outsiders, and so are her students.
They are dependent on her, and they are not interested in dissent.
That's why they were kicking the media out in the first place.
I'm not saying this has been a deliberate campaign for Melissa Click to create her own personal cult.
I think this is entirely a confluence of circumstances that may well have come around naturally.
I don't think anyone should necessarily be punished for this.
Melissa Click should be punished for her actions, sure, but for this no one necessarily has to be punished.
▲
Export Selection