Missouri professor no longer deserves position

Missouri professor no longer deserves position

Gazette Column
Communication department professor should uphold First Amendment University of Missouri Assistant Professor of Communication Melissa Click must be fired. If you’ve watched the video, then you are hereby excused from reading this rest of the column. If not, let me set the stage for you. The video, shot by MU junior Mark Schierbecker, begins by focusing on MU senior Tim Tai, who is holding a camera and being surrounded by a crowd of people who want him, and all other journalists, to leave Carnahan Quad where a temporary encampment was set up by student activists. Students, who had been actively and peacefully protesting the university’s lack of response to ongoing incidents of discrimination and racism, were celebrating the resignation of university system president Tim Wolfe and the decision by MU…
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Bringing the University of Iowa out of its fog

Bringing the University of Iowa out of its fog

Gazette Column
Sally Mason, spokesmen could benefit from sunlight Last Friday morning, as I turned the corner of Clinton and Washington streets en route to a breakfast meeting, a figure on the Pentacrest caught my eye. It was early and still foggy as I stared, my brain racing to register what it was seeing. I flipped through scenarios: a mostly white trench coat, maybe a homeless person, a lighthearted holiday sock-top with an elven point at the top. Bile rose as I moved forward, seeing the shape of a person in the ceremonial garb of white supremacists. Anger percolated. Hateful scenes, talk and writing from my past in the South flickered. A sign on a country road announcing a curfew, punishable by death, for people of color. Students teasing a new white…
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Bertrand defamation case changes nothing

Bertrand defamation case changes nothing

Gazette Column
Transparency makes attack ads palatable In September 1895, Woodrow Wilson was more than two decades away from his move into the White House and spent a great deal of time studying government via the lens of history. It was at this time, well before history and political science were distinct disciplines, the scholarly Wilson wrote a magazine essay establishing his thoughts on how historians should present their work, summarizing why it is often difficult to see into the past as well as into the future. “The truth of history is a very complex and very occult matter. It consists of things which are invisible as well of things which are visible. It is full of secret motives, and of a chance interplay of trivial and yet determining circumstances; it is…
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