Category: MU Protests

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MU graduation gap between black, white students rooted in money, academics and climate

Columbia Missourian | 12 May 2016

COLUMBIA — Of the 5,702 full-time MU freshman who stepped onto Columbia’s campus in August 2008, fewer than half — 46 percent, according to a database from MU — graduated within four years.

Nationally, this is not unusual. Students transfer or drop out. They change majors once, twice or three times. They have double majors that take more time.

The six-year graduation rate is a better indicator of how many undergraduates complete their bachelor’s degrees: 69 percent graduate within six years, as reported by Common Data Set released by MU.

But when that number is broken down by race, it gets complicated. The six-year graduation rate for white students is 71 percent. For black students, that number drops to 57 percent — a difference of 14 points, according to numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics for the entering class of 2008.

This graduation gap is evident not only at MU. It’s a national issue, one with complex causes including not having enough money to pay for college, not enough peer and faculty support and a sense that they don’t belong.

First-generation students

One of the main reasons for the gap at MU is lack of financial resources, according to Donell Young, director of Academic Retention Services.

It’s true that nationally, African Americans are disproportionately affected by poverty. The 2014 poverty rate for black Americans was 26.2 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Only 10.1 percent of white Americans lived under the poverty line that year, or an income of $24,230 for a family of four.

Not only that, but 49 percent of black students were first-generation college students in 2007-08, according to a report from the Institute of Higher Education Policy.

Loans and scholarships are available, but navigating the related paperwork — especially when the student is the first person in the family to go to college — can be a roadblock.

Ronecia Duke came to MU from her hometown of Springfield as a freshman in August 2009. After a yearlong break to be with her family when her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease then switching to online classes when she learned she was pregnant, Duke graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and communications.

Duke was also a first-generation college student.

“If you don’t have any prior knowledge of the whole adventure of going to college and what it entails, you can kind of get overwhelmed, I guess,” she said. “You don’t have anyone in your immediate family going to your orientation, dealing with a course schedule, meeting with academic advisers, taking out loans.”

Beyond academics

Another contributor to the graduation gap between black and white undergraduates is lack of adequate academic preparation for college, Young and others said. Research published last year from the Center for Law and Social Policy found that high-minority schools often don’t have access to the rigorous coursework that equips students for college.

That’s part of the reason Jaylen Johnson, who came to MU to study business in 2014, decided to transfer to a community college in his home city of Chicago in January.

“I don’t think that my high school prepared me for a college as large as MU,” Johnson said. “I wasn’t as successful or focused as I should have been.”

But Darnell Cole, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies race and ethnicity in higher education, said it’s more complicated than assigning responsibility to the school districts from which students come.

“If you think about it, a lot of your white students don’t come from very good high schools, but they’re able to persist,” Cole said. “And one of the reasons they are able to do that is because they find enough peer support, faculty support and support among their campus services.”

Johnson’s reasons for leaving MU went beyond his feeling that he wasn’t sufficiently prepared. A first-generation college student, he said his family didn’t always know how to handle the paperwork and pressures related to his attending a big university. He found large classes tough because of their size, he said. Speaking to professors during office hours was intimidating.

Duke, who spent just over six years working to earn her degree, also noticed an atmosphere of separation when she came to MU.

At the MU Student Center, she saw “pockets of black people” sitting together rather than being integrated with the rest of the student body. She said that once, when she went with a large group to a fraternity party, the party hosts let the black women in — but not the black men.

And then there was the day in 2010 that cotton balls were strewn in front of the Gaines-Oldham Black Culture Center, a reminder of black slavery.

“I remember getting up that day and I was walking past the plaza, and I remember seeing those cotton balls,” Duke said. “I’ll never forget that.”

Hiring black faculty

It’s hard to see yourself successful when you don’t see anyone else who looks like you reaching success, Cole said. “So what we call representational diversity or structural diversity or demographic diversity is critical,” he said.

In other words, black faculty help black students prosper. “In many cases, institutions have become more diverse, but faculty haven’t,” Estela Bensimon, professor and co-director of the University of Southern California Center for Urban Education, said.

This is true at MU. From the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2015, the undergraduate black student population rose  to 8 percent from 6 percent ; the number of black faculty stayed virtually stagnant in the same time period, at 2.8 percent.

White students made up 84 percent of the student body in 2005; now, that’s dropped to 78 percent. Although the number of white faculty has dropped, it hasn’t been by the same margin. Ten years ago, MU faculty was 78.8 percent white; now, it’s 74.8 percent white.

One widely cited reason for the lack of black faculty on U.S. college campuses is what’s called the pipeline problem. If not many black students attend college, and even fewer graduate, and even fewer earn master’s or doctoral degrees, it becomes a circular problem. There simply aren’t as many black Ph.D.s to be hired as faculty members.
Cole pushes back against this thinking. There are enough black doctoral degree   candidates looking for jobs who could significantly increase minority faculty at colleges, Cole said, except in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
Universities should “look at hiring practices, where they advertise for faculty positions, who’s on faculty search committees, who’s deciding what research is important, and what fits within university structure,” Cole said. “These are all decision points that reduce the opportunities that African Americans have (to) join the faculty.”
Recently, MU’s Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity required training for people involved in faculty hiring. Another one of of MU’s challenges, though, is its inability to retain black faculty members.

Non-black faculty have a responsibility to black students, too, Cole said. Just because there are low numbers of black faculty on campus, “it doesn’t exclude people who are not African American from providing those support networks for students for being mentors or providing environments that are supportive.”

Exploring data

It’s not enough to hire more black faculty, though, Bensimon said. Institutions of higher education must look at their practices and procedures, too.

One way to do that: Scrutinize the data.

Data can help administrators identify barriers that hold back black and other marginalized students — which they can do, for example, by spotting which courses might have disproportionately high rates of failure for these students.

“We have to really investigate right now what is causing the gap,” Bensimon said. “Do students drop out after the first year? Is it that they get to their junior year and run out of financial aid?”

At MU, the retention rate in 2015 for first-year African-American students was 82.9 percent; for white students, it was 87.8 percent, according to MU’s Office of Enrollment Management and Office of Institutional Research.

The offices collect and publish spreadsheets filled with data about students and faculty.

The office of undergraduate studies also tracks data for students who are not graduating from MU but who do not enroll in the next semester, said Jim Spain, vice provost for undergraduate studies.

This office found the reasons MU students leave are in line with national trends: finances, difficulty in academics and no sense of belonging.

Closing the gap

Given the complexity of the problem, the large and looming question is: What is MU going to do about it?

MU has established several race initiatives over the past half year, but quite a bit of that responsibility to keep students at MU — and black students, in particular — falls to the Academic Retention Services office.

“Ideally, I’d love to eliminate the gap,” said Young, who also has an appointment as assistant vice chancellor with the Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity. “But it’s going to take a lot of hard work.”

Young took over in July 2015, and since then he’s formed anadvisory board with five subcommittees to evaluate programs to help students. They are:

  • Peer mentoring, meant to empower older students to guide newer ones.
  • An academic faculty involvement subcommittee, tasked with encouraging faculty to help students find success.
  • A financial awareness subcommittee to help students with financial literacy, especially those who may not have families who can help out.
  • A committee to evaluate the Summer Transition program, which invites 35 minority students to campus before their freshman year to take classes and learn how to navigate college before the fall semester hits. This fall, Academic Retention Services has created a Freshman Interest Group for Summer Transition participants.
  • And finally, student success committee, which focuses on what Young calls the “holistic experience” — looking outside the classroom to make MU a more welcoming environment to minority students.

Young plans to establish changes suggested by the advisory board by spring semester of 2017. But Academic Retention Services has already begun working with the fellowships office and the Honors College to put initiatives in place, including pairing junior and senior mentors with freshmen and sophomore mentees and hosting workshops for students who are close to meeting — but don’t quite reach — Honors College requirements.

“We’ve had conversations with students who said that if it wasn’t for their relationship with their mentor, that they would’ve transferred,” Young said, though since the program is so new, Academic Retention Services doesn’t have enough data to make any definitive conclusions.

Challenges aside, students do succeed. Johnson hopes to get back on track academically at his community college and return to MU in spring 2017. Duke, bouncing her 6-month-old baby, Naysa, on her lap, said she will take the LSAT this June with the hope of going to law school in the near future.

Quest for justice drives MU hunger striker to grab ‘things by the root’

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Columbia Missourian | Nov 10, 2015

COLUMBIA — When Jonathan Butler announced he would not eat until University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe left office, he included in his letter a quote from author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou:

“I agreed a long time ago, I would not live at any cost. If I am moved or forced away from what I think is the right thing, I will not do it.”

Butler reads a lot. He reads Angelou, Toni Morrison, Stokely Carmichael, Frantz Fanon.

These authors, among others, are why Butler considers himself a radical. This isn’t to say he’s a political extremist, but he thinks about radicalism as “grabbing things by the root.” When Butler is called the n-word while walking through campus, he doesn’t rebuke the heckler. He wonders how and what: How, in 2015, can this occur on campus? What conditions at MU create this environment?

These questions drove Butler to embark on a hunger strike until the top official in the UM System was gone.

Wednesday evening, at the end of day three of consuming only water, his stride was slow and his steps heavy as he walked toward Jesse Hall. But after sitting down and sipping from his water bottle, he spoke quickly, eager to share his favorite books and authors.

“I’m still reading it actually,” he said about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.” “Hopefully, crossing my fingers, I get to finish that book.” He said it in a joking way, but the implication then — that he wouldn’t survive his protest — was grim.

Now, after the Missouri football team announced a boycott in solidarity with his hunger strike and Wolfe announced his resignation, Butler, 25, has all the time he needs to finish the book.

This notion of “grabbing things by the root” was a catalyst for his drastic measure to oust Wolfe from his position.

Butler has experienced racism at MU, he said. Days after Missouri Students Association President Payton Head wrote a widely shared Facebook post in September about being called racist slurs , Butler was called the n-word while walking through Greektown. He felt these hecklers considered him less than human, as if they were still abiding by the “Three-Fifths Compromise,” an 18th century clause in the U.S. Constitution that stated slaves were three-fifths of a person.

This feeling of “less than” solidified when Wolfe and other university leaders did not publicly respond to MU’s culture of racism. If the institution was dismissing Butler’s humanity, he thought, fine. He would put his own humanity on the line.

Cafeteria politics

Although Butler didn’t start reading the radical authors until his senior year while studying business at MU, he recalls being surrounded by literature when he stayed with his grandfather in New York City.

His grandfather was a public defense lawyer in the Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant — “Bedstuy … in the heart of what you consider the hood,” Butler said. There, 7-year-old Butler saw his grandfather help the poorest of the poor.

“He comes from a very religious background, and he was very heartfelt on showing compassion for people … and love towards God,” Butler said. “There’s protesting, there’s policy, there’s community engagement. So when you talk about that community engagement piece, I really got that at a young age.”

When Butler wasn’t at his grandfather’s, he grew up with two older sisters in Omaha.

“Tortuous,” he recalled. “They loved picking on me because for the longest time I was the short, chubby brother.”

Two years into his time at Omaha Central High School, where he wrestled, played football and ran track and field, the city’s school district lines were redrawn. Butler observed how money could dictate social and racial dynamics.

“The school needed some money so they did some redistricting, and, with that, it brought in a lot of white students,” he said.

Omaha Central High got repairs and a new football stadium. But along with these resources came a deepening divide between white students and students of color, Butler said. During lunchtime, white students gathered in the octagon-shaped courtyard with a glass ceiling. Black and Latino students ate in the cafeteria. It was the classic high school lunchroom, which had foldout tables and doubled as a gymnasium.

“It was that phenomenon — that’s where we felt safe, that’s where we felt at home,” Butler said. “People would bring their speakers, their CD players. We would play music. It was always this great time.”

Activism

The more Butler read, the more radical he became. For him, that meant making people aware of institutional systems that dole out power to a lucky few while taking it away from others.

“The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a book by Paulo Freire, made Butler rethink these systems and reach for freedom — “freedom of mind, physical freedom, freedom from systems,” he said.

And freedom of mind leads to consciousness, which comes from education, he said.

Butler arrived at MU in 2008 to study engineering. He switched his major to psychology, then sociology, then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business. He recalled being on campus in 2010 when cotton balls were scattered in front of MU’s Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center.

Butler took a little time off school and worked for the university before starting a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis last year. As he began graduate school, the eyes of the world turned to Ferguson, Missouri, after black teenager Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer.

Butler headed to Ferguson to protest. He saw law enforcement officers approach protesters in what he assumed were SWAT trucks. He saw them toss tear gas cans into the crowd. He felt it, too.

“When they started popping the first tear gas, there was a taste I couldn’t get out of my mouth,” Butler told the Missourian in August 2014. “My nose started running. I just started itching. It was so overpowering that I started to get a headache.”

Fourteen months later, after participating in numerous demonstrations to reform the racial climate at MU, Butler had a peculiar sense of deja vu.

On Oct. 10, he and 10 other student activists, who called themselves Concerned Student 1950 after the year when the first black graduate student was admitted to the university, stopped Wolfe’s convertible during MU’s Homecoming parade.

Their demonstration was meant to educate bystanders about MU’s history of oppression.

“In 1839, the University of Missouri was established as a flagship institution west of the Mississippi River,” began Reuben Faloughi, a member of Concerned Student 1950 and also an MU graduate student. “This institution was for white men only — only white men! And it was built on the backs of black people!”

“Ashé!” the protesters chanted, using the Yoruba word for power. “We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

A number of people in the crowd shouted back MU’s signature chant, “M-I-Z!” and “Z-O-U!” Some bystanders tried to block Wolfe’s car from the activists. Wolfe did not leave his car, and he did not respond to the students. His driver revved the car’s engine, and the car bumped into Butler.

After law enforcement officers came to break up the demonstration, the student activists embraced. Some cried.

This sense of emotional support felt between the original 11 members of Concerned Student 1950 has only intensified since the parade. The group sent Wolfe a list of demands, including a comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum, an increase in black faculty and staff and more funding for MU’s mental health center. When Wolfe met with Concerned Student 1950 members, he did not agree to any of them.

The movement family

Butler was not satisfied. He thought about things he had often thought about: radicalism, humanity and confronting things at the root. He consulted with his physician and his pastor. He updated his will, decided to become an organ donor and signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.

He thought about God, too.

Butler spoke passionately, quickly, varying his sentences with repetition and fragments to make his point. But when it came to talking about God, he paused and took a deep breath.

“There’s this faith that if I walk on concrete, I’m not going to sink into a hole and fall through the ground,” Butler said. “So there’s that faith that we already have in everyday life, but it’s just a blind faith in a greater sense. God created me. He created these systems. He created this world. And to trust him through it all — that whatever is going to happen is going to happen.”

“Jesus was a radical, too,” he added.

Yet Butler did not tell his friends — his movement family, as he calls them — until the Sunday night before he began his hunger strike. They were shocked that he was willing to give up his life to protest Wolfe. But not 24 hours later, they had set up a few tents on Mel Carnahan Quadrangle and were determined to stay until Wolfe was out of office.

As the week went on, passers-by visited with support in the form of food, tarps, even a dog to pet. Some students stopped by to learn about the movement. More and more supporters brought tents and joined the campout. They formed a community, gossiping about why Missouri quarterback Maty Mauk had been suspended and complaining about seeing drunk parents at bars downtown. They prayed.

A few days in, students dedicated an entire tent to storing food. The camp grew. The movement community swelled.

Butler stopped by from time to time, but he spent the majority of his week in class, working or in meetings.

“Some people want to meet for just 15 minutes to talk and just pray,” Butler said. “Some of them have been hour-long meetings because they’re really trying to clear up what got me to this point.”

Without food, by day four, his friends helped him meet his appointments by acting as human crutches. Standing up required his significant concentration.

His movement family protected him, too. On Monday morning, after Wolfe announced his resignation, they surrounded him by the tents at Carnahan Quad, shielding him from the barrage of reporters and curious onlookers.

Students hugged each other. They danced. They jumped up and down. Butler, in a dark cap and sweatshirt, was in the middle of it all, held up on each side by a friend. They chanted the chorus to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.”

Many strings remain loose, including whether real race relations reform will come to MU or whether the president’s successor will be different than Wolfe in the eyes of the movement community.

From Butler’s perspective, though, he took the important step from reading about radicalism to making it his own. He spun the wheels of change at MU.

ANSWERED: Common questions about Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike

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Columbia Missourian | Nov 8, 2015

COLUMBIA — After multiple incidents of racism at MU and a lack of response from UM System leadership, MU graduate student Jonathan Butler embarked on a hunger strike to catalyze change. Here are some answers to common questions about Butler’s protest:

1. What does Butler hope to accomplish with his hunger strike?

In a Nov. 2 letter announcing the hunger strike, Butler asked the UM System Board of Curators to fire UM System President Tim Wolfe. The curators, the system’s governing body, has the power to remove Wolfe from his position. Butler did not send a letter to Wolfe asking him to resign.

2. Why does Butler want Wolfe out?

Because of Wolfe’s inaction in response to a “slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience at the University of Missouri,” according to Butler’s letter.

Butler and other student activists stopped Wolfe’s car during the Homecoming Parade on Oct. 10 while they condemned MU’s history of racism.

Wolfe did not respond to the group’s concerns while he was in the car. His driver revved the convertible’s engine, and the car bumped into Butler. Some bystanders at the parade heckled Butler and the activists.

The Homecoming Parade incident represents larger issues with racism at the UM System, Butler said.

He said Wolfe has the power to create change within the four-campus system, but that Wolfe has remained silent about racism that makes students of color feel unsafe and unwelcome. Wolfe has only spoken out when students have pressed him, Butler said.

“When you look at something like Tim Wolfe — when you look at the way the system is set up — what Tim Wolfe is representing at this moment is this corrupt system that doesn’t value the lives of marginalized students,” Butler said in an interview.

In the 23 days between the Homecoming Parade and Nov. 2, when Butler began his hunger strike, “(Wolfe) had all the time in the world to come up with a statement to actually say that he cares about black students, to come up with something, and he failed to do so,” Butler said.

Butler has denounced incidents of black students being called racist slurs, among other acts of discrimination targeting minorities.

In early September, Missouri Students Association President Payton Head was called the n-word behind a fraternity house in Greektown. Members of the Legion of Black Collegians were called the same slur during an event at MU’s Traditions Plaza in early October. And, on Oct. 24, a swastika drawn with human feces was found in an MU residence hall.

“He’s never responded to Payton Head and that situation, didn’t respond to the LBC incident, didn’t respond to the incident with the swastika in the residence hall.

“That’s not what leadership is. We look at his physical job description, (which is to) provide a safe learning environment for students. He’s not fulfilling that part of the duty.”

3. Why is Butler not demanding a policy change or targeting MU Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin?

There are two parts to the answer, Butler said.

“One, is that you have to look at all the student organizations and people who are already asking for similar things like that (policy changes), so I don’t think it’s necessary to reinvent the wheel when there’s already students protesting, advocating to get measures like those put into place.”

The second reason is that for all of Loftin’s flaws, Butler said, the chancellor is more sincere in his responses and willing to listen to students.

“I’m critical of Chancellor Loftin because he does play a crucial role in what happens on campus, but in the meetings I’ve seen with him, he’s actually more willing to understand how systems of oppression, how racism and all these things work,” Butler said.

“Being in a meeting with Tim Wolfe … he doesn’t acknowledge our humanity, he doesn’t acknowledge that we exist, we’re nothing to him. When you have a leadership like that, that’s treating marginalized students like that, that’s not the type of leader we need.”

4. Has Wolfe responded?

After Wolfe met with Butler on Friday, five days after the hunger strike began, Wolfe issued an apology in a news release.

“I regret my reaction at the MU Homecoming Parade when the Concerned Student 1950 group approached my car. I am sorry, and my apology is long overdue,” according to the statement.

“My behavior seemed like I did not care. That was not my intention. I was caught off guard in that moment. Nonetheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

Butler and other student activists have been skeptical about the sincerity of Wolfe’s statements in the past. They are impatient with Wolfe’s calls for dialogue, and they want action.

Wolfe released another statement Sunday afternoon.

“We want to find the best way to get everyone around the table and create the safe space for a meaningful conversation that promotes change,” the statement read. “We will share next steps as soon as they are confirmed.”

“Extremely unsatisfied,” Butler tweeted after the statement came out. “He still has no true plan for change. We deserve a leader who actually cares.”

5. Have the curators responded?

The curators have issued no public response.

Curators David Steelman and Phillip Snowden had no comment Nov. 2 after Butler’s hunger strike started. None of the other curators have responded to requests for comment.

At 7:20 p.m. on Nov. 8 the curators announced they would meet at 10 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 9, for an executive session. The board will have a brief public session followed by a closed session. Then, it will reconvene the public meeting.

6. Why a hunger strike? Why not another type of protest?

Nothing else has worked, Butler said.

“The number one question, concern I’ve gotten from everyone is … please don’t do this, we value you your life, there has to be another method,” he said. “The question I ask right back is ‘what method?'”

“If you look at the past two years, and all that students have done, black students, brown students, students of color and marginalized students have been fighting and protesting and writing letters and doing all these things over several years,” Butler said.

“Then you see what happens with graduate students, which is a primarily white demographic, and within seven days, you get a response. And a pretty significant response, a pretty significant public, national response.

“We, as students of color, marginalized students, we still can’t get an answer years later. It takes these drastic measures for us to be taken seriously, for us to actually be considered humans,” Butler said.

7. Is Butler serious about his hunger strike?

Yes. Butler has not eaten since the morning of Nov. 2, when he had breakfast before 9 a.m.

He updated his will before the strike, he said. Butler spoke with his physician and his pastor before making his decision. He confirmed Thursday that he signed a “do not resuscitate” order, which instructs doctors not to perform CPR.

8. When did he begin the strike, and when will he end it?

Butler began the strike at 9 a.m. on Nov. 2. He said that he will continue until Wolfe is out of office or until his own life is over.

9. What does the hunger strike have to do with Concerned Student 1950?

Butler is a part of Concerned Student 1950, a group of black student activists that first came into public eye when they protested Wolfe at the Homecoming Parade. The group was named after the year Gus T. Ridgel, the first black graduate student at MU, was admitted to the university.

The original group had 11 members, but in an Oct. 20 letter to MU, the members wrote that Concerned Student 1950 “represents every Black student admitted to the University of Missouri since (1950) and their sentiments regarding race-related affairs affecting their lives at a predominantly white institution.”

10. Does Concerned Student 1950 have the same demands as Butler?

Concerned Student 1950 is pushing for the removal of Tim Wolfe from office, but the group has several other demands.

According to previous Missourian reporting, the demands include:

  • Enforcement of mandatory racial awareness and inclusion curriculum for all faculty, staff and students, controlled by a board of color.

  • An increase in the percentage of black faculty and staff to 10 percent by the 2017-18 academic year, and the development by May 1 of a 10-year plan to promote a safer, more inclusive campus.

  • An increase in funding to hire more mental health professionals for the MU Counseling Center, particularly those of color, and more staff for the social justice centers on campus.

11. Why are there tents on Mel Carnahan Quadrangle?

Students from Concerned Student 1950 as well as other activists and allies are camping out in solidarity with Butler until Wolfe is no longer the system’s president.

12. Is Butler camping out, too?

No. Butler has stopped by the camp out, but he’s not sleeping in the tents.

13. Is anybody else taking part in the hunger strike?

Some students are fasting in solidarity with Butler, but they’re only fasting one day at a time, according to previous Missourian reporting.

14. What happened Friday in a confrontation between Wolfe and student activists?

Wolfe was in Kansas City on Friday night to speak at a fundraiser.Student activists from MU traveled to Kansas City and met up with students from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The students met Wolfe by the Kauffman Center and asked him to define systematic racism.

“It’s — systematic oppression is because you don’t believe that you have the equal opportunity for success — ” Wolfe said in a video of the incident.

The students were unimpressed with his answer.

“Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe? Did you just blame black students —” one student responded before the video cut off.

15. Is the entire football team involved in a boycott?

On Saturday night, black members of the MU football team tweeted a photo in support of Butler. They announced that they would not participate in any football related activities until Wolfe was gone from his position.

Sixty of the 124 football players are black, but it was unclear Saturday night exactly how many of them were boycotting.

On Sunday morning, coach Gary Pinkel and white football team members announced they supported black players. Pinkel tweeted, “The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP.”

Pinkel released a statement Sunday evening saying that there was no practice Sunday.

“After meeting with the team this morning, it is clear they do not plan to return to practice until Jonathan resumes eating,” Pinkel said in the statement.

MU student embarks on hunger strike, demands Wolfe’s removal from office

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Columbia Missourian | Nov 2, 2015

COLUMBIA — Jonathan Butler, an MU graduate student and campus activist, began a hunger strike at 9 a.m. Monday as a protest against Tim Wolfe remaining president of the University of Missouri System.

“During this hunger strike, I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” Butler wrote in a letter sent to the UM System Board of Curators.

Butler, a master’s student in educational leadership and policy analysis, is protesting “a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience” at MU. His letter referenced incidents of black students being called racist slurs, the sudden removal of graduate student health insurance subsidies in August, MU’s cancellation of Planned Parenthood contracts and the swastika drawn with human feces found in an MU residence hall on Oct. 24.

“(S)tudents are not able to achieve their full academic potential because of the inequalities and obstacles they face,” Butler wrote. “In each of these scenarios, Mr. Wolfe had ample opportunity to create policies and reform that could shift the culture of Mizzou in a positive direction but in each scenario he failed to do so.”

The letter was sent to curators at 8:29 a.m. Monday. The curators, who are the governing body of the four-campus system, have the power to fire Wolfe. Butler also published the letter on Twitter shortly after 10 a.m.

Curators Phillip Snowden and David Steelman had no comment. The other six curators did not respond to phone calls requesting comment as of 7:30 p.m. Monday.

Wolfe issued a statement by email through UM System spokesman John Fougere shortly after 5 p.m. It read:

“It is extremely concerning when any of our students puts their health and safety in harm’s way. I sincerely hope that Mr. Butler will consider a different method of advocating for this cause. I respect his right to protest and admire the courage it takes to speak up.

“I believe that the best course of action is an ongoing dialogue about the racial climate on our four UM System campuses. Immediately after my initial meeting with the ConcernedStudent1950 group on October 26th, I invited Jonathan to meet again so we can build a deeper relationship and open a frank conversation about the group’s frustrations and experiences. I remain hopeful that they will accept my invitation.

“This meeting with the ConcernedStudent1950 group is one example of our engagement at the UM System level on this complex, societal issue. I have met with our chancellors, campus diversity officers, students and faculty about the scope of the problem, so that collectively we may address these issues that are pervasive and systemic in our society. We must always continue our efforts to affect change at our UM System campuses.”

Butler is part of Concerned Student 1950, the student group that stopped Wolfe’s car during the Homecoming Parade on Oct. 10. After Wolfe did not respond to students’ concerns while he was in the car, the group published a list of demands, including asking for a handwritten apology from Wolfe and his removal from office.

Wolfe met privately with members of Concerned Student 1950 on Oct. 26, but he did not agree to any of the group’s demands. Butler confirmed that he did receive an email from Wolfe the next day, but because he asked Wolfe that all correspondence go through the Concerned Student 1950 group email address, he was waiting for Wolfe to email the group before he would respond.

Butler said he is demanding Wolfe’s removal from office because he’s failed to respond to marginalized students’ concerns with sincerity or concrete action.

“I’m critical of Chancellor Loftin because he does play a crucial role in what happens on campus, but in the meetings I’ve seen with him, he’s actually more willing to understand how systems of oppression, how racism and all these things work,” Butler said in an interview. “Being in a meeting with Tim Wolfe … he doesn’t acknowledge our humanity, he doesn’t acknowledge that we exist; we’re nothing to him.”

In his letter, Butler wrote that he has “no ill will or thoughts of harm towards Mr. Wolfe.” Instead, he thinks it’s urgent to make MU “a more safe, welcoming and inclusive environment for all identities and backgrounds.”

MU also released a statement through MU spokesman Christian Basi: “Chancellor Loftin continues to be willing to meet with representatives from student groups, including ConcernedStudent1950.

Additionally, Chancellor Loftin and his staff will continue to meet with student leaders, faculty and staff, as we take steps to acknowledge our past, create a more inclusive campus and build a better future at Mizzou.

“Chancellor Loftin and his administrative staff are concerned about the health and well-being of Mr. Butler, as we are with all of our students. We respect Mr. Butler’s right to protest in this manner, but sincerely hope he will not suffer from his actions. We offer many resources to support students’ health and wellbeing, all of which are available to Mr. Butler.

“Chancellor Loftin and all of his staff sincerely want to work with Mr. Butler toward a better understanding of our differences and hope he will reconsider his actions, which could have damaging repercussions to his health. We stand ready to continue an open dialogue.”

During his hunger strike, Butler will continue to attend class and work at his job as a co-facilitator for a Peace Corps prep program. He will also host study halls about systems of oppression such as racism and sexism on MU’s central campus beginning Tuesday, but the final details of those study halls have not yet been announced.

Butler has been a vocal student protester, condemning racism at MU since last year’s post-Ferguson demonstrations. Butler is also a member of the MU Faculty Council’s race relations committee, which has the “purpose of addressing widespread unawareness of racial insensitivity on campus,” according to a Faculty Council report from March.

Butler made the decision to go on a hunger strike a couple of days after the Homecoming Parade.

“A hunger strike specifically speaks to the nature of the beast that we’re dealing with when we talk about systemic issues, because it deals with humanity,” Butler said. “I think what I want people to come away with, if nothing else, (is) to understand that I’m so committed to making things better here at the university … that I’m literally willing to give up my humanity to see some injustices stop.”

Over the past few weeks, he’s been preparing for the strike: Butler updated his will and spoke to his physician.

After researching how the human body reacts to hunger strike, Butler gradually lessened his food intake in the past two weeks. He will still drink water during his strike.

Butler said he has also prepared himself spiritually. Before making the decision, he spoke to his pastor and prayed.

“[A]s the collective body of UM curators considers my request and decides on what your next steps will be do not consider that my life is in your hands because my life is in God’s hands,” Butler wrote in his letter.

Hunger strikes are a form of non-violent protest used by activists such as labor movement leader Cesar Chavez, who did not eat for 24 days in 1972. More recently, a few students at Tufts University in Boston participated in a five-day hunger strike to protest the university’s decision to lay off 20 janitors.

When a human body doesn’t receive calories from food, after a few days it begins breaking down fat to produce energy,according to an article published in the scholarly journal Nutrition and Clinical Practice.

During prolonged periods of time without food, the human body breaks down muscles and vital organs for energy and protein, consuming itself in order to survive. People of normal weight can last two to three months without food, according to the journal article.

At about 7:30 a.m. Monday, Butler met with a group of friends — he calls them his movement family — at Waffle House. He ordered two waffles with maple syrup and eggs. He only ate half a waffle before his strike began. After breakfast, he and his friends prayed.

“There is a more than 90 percent chance that I won’t survive this, and that’s why I’ve taken such precautions that I have,” Butler said. “If I do lose my life through this process, I think it only promotes the message stronger … that this is worth fighting for.”