Missouri football players announced Saturday night on Twitter that they will not participate in team activities until the university president is removed from office.

The statement from the athletes of color was tweeted out Saturday by several members of the football team, including starting running back Russell Hansbrough.

The move aligns the team with campus groups who have been protesting the way university president Tim Wolfe has dealt with issues of racial harassment during the school year. Jonathan Butler, a black graduate student, is in the sixth day of a hunger strike to call attention to the issue.

The statement from the players included a photograph of 32 black men, including Butler. In the photo, two players have their arms linked through his.

The message reads: "The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe "Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere" We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students' experience. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!"

Wolfe met with Butler and student groups on Friday to discuss the university's handling of racial harassment cases.

Butler also has expressed concern about other student issues, including the removal of graduate student health care subsidies and an end to university contracts with a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Student groups have been critical over how Wolfe has handled issues of race and discrimination, and blocked his car at homecoming in an attempt to speak with him. They have complained that the use of racial slurs is prevalent. In April, a swastika was found in a Missouri dormitory, and officials said last month they were investigating another act of vandalism that targeted minorities.

In a text message statement to The Associated Press, the Missouri athletic department said it was aware of the statement by "many of our student-athletes."

"We all must come together with leaders from across our campus to tackle these challenging issues and we support our student-athletes right to do so."

The campus is about 120 miles west of Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb where tensions erupted following the police shooting death of 18-year Michael Brown. Brown, who was black, was unarmed when he was shot by a white police officer during a confrontation in a street in August 2014. His death sparked ongoing protests and helped spawn the national "Black Lives Matter" movement rebuking police treatment of minorities.

The campus of 35,448 is mostly white. Approximately 17 percent of the student population identifies with a minority group, according to the university website.

Prez is fucked. Did nothing in some bad situations.

not sure the students demands are well thought out....

if the place is bad and it sure seems it is, the students should plan to transfer in large numbers if changes arent made. Allow adequate time to react and make changes with some serious pressure.

Are we talking the original Nation of Domination with Ron Simmons, PG-13 rapping their way to the ring, and D-Lo in a suit?

The best part of this is that "Legion of Black Collegians" sounds just like "Nation of Domination" and can be substituted into their old theme song virtually seamlessly. WE ARE THE LEGION! OF BLACK COLLEGIANS! Legion...of Black Collegians...

Think back to being a college student. This is not an option unless they are all gonna transfer to a local JUCO.

Dont even know what Univ of Missouri specializes in.

Decent broadcasting department, I believe. The university owns the NBC affiliate for CoMO/Jeff City, which is kind of unusual. They also produced, if you'll pardon the expression, our Baldy McGrindy!

The football team wants to strike and not play. They have all the rights in the world to do that. I assume they will be reimbursing the school for room, board and tuition will they choose not to honor their scholarship deals? Because, really doesnt seem like they are putting anything on the line. I would imagine most people who strike at their place of employment dont get paid for Strike days.

Legally, there is not much Missouri or any other school can do. Theoretically, the athletes are breaching their contracts, aka scholarships, by not playing. However, the schools can never actually make that argument. Otherwise, they would be admitting that the athletes are employees under contract to perform athletic services in exchange for tuition, room, and board.

Thanks to the NCAA’s “student-athlete” charade, there is no way to stop this strike aside from accepting the PR nightmare of revoking scholarships. Assuming Missouri’s athletes truly came to play school (thanks, Cardale), then these students are simply choosing to not participate in their extracurricular activity anymore. If the school and the coaching staff lose significant money in the process, well, that’s the double-edged sword the NCAA has finely sharpened by creating a system in which football players are the most valuable commodities on campus.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erika Christakis <erika.christakis@yale.edu>
Date: Friday, October 30, 2015
Subject: Dressing Yourselves
To: "All Silliman Students and Admin." <itscomm2@yale.edu>

Dear Sillimanders:

Nicholas and I have heard from a number of students who were frustrated by the mass email sent to the student body about appropriate Halloween-wear. I’ve always found Halloween an interesting embodiment of more general adult worries about young people. As some of you may be aware, I teach a class on “The Concept of the Problem Child,” and I was speaking with some of my students yesterday about the ways in which Halloween – traditionally a day of subversion for children and young people – is also an occasion for adults to exert their control.

When I was young, adults were freaked out by the specter of Halloween candy poisoned by lunatics, or spiked with razor blades (despite the absence of a single recorded case of such an event). Now, we’ve grown to fear the sugary candy itself. And this year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween.

I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.
It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue “signalling.” But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.

As a former preschool teacher, for example, it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it. I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.

Which is my point. I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours. Why do we dress up on Halloween, anyway? Should we start explaining that too? I’ve always been a good mimic and I enjoy accents. I love to travel, too, and have been to every continent but Antarctica. When I lived in Bangladesh, I bought a sari because it was beautiful, even though I looked stupid in it and never wore it once. Am I fetishizing and appropriating others’ cultural experiences? Probably. But I really, really like them too.

Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense – and I’ll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes – I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves! Are we all okay with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people's capacity – in your capacity - to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you? We tend to view this shift from individual to institutional agency as a tradeoff between libertarian vs. liberal values (“liberal” in the American, not European sense of the word).

Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.

But – again, speaking as a child development specialist – I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?

In other words: Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It's not mine, I know that.

Happy Halloween.
Yours sincerely,
Erika

The best part of this is that "Legion of Black Collegians" sounds just like "Nation of Domination" and can be substituted into their old theme song virtually seamlessly. WE ARE THE LEGION! OF BLACK COLLEGIANS! Legion...of Black Collegians...

I used to think it was kinda funny how Gangrel would kinda nod along to his own theme song. Very self-aware, very meta. Not enough guys did that.

Yeah, my oldest is down there. Some of the stuff that was going on scared the hell out of many of the kids. It really worried me, because I actually saw some parallels to my own bitter time down in Champaign. My son really hadn't been trying to be out much on campus over the last two weeks where things escalated. He really hadn't experienced much of the protest reactions by some "students" in the jock dorm he lives in (I wonder why), but when a wise ass thought it would be funny to smear fecal matter in the shape of a swastika all over a common bathroom it really reached him directly.

The really sad thing is that you saw this coming in July when there was the administration seemed to almost joyously embrace a big public push away from the diversity programs & (symbolic) attempts at inclusiveness. Supposedly those programs had really started to improve campus life and had gotten all kinds of real participation. But in the admins opinion, it wasn't needed. Grad students, upperclassmen and professors were telling anyone who would listen that it was a mistake, but the Pres got huffy and dismissive. Sad.

The president's actions seemed really high handed, especially given the nature of the then protests. I guess $1MM+ plus lawers fees to be paid when this weekend's football game was to be the first not played hit in the wallet...and that's not allowable.

The swastika would indicate hostility towards Jewish people, not blacks.

Did the fecal swastika really happen? I must admit that I was skeptical of that one. I can see a swastika and I can see non-specific fecal matter, but I can't see a swastika comprised of fecal matter.

You can't count on Missourians to know that.