University of Missouri president resigns amid racial protests
The president of the University of Missouri has resigned amid a wave of student and faculty protests over several racial incidents against African American students.
Timothy Wolfe announced on Monday that he would step down immediately following a special meeting of the university system’s governing body in Columbia, Missouri.
Tensions are high at the public research university with a black student on a hunger strike and others camped out in solidarity.
Faculty members have also canceled classes and members of the school’s American football team have threatened to boycott the rest of the season.
The Missouri Students Association released a letter on Monday demanding Wolfe’s ouster because he “enabled a system of racism” at the university.
“Racism does exist at our university, and it is unacceptable,” Wolfe said in a statement circulated last week. “It is a long-standing, systemic problem which daily affects our family of students, faculty and staff. I am sorry this is the case.”
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said in a statement that Wolfe’s resignation was “a necessary step toward healing and reconciliation on the University of Missouri campus.”
Students began protests at the university on September 24. Many of the protests have been led by a student organization called Concerned Student 1950, which gets its name from the year the college accepted its first African American student.
Students have pointed to several recent events on campus that underscore a hostile environment for black students. Student government president Payton Head, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him.
In early October, members of a black student organization said racial insults were shouted at them by an apparently drunken white student.
The protests come more than a year after a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, sparking widespread demonstrations across the US.
Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, is about 120 miles (193 km) from the Columbia campus.
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