Curator joins call for dismissal of Melissa Click

A member of the board of curators for the four-campus University of Missouri system has joined the call for an assistant professor at the Columbia campus to be fired over a videotaped clash with reporters.

Curator David Steelman of Rolla described Melissa Click as “an embarrassment.” But speaking before a meeting Wednesday, Steelman noted that he’s not chairman of the board and isn’t able to put her continued employment on a future agenda.

Click garnered national attention after she confronted a student photographer. The photographer was filming after the university system’s president and the Columbia campus’ chancellor resigned amid protests over what some saw as indifference to racial issues.

Steelman told ABC 17 News Thursday afternoon the desire to remove a student from a public place deserved some sort of discipline from the university, but calling for “muscle” to remove the student, as is seen in the video, put others in the way of harm.

“If all she had done had simply been to try to prevent students from doing their job and students from using public land, I would have been shocked by that,” Steelman said in a phone interview. “But her call for muscle, I found absolutely appalling and intolerable.”

Steelman said it would take a majority vote of the board to remove Dr. Click from her job, and that Curator Pam Henrickson would need to put it on the agenda. He said he didn’t want the board to get into the business of micromanaging staffing at the system’s schools, but he feared doing nothing in terms of discipline to Dr. Click would set a poor precedent.

“We have a responsibility to just not students, but future students, that every professor understands that at no time will the use of physical threats be tolerated,” Steelman said.

Since November, different groups have both called for Dr. Click’s firing, and defender her actions caught on video November 9. One hundred Republican state lawmakers signed a letter calling for Dr. Click’s ouster. Representative Caleb Jones, representing parts of south Columbia, said in a press release then, “At every turn, Click’s actions were unacceptable and inflammatory in a situation where the students and the public needed and expected university employees to serve professionally and as a calming influence.”

In early January, 100 MU faculty members sent a letter to Mizzou leadership, defending Dr. Click. They called her behavior “”

Steelman said he wished the University acted quicker on the situation, so as to avoid “politics injected into this.”

“This is not a political issue,” Steelman said. “This is an issue about students’ rights, about students’ well-bring and about safety on campus.”

Click didn’t immediately return phone or email messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.