Missouri football players threaten to strike? An exercise in pure stupidity

The Game Room
161

Well, clearly someone gave a shit. :eek:

Yeah, the problem here wasn’t this incident or any specific incident. It was the response of the administration to the genuine concerns of the student body. You may argue that the students shouldn’t have been this upset with what appears on the outside to be random isolated pranks, but I suspect the reports don’t accurately reflect the mood on campus.

Or maybe they do, and there are a few agitators making much ado about nothing. Either way, it’s up to the President to address and/or diffuse the problems and he didn’t do that.

162

Do you think a graffiti swastika is equivalent to a graffiti sketch of a penis and testicles?

163

As I mentioned earlier , you don’t negotiate with terrorists, blackmailers, or social justice warriors. I believe that Mr. Butler and his fringe Concerned Students group represent a a small group of agitators that wanted their own Ferguson movement. They blew a small number of mostly unverifiable incidents way out of proportion. They disrupted the homecoming parade and intimidated the university president. Since they didn’t get the president to admit his white privilege, Mr Butler started his hunger strike.

I’ll give the agitators credit though. It was a stroke of evil genius that they managed to pick up the support of a few members of the football team. The team was not united in the proposed strike , but I can see how ugly things would have gotten in the locker room if a group of white players had spoken out against it.

I hope Mr. Butler is happy with his 15 minutes of fame and the scalp he claimed. He hasn’t done anything to help improve race relations and he’s probably destroyed team chemistry on an already struggling football team.

164

I rarely leave one that doesn’t.

Regards,
Shodan

165

Increasing faculty (I assume they want faculty, not staff) to 10% is a laudable goal - but it can’t be done overnight. Finding PhDs who want to live in the middle of Missouri I am sure is already a challenge at times. Then you need to fill the open slots that you have - are there African American PhDs in the fields that match the faculty needs who want to come to Missouri? Finally - are they any good?

Looking at some NSF data - plenty of PhDs out there, not sure how it breaks down by field however.

166

Actually, they do want both staff and faculty rates increased to 10%.

Currently, according to the latest figures on the university’s website, African Americans make up 405 out of a total 5793 staff positions, or almost exactly 7.0 percent.

The largest percentage of black staff can be found in the Service and Maintenance jobs, with African Americans filling 25.7% of such positions. The smallest percentage of blacks can be found in the Executive/Administrative/Managerial category (4.16%), and in the Professional category (3.51%).

All these figures are from 2013. The university doesn’t have the staff breakdown for 2014.

In terms of faculty, overall black representation is lower than the overall staff level. The numbers are here, and they are from 2014. Out of a total of 2952 faculty, there are 92 African Americans, or 3.25%. Levels of black faculty are pretty consistent across all three main categories of faculty (between 3 and 4 percent), although it’s not clear to me from the figures what the “Other” category includes; i’m assuming it’s probably adjunct/contingent/contract faculty. In the Tenured/Tenure Track category, blacks are 3.18%.

[all faculty and staff numbers exclude hospitals and clinics, and the university Extension program]

The folks at FiveThirtyEight.com have calculated that, in order to comply with the student demands that black faculty and staff levels be raised to 10%, the university would have to hire 414 new black faculty and staff, or replace about 370 current (presumably non-black) faculty and staff with African Americans. They don’t break this down between staff and faculty, but the numbers i’ve provided above suggest that the 414 new hires would need to be split about 50-50 between faculty and staff to get both numbers up to 10%.

This means that getting faculty numbers up to 10% would require hiring about 200 more black faculty. That’s a tough ask, and doing it by the 2017-2018 academic year would be nigh on impossible. You can’t simply fire a bunch of non-black faculty to make way for new hires, and in the current financial climate there’s no way the university is going to approve 200 new faculty positions.

167

And that’s where the administration sits down with the protesters and negotiates with them to set more reasonable goals.

dalej42, your position that you “don’t negotiate with social justice warriors” is part of the reason why the social injustices exist in the first place, and a large part of why the demands end up being unreasonable.

168

I think you’re giving the OP too much credit. He doesn’t seem to really be all that concerned about football. He seems more annoyed that some people are pointing out that racism is still a problem.

169

Coach Pinkel stepping down at the end of the season.

Link

170

Then we need to be asking ourselves why it can’t be done overnight. What are the underlying causes? Why aren’t black people getting PhD’s? Is there problems in the graduate system? In the lower university system? In the pre-college education system? And why don’t African-Americans want to live in the middle of Missouri?

171

Probably not due to this. The guy has lymphoma and is supposedly stepping down due to those health reasons.

172

You’d be wrong. I examined the entire timeline of the events. I saw nothing in there that would warrant the cancellation of an intramural flag football game much less a neutral site major college game with a one million dollar forfeiture penalty.

I know the coach is stepping down due to cancer but I can’t help thinking that the inmates running the asylum helped confirm the decision.

173

Reports through the alumni grapevine are that he notified the AD on October 28th of his decision.

174

Interesting that you group people working for social justice in the same category as terrorists and blackmailers.

I think they know better than us what the racial atmosphere on campus was like. I doubt they would have received the support they did if people really didn’t believe there was a real problem. A few incidents are often just the tip of an iceberg.

Assuming they’re blowing several “minor” incidents out of proportion, that would hardly make them “evil.”

I would think the team is probably bonded now more than before. Standing together for something important should be a team-building exercise.

And, the steps the University has agreed to take may very well improve race relatilons on campus. Kudos to all involved.

175

Focusing on faculty:

Earlier poster ran the math - you can’t go to 10% faculty representation without either adding hundreds of faculty positions (when the prior President was hired to make cuts), or ONLY hiring African American faculty for each retirement / turnover.

In addition, plenty of other universities are working hard to hire African American faculty as well to build out their representation. So if USC decides to hire 10 faculty - they have the endowment, the location, at the startup packages to offer. I don’t think that Missouri is in the same position right now to hire.

176

I agree their are few black college teachers out there. I went to college from 1984 to around 1992 taking classes here and there off and on at 4 different universities and community college campuses in Missouri and Kansas and in all those years I had exactly ONE African american teacher.

And that course - golf.

Now I had 4 Asian teachers.

177

Now is it?

He is the president of a college of 32,000 students and about 6,000 staff. He oversees hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. He deals with the state, the city, different boards, alumni, and numerous donors.

Is it REALLY his job to get involved if ONE student gets called the N - word by some nutcase OFF campus? Or some idiot makes a poo swastika in a bathroom? Isnt that the responsibility of police and lower department heads?

178

You either ignored or missed the point I made. Offering an explanation of why the current situation can’t be changed immediately is ignoring the bigger issue: what are the conditions that have existed over the last few decades that led to the current situation?

Let’s ignore for the moment the demographics of the facility in 2015. Let’s instead ask what the demographics of the facility will be in 2040. Will the percentage of black college teachers still be significantly below the percentage of black people in the general population? Now go backwards. If somebody had asked this question in 1990, we wouldn’t be having this debate in 2015.

We need to stop putting off these issues to “some day” and start working on them now. And if a football team going on strike is what it takes to get people moving, then good for them for striking.

179

Well I can tell you a little about conditions in Missouri.

The majority of blacks in the state live in the big cities of Kansas City Missouri and St. Louis Missouri. In both cases the public schools are terrible. Ratings of KCMO and STLMO schools. The schools academics are so watered down and weak that so while they technically graduated from high school, they are way underprepared for the rigors of college academics. You just cant do well in a college environment when at best you have a 5th grade level education.

180

It’s not just Missouri. If you are looking to hire a black PhD., the pickings are pretty slim. If you want a PhD. in something other than education, they are even slimmer.

Cite. Cite.

Regards,
Shodan