Ever since Melissa "I Need Some Muscle" Click tried to run the press off the University of Missouri campus in November, I've been predicting that the 44-year-old assistant professor of communications at Mizzou, far from being fired, would be a "shoo-in for tenure" with a "stellar academic future" at the activism-dominated campus.
And–looks as though I'm going to be right!
On Jan. 5, 115 Mizzou faculty members signed a letter saying, "We wish to state in no uncertain terms our support for Click as a member of the University of Missouri faculty who has earned her position through an outstanding record of teaching and research." The letter called Click's seizure of a student-journalist's camera and her call for "muscle" to remove him forcibly from a protest "at most a regrettable mistake."
And now, with the help of a sympathetic reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education, we have the Melissa Click Pity Party.
Because it seems that after the "muscle" incident some mean people sent mean e-mails to Click. How horrible!
Here's how Click herself characterized the contents of her in-box: "Oh yes, I am getting rape and death threats."
Actually, as Chronicle reporter Steve Kolowich lays it out, not a single e-mailer got around to directly threatening to kill or rape Click. But they probably made her cry, which is the important thing.
Here are what were apparently the very nastiest e-mails that Click received:
"I hope your mother dies of brain cancer."
"I plan to belly-laugh when someone shanks you or sets you on fire in the next week."
"Sport should be made of you, in which you are passed around a cell block for a week straight, then cut loose to be hunted down and killed. If hell exists, I want to be there to take part in your eternal agony. You do not deserve a marked grave."
"I hope you're gang-raped by some of the very animals with whom you're so enamored."
Not very nice, but there is a difference between hoping someone gets gang-raped and announcing one's intention to do it personally.
The rest of the e-mails seemed to consist of calling Click an "a–hole" (that must have hurt!) and reminding her, as many journalists did, that there's such a thing as the First Amendment that protects the freedom of the press. Other e-mails used the word "shame" (that must have hurt, too!) or compared her to Hitler, Mao Zedong, and George Wallace.
Aren't you feeling sorry for Melissa Click already? I am!
Click has been teaching at Mizzou since at least 2004 and is the author of such significant publications as Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise and Saving Food: Food Preservation as Alternative Food Activism. So surely tenure review must be just around the corner for her. With the wellspring of faculty and liberal-press support now gurgling around her, I predict it's going to be a no-brainer.