University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe resigns
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The University of Missouri is a mess.
On the one hand, Missouri’s flagship university in September stripped clinical privileges from a physician who performed abortions in Columbia amid ongoing pressure from state lawmakers, a move that effectively stopped abortions in Columbia.
On the other hand, the university has seen a string of racially motivated incidents in recent months that have been met with passive response by UM System leaders.
The latter cost Tim Wolfe his job. Wolfe, the president of the UM System, announced his resignation on Monday. It comes under mounting pressure from students and faculty to vacate the system’s top post after clumsily handling the undercurrent of racial tension in Columbia.
His resignation reverses course from an announcement Sunday that he would stay on the job and try to work his way through the crisis.
It was impossible to see how Wolfe could continue. One student had been on a weeklong hunger strike, vowing not to eat again until Wolfe was gone. The Missouri football team said it would not practice or play another game until Wolfe stepped down, a move that head coach Gary Pinkel supported. The Missouri student government demanded Wolfe’s departure.
When Wolfe’s resignation finally came after a meeting with the UM System’s Board of Curators, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon welcomed Wolfe’s departure.
“Tim Wolfe’s resignation was a necessary step toward healing and reconciliation on the University of Missouri campus, and I appreciate his decision to do so,” said Nixon, himself a person in a leadership position who knows what it’s like to fumble his way through a racial crisis.
Black students in Columbia had made well-publicized complaints over the last year about racial incidents on campus, including hearing racial epithets and an instance of a swastika made of feces appearing on the wall of a student dormitory. It all occurred under the backdrop of ongoing racial tensions across Missouri, which reached its boiling point last year during widespread riots in Ferguson in response to a police officer’s killing a black man.
Wolfe seemed paralyzed by the incidents and calls for him to do something about them. It culminated in a video of Wolfe being confronted by students last weekend. He offered impossibly lame responses to pointed questions from angry students in Kansas City, putting his inability to deal with the crisis in front of the world to see.
Wolfe, a graduate of the University of Missouri, had been the UM System president since 2012. Formerly an IBM executive, Wolfe was the second corporate executive to take the helm of Missouri’s top higher-education system after former Sprint CEO Gary Forsee held the job.
