Why Do Parents Hate Paying College Tuition? Meet Missouri Professor Melissa Click

video via Mark Schierbecker

Thanks to a student’s YouTube video, University of Missouri Assistant Professor Melissa Click has become of symbol of what many parents dread when they send their children off to college. From her bullying of students to her doctoral thesis on the whiteness of Martha Stewart and her classes in “visual literacy,” she crystallizes the view that tuition dollars are spent on nonsense, and sometimes worse. As Missouri high school students prepare their applications this fall, they are looking at paying over $25,000 for a year on campus and non-residents will have to pay over $40,000.

When the president of MU and the chancellor of the main campus in Columbia stepped down Monday following protests that they were insensitive to racial issues, Click and other members of the faculty went to work enforcing their self-created ban on the media. Click was captured on video harassing student journalists and calling in “muscle”  to prevent one from documenting the tent city that the protesters (known as Concerned Student 1950 for the year MU first admitted black students) had erected on the campus quad, a public space.

That an assistant professor of “mass media” in the department of communication was unaware of the instantaneous power of YouTube and social media is another reason for parents to wonder about the wisdom of spending their money on Click...