University of Missouri football players step up, university president steps down

Just finished listening to a remarkable press conference with Mack Rhoades, Athletic Director, and Gary Kinkel, football coach, at the University of Missouri on ESPN. Both supported the refusal of the university’s football team to play in this weekend’s game with BYU as an expression of solidarity with the student hunger striker Jonathan Butler. Butler, along with other students and faculty, who had been protesting racial injustice and other incidents on campus, had called earlier to no avail for university president, Timothy M. Wolfe, who had become a cause of and obstacle to resolving racial and other tensions on campus, to step down. But it appears that entrance of the football players in this struggle that had gained broad support across the campus and was a continuation of wider process of struggle going back to Fergurson, turned into a tipping point (and not only because of the money lost – 1 millions bucks – if this weekend’s game was forfeited) forcing Wolfe to do today what up to now he had resisted: resign as president.