Douglas Murray: Social Justice Warriors Are Bad for a University’s Bottom Line

Writing for the Spectator this week, commentator Douglas Murray argued that social justice warriors are bad for university’s bottom line.

Murray referenced the 2015 protests at the University of Missouri, which has had a significant impact on the university’s enrollment. The protests surrounded the alleged mishandling of specific racial incident on campus. National media covered the story of professor Melissa Click, who infamously called to have a student journalist physically removed after he began documenting the protests with his camera.

It is now three years since the University of Missouri underwent a prominent bout of SJW-itis. On that occasion various students at the university demanded that the college President should resign, acknowledge his ‘white male privilege’ and henceforth organise both faculty and staff along strictly racialist lines. Instead of telling these students who the grown-ups were, and where to go, the university authorities repeatedly bowed to radical student pressure. During the ensuing protests, reporters were harassed by students and university employees. And in an incident that was soon seen around the world, assistant professor, Melissa Click memorably called for ‘some muscle over here’ to help her physically eject a reporter who was trying to report on the student and faculty temper-tantrum.

After the University of Missouri protests, the institution began to see a decline in enrollment. The university was forced to close a total of seven dorm buildings.

Clearly after seeing these scenes a lot of parents in the state of Missouri decided that it wasn’t worth re-mortgaging the house in order to make their children dumber. And so over the last two years the University of Missouri lost a third of its freshmen. It has had to shut down a number of dorms and has already had to lay off dozens of employees, with more redundancies likely to come. It turned out that the University of Missouri did indeed need some muscle, and that it was required to carry out the belongings of staff they were forced to let go.

You can read the rest of Murray’s column here.