Why Missouri professor Melissa Click is Public Enemy No. 1 for conservatives right now

Melissa Click, a mass media professor at the University of Missouri, is seen pushing a student journalist's camera and asking "for some muscle" during demonstrations on campus on Nov. 9. (Youtube/Mark Schierbecker)

Sorry, “liberal media.” Today, you’ve been knocked from your perch atop the conservative enemies list. The new No. 1 is University of Missouri mass media professor Melissa Click.

Wait, it could be Melissa Glick or Elisa Click. Rush Limbaugh isn’t quite sure. But he’s very sure that she represents everything that’s wrong with this country.

Click is the bespectacled Mizzou faculty member who, in a now-viral video, can be seen ordering a student journalist to leave a public area of the state-run campus where other students protesting the university's handling of racial incidents had set up tents and held meetings. At one point, Click seems to suggest removing the journalist by force: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?” she asks. “I need some muscle over here.”

The full video is below:


  A journalist at the University of Missouri was challenged and physically blocked from filming protests at the school. The man was met with chants saying, "Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go!" (YouTube/Mark Schierbecker)
Click has been widely criticized for her actions, including notably by prominent members of the media. The Post's media blogger, Erik Wemple, said any staff that were involved in what happened should be fired. Colleagues were considering revoking her courtesy appointment to the university's journalism school Tuesday afternoon, according to the Columbia Missourian, with the school’s dean telling the student newspaper that Click clearly violated 1st Amendment principles.

Click is an assistant professor in the university’s communications department, which is separate from the journalism school, but she has a courtesy appointment that “allows members of one academic unit to serve on the graduate committees of students from other academic units,” the Missourian reported.

And for some conservatives, Click is now the ultimate bogeywoman — an “academic fascist” in the words of Fox News commentator Todd Starnes, who epitomizes the liberal, politically correct thought-policing that conservatives have long decried.

Limbaugh, despite some trouble with Click’s name, captured the sentiment on his radio program Tuesday:

They’re demanding safe spaces at places like Yale and at Mizzou and many other college campuses. What are safe spaces? Where they are not subjected to people that disagree and where they’re not subjected to symbols that hurt their feelings, and they’re not subjected to negative comments, and they’re not subjected to jokes that they don’t like.

In other words, they are shielded and protected from reality. They are basically — I don't know any word to describe them but cowards. They’re just scared to death of reality. They're scared to death of life. And they have been raised and educated to believe that it is legitimately possible to shield yourself from anything that’s upsetting.

And if somebody gets through that shield and succeeds in upsetting you, then they have to go. We've got to do something about them. We can't handle symbols that offend us. We can’t handle speech that bothers us.

Contrast Limbaugh's take with what Tim Tai, the student journalist on the receiving end of Click's directive to leave, said about the whole episode.