This past fall a tiny number of Mizzou students protested over a poop swastika and two alleged racial slurs one delivered by a drunk man on campus, another delivered by a mysterious non-student in a red pick-up truck off campus. The best part of the protest, a fake hunger strike by a grad student whose dad is worth over $20 million. Unable to lead effectively, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel allowed his football team to go on strike in support of the protesters as well. Encouraged by mostly supportive media coverage -- Outkick was one of the only media outlets in the country to point out that there was no basis for these protests -- the student protesters were emboldened.
Despite the fact that Mizzou had elected a gay black man as student body president and embraced another gay black man who became the first football player to publicly announce he was gay, the protesters asserted that Mizzou was racist and not an inclusive campus. The protesting students, who took over the quad as their base, propounded an absurd list of demands that included the university president publicly announcing his white privilege.
Rather than stand up to the protesters and point out how illegitimate their protests were and asssert that they would be kicked out of school if they didn't immediately leave the quad and attend class, the school negotiated with the protesters. The result? The president and chancellor of the universities both resigned despite the fact that they'd done nothing wrong.
Now the university is paying the price for allowing these student protesters to set up shop on the quad and stage a fake protest. It was already announced that the school faced a yearly budget deficit of $32 million and projected an undergraduate enrollment decline of 1500. Now the official numbers are in for freshmen who have paid deposits to start school at Mizzou in the fall of 2016 and they're awful.
The #Mizzou enrollment numbers are brutal. Freshman deposits down by about 1,500.
— Eric Blumberg (@BlumbergOTB) May 2, 2016
Fall 2016 = 4,738
Fall 2015 = 6,208
Fall 2014 = 6,487
Freshmen enrollment has plummeted by nearly 25%, a decline of nearly 1500 students in the freshman class alone. Since many fewer freshmen students will also become sophomores and juniors and seniors, the financial impact of the Mizzou protest will cost the school hundreds of millions of dollars. Worst of all, the entire school's academics have likely suffered as these 4738 students are unlikely to be of the same caliber as the enrolling students in prior classes. Why's that? The students with the best college options are the least likely to enroll at Mizzou, meaning this isn't just a significantly smaller class, it's also likely to be much less academically strong.
These Mizzou protesters didn't just stage a fake protest, they nearly strangled the university to death.
The only comparable undergraduate enrollment decline in recent decades that I can find at any major college or university is Tulane University the year after Hurricane Katrina. Yes, this is real life. These protesting students had the same impact on the University of Missouri as Hurricane Katrina did on Tulane.
Remarkably, the only thing that we know happened on campus was a poopswastika and we still don't know who did it or what their motivation for doing it was. So a single poopswastika nearly crippled Mizzou.
Let this be a lesson to all colleges and universities who negotiate with student protesters -- the market is watching.
And negotiating with student protesters might just kill your school.
Well, at least ESPN didn't let Spike Lee on campus to film a 30 for 30 glorifying the bravery of the student protesters.
Wait, they did that?
Pray for Mizzou.
