Unless I’ve misunderstood this, they’re not voting to fire her. They can’t do that; she’s a member of MU’s communications department, not the journalism school. She has a “courtesy appointment” to the J-school, though, which they’re now debating whether to revoke in light of her taking a steamy dump on the First Amendment in yesterday’s protest video gone viral.

Mark my words: Before this is over, despite inciting a mob of SJWs to deny a reporter’s rights and then all but laughing about it on camera, safe-space enforcer Melissa Click will pose as every inch the persecuted free-speech martyr herself. Gabe Malor expects her to file an epic lawsuit if/when she gets booted from the J-school or, if MU really cracks down, loses her faculty position altogether, although I’d guess the risk of that is low. In today’s campus culture, even an untenured professor would probably have to literally murder someone before losing her job for engaging in “direct action” for The Cause.

Kurpius and Esther Thorson, the journalism school’s associate dean for graduate studies, characterized Click’s actions as a clear violation of First Amendment rights. Kurpius said taking actions that might escalate a peaceful protest was “unwarranted.”…

An email vote was being conducted among doctoral faculty and members of the journalism school’s Promotion and Tenure Committee on Tuesday morning. A simple majority from the groups is needed to revoke a courtesy appointment, Thorson said. 

“It’s close,” Thorson said of the vote. “But we have some strong voices concerned about fairness (to Click).”…

“Faculty (and students) have a right to express their views, but they do NOT have the right to intimidate others,” O’Brien wrote in the email. “This has been an awful time for the university, but that in no way condones intimidation.”

By “fairness” I assume they mean procedural fairness, i.e. giving Click some sort of hearing to present her side before revoking the appointment. I hope they do. I’m dying to hear a call for “muscle” against reporters justified in the language of progressive Newspeak.

Go read Erik Wemple at WaPo, who wants not just Click fired but two other professors who stood by while a student photographer was getting shoved around for the crime of documenting something happening in public. Oh, by the way: Sean Davis of the Federalist did a little reporting himself today and makes a convincing case that one of the incidents that triggered the Mizzou protests in the first place, a swastika painted with feces in a student dorm, almost certainly never happened.

Multiple activists on Twitter pointed to [a] photo as proof that the incident occurred as reported, but a Google search for the same image shows that it has been floating around the Internet for nearly a year. A reddit thread from November of 2014 appears to contain the earliest publication of the photo in question, meaning that it most certainly does not constitute proof of the incident alleged to have occurred at Mizzou on October 24, 2015.

Maj. Brian Weimer, the public information officer for the Mizzou police department, told The Federalist that he also did not personally see the poop swastika that was reported to police…

Did the incident happen as reported, or did two university administrators resign over protests that were sparked by a hoax? And if the incident did happen as reported, a proposition for which no publicly available evidence currently exists, how did university administrators and law enforcement authorities confirm that the vandalism was driven by racial animosity, as opposed to being promulgated as a public relations stunt meant to tar the university for failing to provide an environment free of racist invective? It would not be the first time a public university fell victim to a high profile PR stunt that was later revealed to be a fabrication.

That makes this week a fitting bookend to the Ferguson protests, which were also based on a racist incident that ended up being nothing of the sort.

Here’s the state of academia while we wait for a decision on Click.

Update: A day later, here’s the let-me-keep-my-job apology.

JUST IN: Mizzou professor Melissa Click apologizes for bullying student journalist out of "safe space" pic.twitter.com/KrNVsL4S7W

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 10, 2015