Accountability — the University of Missouri seems short on it, but the rest of the state … not so much. Melissa Click, the Fifty Shades of Grey scholar who threatened a student journalist with “some muscle” when he dared tread on public property to report on a demonstration, will face assault charges. ABC’s St. Louis affiliate reports on the details:

The University of Missouri Communications Professor caught on video ordering student journalists to leave a public campus area to keep them from other students at the public university is now facing an assault charge in that incident.

The Allman Report has confirmed that MU Communication Professor Melissa Click has been charged with a class C, or 3rd degree assault, for her actions during the MU campus protests in November.

The Kansas City Star notes that this is a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of 15 days in jail:

A spokeswoman for the Columbia Prosecutor’s Office said Click was being charged with third degree assault, a class C misdemeanor that carries a possible 15-day jail sentence.

Click was caught on video calling for “some muscle” to remove a student reporter from an area on the university’s flagship campus where protesters had gathered. The protests eventually led to the resignation of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe and Mizzou Chancellor R. Bown Loftin. Click, however, remains as an assistant professor in the Department of Communications.

So … it’s not the crime of the century, clearly, but it is worth pursuing. Campus tyrants are not exactly rare finds, but substantive rebukes of their abuses could eventually limit their population, or at least force them to behave as though their publicly funded institutions serve a representative republic. Mizzou’s response, which consisted entirely of stripping Click of an honorific, fell miserably short of the level of disincentive needed pour encourager les autres.

State representative Caleb Jones put it best. “While the University of Missouri seems to have no accountability,” he told ABC, “the judicial system in Missouri does.” Jones and his colleagues need to work on the first half of that equation, no matter what the courts do with Click.