The 2015 protests that rocked the University of Missouri campus and eventually led to the ouster of the school’s president “has been a disaster for the university.” That’s the conclusion of the NY Times which published a story yesterday on declining enrollment at Mizzou.

Before the protests, the university, fondly known as Mizzou, was experiencing steady growth and building new dormitories. Now, with budget cuts due to lost tuition and a decline in state funding, the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting more than 400 positions, including those of some nontenured faculty members, through layoffs and by leaving open jobs unfilled…

Tyler Morris, a white student from St. Louis, said he was afraid of being stereotyped as a bigot if he went to Missouri. So he decided to go to Missouri Valley College, “just down the road” in Marshall.

“The discrimination wasn’t against white people, but I didn’t want to be that person who I guess was stereotyped because I was white,” he said.

The Times’ account of what happened at Mizzou is fairly good, though the description of one of the student grievances was a bit anodyne. “This was followed by the failure of the university president, Timothy M. Wolfe, to get out of his car to speak with demonstrators during the homecoming parade in October, drawing accusations of indifference,” the Times reports.

Actually, what happened was that a group of about a dozen black students got in front of the car carrying Mr. Wolfe through the parade and began hectoring him and the audience with a bullhorn. When the car tried to slowly move around the protesters, Jonathan Butler put his rear end on the hood. Thereafter, Butler claimed a protester had been hit by a car:

https://twitter.com/_JonathanButler/status/653938486471467012

This became one of the group’s main points of outrage and one of the items mentioned in their list of demands. That oversight aside, the NY Times does mention the infamous video of Professor Melissa Click calling for “muscle” to eject a student reporter.

The protests at Mizzou and the resignation of the college president were widely celebrated as a success at the time, but things haven’t worked out well for the school which is now renting out empty dorm rooms for events like the upcoming solar eclipse. It turns out students aren’t eager to attend a school best known for, as the Times puts it, “a hair-trigger protest culture lacking any adult control.”