Melissa Click has quietly gone back to teaching after her embarrassing tiff with a journalist last year. The Seattle Times reported on Saturday that Click was hired this summer as a non-tenture-track professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University.
In February 2015, University of Missouri Professor Melissa Click was fired, in part over a viral video posted on November 9, 2015 that shows Click requesting “some muscle” to chase an ESPN freelance photojournalist, Tim Tai, away from a protest of campus racism. Click grabbed Tai’s camera and shouted, “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?”
It later emerged that Click had also had a confrontational run-in with police in October 2015 during a student demonstration at a homecoming parade.
Click apologized for her actions at the time, saying of the video, “When I watch it, I see someone dealing with ah high-stress situation who gets flustered. I see a moment where i feel like I’m not representing my best self, and I see somebody who’s trying to do her best to help marginalized students.”
Click’s story was also, significantly, a distraction from the protests themselves, which were designed to make the student body, the administration, and the public aware of racist and homophobic incidents on campus that had been ongoing since at least 2010.
In an April interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Click claimed that her firing was “all about racial politics,” and that as a “white lady” she’d been an “easy target.”