http://chronicle.com/article/How-Missouri-s-Deans-Plotted/234283
. . .so in addition to the many ways that Trump is complete off-base, it also has to be said that the Deans at U Missouri were after the Chancellor long before the racial tension came to a head.
This article is behind a pay wall (but should be accessible via libraries), but here are some key paragraphs:
How Missouri’s Deans Plotted to Get Rid of Their Chancellor
When R. Bowen Loftin announced his intention to resign as chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia this month, the decision was widely regarded as a surrender to student-led protests over race relations on the flagship campus. But Mr. Loftin’s downfall was also, if not exclusively, the culmination of a well-orchestrated coup led by nine deans who had worked for weeks to secure the ouster of a chancellor in whom they had lost confidence. Missouri’s deans describe Mr. Loftin’s tenure as a profile in autocratic leadership, where vindictiveness and ham-fisted decision-making were thinly masked by an affable and goofy public persona that won over students but never the university’s academic leaders.
. . .
It was soon after Mr. Loftin’s appointment, in 2014, that Missouri’s deans say they felt the first pangs of buyers’ remorse.At first, there were the little things, like the fact that the chancellor sometimes seemed more interested in his phone than in his colleagues. There was Mr. Loftin’s habit of calling the deans "essential middle management," a title that, while technically accurate, sounded like a disparaging dig.The deans cringed when the chancellor told them, "I can fire you," which he once said to the entire group and occasionally told the deans individually, according to their account. . .
. . .
The deans’ concerns, however, were less about the chancellor’s words and more about his approach to governing, which they called secretive and scattershot. They were blindsided, for example, by a controversial proposal to cut health-care subsidies for graduate students.
That decision was later reversed, but not before considerable turmoil on the campus. . .
. . .
Two weeks later, on October 9, the deans gathered in a boardroom at the university system offices for a meeting with Timothy M. Wolfe, who was then president."We indicated to President Wolfe that we believed our relationship with the chancellor could not be repaired and that he should be dismissed," the deans said.By this time, racial unrest was starting to bubble up on the flagship campus. . . Mr. Loftin had called the incident and others like it "totally unacceptable," but students criticized him for being insufficiently responsive.. . . In the deans’ view, the chancellor’s response was anemic, and it gave students and the public a glimpse at Mr. Loftin’s ineffectiveness. Racism is indeed a problem at Mizzou, the deans said, but the chancellor’s decisions on graduate-student benefits, including health-care coverage and reduced tuition stipends, had fomented the very resentment and distrust on which the protest movement fed.
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