2015-11-11

From Steve Sailer:

Here’s U. of Missouri Professor of Communication Melissa Click rounding up “some muscle” to throw out a reporter from some kind of Hate YT rally at Missouri.

But first, a perspective on the Department of Communications:

How many U. of Missouri football players are Communication majors?

And here’s her page on the U. of Missouri website:

Dr. Melissa A. Click earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs. Melissa is Vice-Chair of ICA’s Popular Communication Division and is Chair of the committee hosting the Console-ing Passions conference at the University of Missouri in April 2014.

Did I ever mention that a superfluity of punctuation in the service of bad puns is the secret handshake of postmodern academics?

Melissa’s excellence in the classroom has been recognized by the MU Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Women (Tribute to Women, 2004), the Intercollegiate Communication Association/iCom (Outstanding Professor, 2007), MU’s College of Arts & Sciences (Purple Chalk Award, 2007), Lamda Pi Eta (Honorary membership, 2008). In 2010, she received the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award. MU’s Association of Communication Graduate Students have recognized her as an “Outstanding Mentor” (2011) and as “Graduate Advisor of the Year” (2013).

Frequently Taught Courses:

Comm 4618/7618 – Television Program Analysis and Criticism

Comm 4638 – New Technologies and Communication

Comm 4975 – Visual Literacy

Comm 8110 – Intro to Graduate Studies

Comm 8150 – Seminar in Television Criticism

Comm 9530 – Topics in Mass Communication: Cultural Studies, Audiences, & Fans

Research Interests:

Media audiences and fans; Gender, race, class and sexuality in popular culture; Television analysis and criticism; Media literacy

Selected Publications:
Click, M. A., Lee, H., & Holladay, H. (2013). Making monsters: Lady Gaga, fan identification, and social media. Popular Music & Society, 6(3), 360-379.

Click, M. A., Aubrey, J. S., and Behm-Morawitz, E. (Eds.). (2010). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Behm-Morawitz, E., Click, M. A., and Aubrey, J. S. (2010). “Relating to Twilight: Fans’ Responses to Love and Romance in the Vampire Franchise.” In M. A. Click, J. S. Aubrey & E. Behm- Morawitz (Eds). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Aubrey, J. S., Walus, S., and Click, M. A. (2010). “Twilight and the Production of the 21 st Century Teen Idol.” In M. A. Click, J. S. Aubrey & E. Behm-Morawitz (Eds). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Aubrey, J. S ., Behm-Morawitz, E ., & Click, M. A. (2010). The romanticization of abstinence: Fan response to sexual restraint in the Twilight series. Transformative Works and Cultures, 5. doi:10.3983/twc.2010.0216.http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/216/184

Click, M. & Ridberg, R. (September 2010). Saving food: Finding the politics of the everyday in food preservation. Environmental Communication, 4 .

Aubrey, J.S., Click, M.A., Dougherty, D.S., Fine, M.A., Kramer, M.W., Meisenbach, R.J., Olson, L.N., & Smythe, M.J. (2008). “We do babies!”: The trials, tribulations, and triumphs of pregnancy and parenting in the academy. Women’s Studies in Communication, 31, 186-195.

Click, M. & Kramer, M. W. (2007, December). Reflections on a century of living: Gendered differences in popular songs. Popular Communication, 5, 241-262.

Click, M. (2007). Untidy: Fan response to the soiling of Martha Stewart’s spotless image. In J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, & C. L. Harrington (Eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, pp. 301-315. New York: New York University Press.

Melissa A. Click also writes for the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Antenna and the University of Texas at Austin’s Flow .

COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:

* What a useless woman. She wasted educational resources on herself that might have gone to another woman who studied something useful like nursing, physical therapy or accounting.

* Melissa’s CV is probably the sort of Japanese government had in mind when it cracked down on humanities departments in its universities.

* What exactly is the “perimeter” protecting and why are reporters being pushed away from it?

* This woman makes me ashamed of working in academia. Unfortunately, her ilk increasingly dominates all fields of study.

* She must be popular with the students who were selected into the university because of their diverse skin colors rather than for their academic merit.

Those students are flunking out of their normal university courses, but can pass her pop-culture classes. It’s likely that her lectures during the last week of October focus on Halloween costumes.

* Remember Melissa Click’s C.V. – and the tens of thousands of public university professors with C.V.’s just like hers – when the Left loses its shit about “government funding of religion.” The government is funding their religion to the tune of billions of dollars per year.

* If I was a Missouri taxpayer, I’d have some real questions about spending any money on this travesty. Missouri is very Republican, but I guess the Governor is a Democrat and can probably protect UM. It would probably make a great campaign issue for a Republican. Shades of Ronald Reagan and Berkeley.

* Universities like to have a prof or two teaching pop culture subjects as money-bait. They make the rich kids browsing the catalogue say, “Hey, I want to go to this school,” instead of somewhere else where they actually have to use their brain and work all the time. It works much like putting a soda machine in the hallway of a public high school. The sugary calories are bad for the students, but it makes them cough up extra money anyway. With college tuitions ever-climbing, universities resort to tactics like these to snag potential students from each other. Also, these profs teach the athletes if the grades of the latter start to sag.

* Low-hanging fruit right now for Trump would be to use this idiocy (and her CV) as an argument for cutting federal money to universities. He could easily whip up a policy plank that a super-majority of voters would support. Just say you’ll cut all funding (including backing student loans) for social science and humanities majors, and use some of the money saved to increase funding on engineering, basic sciences, and medical research.

The humanities will survive. Elite schools will keep them for prestige reasons, and students from wealthy families can still study them.

* Why do many black people, when angry, often go into a sort of trance and start repeating themselves over and over like mental patients? The large threatening Black Guy they were using to try to intimidate the photographer is a good example of that, though I’ve mostly seen the phenomena from lower class and poor blacks.

“You lost this one bro. You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.You lost this one bro.

Is that a cultural thing, or a retarded prefrontal lobe issue? Sans brain damage, it certainly seems like a micro-aggression: repeat yourself, while getting louder, to indicate something physical is about to happen, to intimidate your target into submission. Primitive, but effective.

If it is a bona fide micro-aggression, apart from basic retardation, black college students should be alerted to this negative behavior, so they can work to replace it with a more productive behavior that relates better to modern civilization–which I will always presume is their ultimate aim, because I’m a good person.

That said… regarding the big black guy… what the hell is his major, I wonder? He must have an interesting story.

* The left is so easy to trigger now. For example yesterday at a family dinner my high IQ Jewish sister who was a debating champion in high school was almost brought to tears by my calmly laying out why the “wage gap” hardly exists, and that even if it did exists who cares as there is an argument for disincentivising women from working so that women pursue motherhood.

She’s much smarter than I am, but I easily beat her in that debate, and she was almost crying. It was great.

* When I went to high school, a pre-fight ritual for African Americans evolved: they would stand offset in front of each other, right shoulder facing right shoulder, and rotate like that in a circle while daring the each other to repeat some insult. They’d gradually raise their voices, and then one would finally shove the other, and the fight would be on.

* Problem is, Trump never endorses any position that doesn’t have the Family Feud survey-says high approval rating or Q Score. Copious federal welfare for state uni’s so that your idiot children can hold up meaningless diploma papers is a very popular policy. He’s on sturdier ground just restricting the number of illegals added to the Medicare moocher pool, which is on track to sink the whole country long before campus retardism is in even a weakened condition.

* Yes, revoking the sanctified status of student loans would make for both an excellent “left-liberal” wedge maneuver and the accelerant to restore market reality back to the youth country-club, uh, “higher education” sector. The libs want it to apply to outstanding debt as well, which is the proverbial rub, but the imminent fiasco might be not only worth the outcome but necessary. Colleges not organized to add value via training, on balance, don’t deserve preservation. Also cancel all of the G.I. Bill mutations and Pell grants.

* It’s hard to watch stuff like that and at least feel somewhat sympathetic towards fascism. I know: horseshoe theory and all that but how can we fight this growing cancer without resorting to illiberal means?

* Maybe the reason for the protests is basically simple. The black students admitted to the University are not as qualified as the non whites. They then are self conscious about taking remedial courses or being in invented degree programs. Hence they see themselves as left out of mainstream campus life.

* Asians for example seem do be doing just fine. Not only are they as successful economically as whites, but because their crime rates are low they don’t attract excess scrutiny from shopkeepers or the police while they are going about their day to day business. OTOH, although it’s very risky to say so in public, everybody knows that a highly disproportionate percentage of the black population consists of low achieving fuckups, and so blacks in general tend to get treated that way. This is a burden that blacks who aren’t low achieving fuckups — which I’m willing to concede is probably an absolute majority — are forced to bear, and yes, it’s unfair.

But what’s the solution? Whining about “white privilege” might bring you some emotional solace, but it isn’t actually going to improve black behavior. And there is always the risk that white people might wise up and tell you to piss off. Then what? If you have a solution please share it!

* So let me understand what’s happening here.

-A group of students organize themselves based on their ethnicity. They protest for preferential hiring and other preferential treatment for their ethnicity, including a de facto veto on what is taught at the school:

“This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board composed of students, staff and faculty of color.”

– This group of protesting students picks out one specific ethnic group for demonization, citing it as the cause of most societal problems.

– To have their demands met, they mass in large groups and use intimidation and violence to silence opponents and the press. (How else to describe calling for “muscle” against a reporter?)

Doesn’t this fit the definition of fascism?

* Liberals spend so much of their time obsessing over the non-existent KKK, Halloween costumes, an ethnic joke somebody told 20 years ago, the fact that some guy with racialist beliefs sent money to this or that Republican candidate, but they are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the insanity displayed in that video. In fact NBC Nightly News did a perfectly straight story last night about “racial tensions” on the Missouri campus, including footage of some black students wailing in joy over the President’s resignation. Never mind that all of this stuff is, like, 100% fake.

My point: You can be as crazy and shrill and as psychologically imbalanced as you like. It’s a free country. You can blog to your hearts desire about “white privilege” or whatever. But these creeps got the President and the Chancellor of a major University to quit, in part by thuggish violence. They draw 6 figure salaries at taxpayer expense (and get cushy jobs for their lesbian partners in some cases) and they have access to the minds of impressionable young people, usually by required diversity brainwashing courses.

* All I could think of, watching this very brave cameraman “stand his ground,” was the frightening movie I saw in 6th grade called, “The Lottery.” I felt like he was so close to being hit with something, or by someone…or the mob would lose it & beat him to death like the Taliban.

Jeez, these students at U.M are stupid!…their faces will go down in recorded history infamy especially since they “shouted down” a young man of color, technically! Up shot: Republican candidates will appeal to even more frightened people (including the massive Asian demographic) across USA, in addition to the young people stuck on this god-forsaken campus after they see this video. What a bunch of losers, including the prof – I always thought Women’s Studies was bogus. Just disgusting (probably expected) that they don’t even understand/respect The Constitution. U. of M. will not recover from this. Sounds like Missouri is a crummy state you DON’T want your kid going to college in. Too many tornadoes for me!

* It speaks well of the Black students who, while lacking the smarts to do real college work, are at least aware, if only dimly in the back their minds, that they’re in over their heads.

But it speaks poorly of them that they give expression to this awareness of theirs in the form of resentment and blaming of others.

* I took a couple of those “pop culture” type classes in grad school. I needed the credits and, hey, they were available. I didn’t fool myself that I was learning anything useful — it was purely for entertainment. You got to sit in class and watch movies! Then the professor would later explain how everything about the movie was racist and sexist and blah blah blah, but you could pretty much ignore that; reading the introduction to the course textbook basically told you everything you needed to know to regurgitate this crap to the professor’s satisfaction.

The “work” was laughably easy. You had to write papers, but like you said, you could pretty much churn this stuff out in your sleep. All I had to do was sprinkle it with Marxist buzzwords and somehow link my thesis to “proof” that all straight white male Republicans were evil, and — voila! — instant “A,” every time. I think I wrote all of my “papers” for those classes in about 30 minutes the night before they were due, and nobody was the wiser.

Basically, you could fire at least two-thirds of the staff of most modern universities and the quality of the education wouldn’t suffer one bit. Heck, it might even improve. I keep wondering when some Republican governors looking to save money are going to figure this out.

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