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Wieland files complaint against Click

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – At Wednesday night’s Joint Committee on Education hearing of University of Missouri officials, Sen. Paul Wieland, R-Imperial, filed a formal complaint against Prof. Melissa Click for her role in two of the Concerned Student 1950 protests at the university last fall.

While Interim System President Mike Middleton and Interim Chancellor Hank Foley acknowledged that an investigation on the matter was nearing its end, Wieland wanted to ensure that action would be taken. Filing a complaint begins the investigation process anew, and he said he lacks all trust for the system given how slowly it has handled repeated calls by members of the General Assembly to fire Click.

Rep. Paul Wieland, R-Imperial
Rep. Paul Wieland, R-Imperial

“My impression with this whole university thing is they continue to stonewall and not give us anything,” Wieland said. “I wanted to have a complaint on record because I don’t want them coming back to the Legislature two or three months from now and say, ‘We’re working on it, but nobody filed a complaint yet.’ It’s on the university now to investigate and to make a decision.”

Wieland added that the lack of action had become endemic within government institutions, and not only in the university.

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A copy of Wieland’s complaint.

“These bureaucracies get so big, and they have so many rules and regulations that common sense goes out the window,” he said. “So now, they’ve got this process that is so convoluted that who knows, it may take two years for something to get resolved.”

Wieland called the way the higher-ups at the university handled the protests and Click’s involvement in them a failure of the administration, but he also blamed students and faculty for needlessly bypassing the measures created to protect students. He noted that no students or teachers involved in the Concerned Student 1950 movement went through the process of filing a formal complaint to the university that they had experienced an act of discrimination. Instead of informing the university that they needed to investigate something, Wieland said, they just began to protest.

“There are so many things that were messed up and done incorrectly,” he said. “There are rules and procedures in place if the faculty, the staff and the students would follow the rules, we would never be in this position.

“They create this mountain of rules and regulations and nobody bothers to use it, except for when they’re trying to protect somebody. The bureaucracy is there. They use it for their advantage, and they ignore it when they don’t want to use it”