The University of Missouri Columbia (Mizzou) has witnessed a steep drop in enrollment in this year's class, leading the university to layoffs and budget cuts.

According to the Columbia Tribune:

The University of Missouri is unlikely to see a rebound in freshman enrollment in the fall, which means tuition revenue will not be the source of money to cover the latest round of state budget cuts.

A decline of more than 20 percent in this year's incoming class forced layoffs, a hiring freeze and a 5 percent cut in general fund budgets across the Columbia campus. Overall enrollment, down 6 percent from the 2015-16 academic year, already was expected to decline further as the smaller freshman class moves toward graduation.

Gov. Eric Greitens on Monday ordered $146.4 million in new withholdings from state spending, including almost $20 million earmarked for MU. Provost Garnett Stokes and MU Faculty Council Chairman Ben Trachtenberg discussed how to deal with the new cuts during a Thursday council meeting.

Between budget cuts and the drop in enrollment, there is a $20-million deficit at Mizzou.

The situation is so bad that Mizzou had to shut down three dorms. 

With the usual academic myopia, the university is calling for the creation of a commission to determine exactly why enrollment is down and how to make up the shortfall.

Apparently, it does not occur to the academics at Mizzou that parents are afraid to send their children to a school where professors threaten to beat up students.  Remember Melissa "I need some muscle over here" Click?  Not only did she try to get students to beat up inconvenient student-journalists, but she was also caught on tape screaming like a maniac at a police officer.  The university did fire her, but she wound up getting a job at Gonzaga University, probably on a recommendation by Mizzou.

It also didn't help that Mizzou has ties to baby butchers Planned Parenthood, or that the university was the subject of a unionizing effort for adjuncts, the worker drones of academia, or that the school tabled health benefits for said adjuncts.

But the biggest problem of all was the racial terrorism of the 2015 race rampage season.

According tp Lakeexpo.com:

Barbara Rupp, Mizzou's director of admissions, sees cause for concern. ...

But Rupp also acknowledges that some of the projected declines are "undoubtedly part of the aftermath of last fall.

In particular, recruiters working in the Chicago area are more frequently hearing the same concerns from prospective students, she said.

Those concerns are tied to the growing perception of Mizzou as a national symbol for strained race relations.

"Because those students are geographically removed from the campus, they don't really have a sense of what's going on and they are relying on what they are seeing and hearing in the media," Rupp said. "And it's not particularly positive."

According to the university's data, applications from out-of-state student have seen some of the sharpest declines. Among those students, deposits toward tuition are down 25 percent since last year.

But there are also barriers toward luring students from within Missouri, perhaps especially in rural areas[.]

Outside the media, academia is the only business in the world that can openly sneer at the customers and subvert their wishes and still expect to prosper.  The gross mishandling of the bogus racial incidents (and there is every reason to believe that the racial incidents that provoked these demonstrations were bogus) by school officials – and the unwillingness to put down bullying and thug tactics by student protesters – has rightly come back to haunt the Columbia campus.

Any decent parent would be crazy to send his child to such an unsafe and fascistic environment as Mizzou.

Read Tim's blog at The Aviary www.tbirdnow.mee.nu.