Butler said that he would not eat until Wolfe—the president of the University of Missouri System, which encompasses both the flagship campus in Columbia as well as smaller colleges across the state—resigned his position. A graduate student, Jonathan Butler, who was a veteran of the Ferguson protests, held a highly publicized hunger strike, saying he would not eat again until Mr. Wolfe was gone. The baby steps had led nowhere. As of 9 a.m. Monday, it has been a week since the 25-year-old University of Missouri graduate student has eaten, a hunger strike he began in an effort to oust university president Tim Wolfe and bring about change to what he and other campus activists see as a school administration that has been unacceptably unresponsive to a series of racist incidents on campus. “I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” Butler wrote in a letter announcing his protest. Butler’s act of protest, in concert with other activism coordinated by a group of students who called themselves Concerned Student 1950 — a nod to the year that black students were first admitted to the university — has seized the nation’s attention. On Saturday night, the black members of the school’s football team announced that they would not practice nor play until Wolfe was no longer the school’s president, and Butler had resumed eating. As the two resignations were announced, the Board of Curators unveiled a slate of new initiatives to address racial tensions on campus, including hiring a diversity, inclusion and equity officer for the entire University of Missouri system. Opposition to the administration reached a peak in the last week. In a statement he issued on Sunday, President Wolfe made it clear that he doesn’t intended to resign. When asked to confront and address the commonplace indignities minority students experience at his university during the homecoming parade—a celebration, not a crisis—Wolfe, the ostensible leader of that community, had no response. He leaned out his window (now keep in mind I run against traffic so his behavior was a blatant sign that something was about to happen). “What was starting to become clear was the frustration and anger was evident, and it was something that needed to be done that was immediate and substantial for us to heal,” Mr. Wolfe said at a news conference. The football program institutionally supporting its black players protesting along with Butler was probably this situation’s greatest possible escalator—it’s what made Butler’s protest into a topic of coverage for ESPN—but the players, too, weren’t acting alone. I have so many stories to share that it just doesn’t make sense to put them all here.
– Jonathan Butler can finally savor a good meal—and the taste of victory. The 25-year-old University of Missouri graduate student, who began a hunger strike on Nov. 2, posted a tweet Monday in the wake of school President Tim Wolfe's resignation: "The #MizzouHungerStrike is officially over!" Butler also addressed a buoyant crowd about their months of protests against racism and sexism on campus, the New York Times reports. "It should not have taken this much, and it is disgusting and vile that we find ourselves in the place that we do," Butler said. He became central to the campaign when he announced that he would consume no "food or nutritional sustenance" until Wolfe was out or Butler's "internal organs fail and my life is lost," the Missourian reported at the time. Butler found powerful allies when black players on the Missouri football team, and then the coaching staff, refused to play with Wolfe as president, Gawker reports. (Gawker notes that coach Gary Pinkel earns $4 million per year and Wolfe less than $500,000.) "It was really heartwarming and encouraging really because I didn’t think that I had people in my corner in the beginning," Butler told the Washington Post on Sunday. What drove Butler to take such drastic action, which he says gave him pain, shortness of breath, and wildly fluctuating body temperatures? "The campus climate here at the University of Missouri is an ugly one," says Butler. "I'm on a campus where people feel free to call people the n-word, where people feel free as recently as last week, to used [their] own feces to smear a swastika in a residential hall. Everything that glitters is not gold."