It's Sad That It Took Athletes to Make Changes at Mizzou

University of Missouri students protested for weeks over racist acts on campus. One student even went on a hunger strike. But the president of the university didn't resign until the football team got involved, and that's a big problem, writes Jessica Huseman for Slate. "At universities like Mizzou, where football plays an outsized role in campus life and contributes an outsized haul to the school’s coffers, there is a massive power differential between student-athletes and tuition-paying students," she writes.

While black football players who threatened to stop playing should be lauded for their actions, those actions "shouldn't have been needed," Huseman writes. Along the same lines, she notes that she's not calling for college athletes to have less power, she's calling for regular students to have more. "To be sure, the media needs to take our licks for that," she writes. "We deserve some blame for ignoring the well-reasoned voices of hundreds of Mizzou students until the great American tradition of college ball got into the mix. But so does Mizzou." Click for her full column. (More University of Missouri stories.)