To think Melissa Click once taught some of the young minds in America attending college to wrestle with higher ideas. In a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the former Communications professor fired from University of Missouri for intimidating a journalist said she wasn’t fired for her ideology that was contradictory to her employer, but because she is white and a woman. As Click explains, she was there at the protests last year lending her shrill voice to the plight of black students on campus and then she was targeted. “This is all about racial politics,” Click said. “I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target.”

If this is the kind of thing people will stay after a career in higher education, you’re better off working at a fast-food restaurant, $15-an-hour wage or no. Reason Magazine’s Robby Soave followed Click’s logic through her interview, despite the jumps, fits and starts. First, Click essentially says she was discriminated against because she was white. But don’t worry. Black people love her, she said at one point in the interview. Furthermore, she was so concerned about equality and civil rights that she was at the protest calling for muscle to deny the First Amendment rights of another student. Finally, Click says that she wasn’t in charge; other adults were behaving just as badly at the protest, she alleges. But as a professor, she is an example. Despite all her contradictory statements and counter allegations, the fact remains that Click was fired because she, a communications professor, intimidated a student practicing journalism. No amount of post-modern moralizing can unclick that life decision.