The College Fix

Of course, students protested it

Strange Donuts is having a strange week.

The local chain’s location near the University of Missouri is going out of business, and it has blamed declining student enrollment facilitated by a certain professor who called for “some muscle” to get rid of student journalists.

People who likely supported the November 2015 campus protests that made Melissa Click a household name have since taken to trashing the business on review websites. They even announced a “doughnut protest.”

“It’s been a lot of fun but there has been a correlation between the student population decline and our sales,” said the Wednesday post, which has since been deleted. It used a screenshot that featured Click threatening to use physical force to remove a student journalist covering the protests.

Commenters were not amused.

It’s not correct that “enrollment was predicted to decline,” however. Mizzou enrollment was projected to rise slowly but steadily before the protests.

Strange did have some supporters.

And because it’s Mizzou, students staged a protest against Strange Donuts to show that “blaming a reaction to racism on Mizzou’s campus (or anywhere) isn’t the problem with your low sales.” They went to a competing doughnut shop, Harold’s, to “celebrate Strange Donut’s PR nightmare/going out of business” in Columbia.

Owner Jason Bockman released an apology on the shop’s Facebook page Thursday afternoon after the damage had been done, saying he wasn’t trying to be “inflammatory or offensive” and it was a “poor representation of me and our brand.”

He told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he was “ashamed” of the posts, “which he meant to poke fun at Strange Donuts’ failure in Columbia rather than the enrollment decline that has followed the protests”:

“It was never my attention to offend anyone,” Bockman says. “I was hurt that I offended people.”

Read the Post-Dispatch story.

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