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A man in a gold mesh jacket and matching sneakers walked in and made the rounds. He embraced a couple. He took a photo with the mayor of Kansas City. He floated a film recommendation: a recent documentary featuring a prominent Mizzou donor. Then, almost as quickly as he had arrived at the University of Missouri system’s suite, Mun Y. Choi, the system president and flagship chancellor, was off again.
“He is everywhere,” gushed State Rep. Bill Irwin, a Republican, wearing a tiger tail at a tailgate earlier that day. “He shows up at so many events, and he has such a phenomenal memory to go back, and he remembers who you are, your name, and the things you’ve done.”
Choi had arrived in Missouri eight years prior with a mandate to turn around the University of Missouri’s misfortunes, which largely stemmed from a poor leadership response to racial-justice protests on the Columbia campus. The system president and campus chancellor both resigned, negative headlines proliferated, and enrollment nosedived.
Today, donors, lawmakers, and board members say Mizzou is in the best shape it has ever been in. They credit Choi, hired as the system president and now also the leader of the Mizzou flagship, with that success. The day before the Kansas game, the Missouri system board announced it was extending Choi’s contract, set to expire in 2028, for another three years.
Mizzou is faring very well so far during the second Trump administration — an era defined by aggressive scrutiny of higher education at the federal and state level. That’s because Choi is good at staying out of trouble.
He pays close attention to the shifting political winds in an increasingly conservative region that could influence, or cost him, his job. As his colleagues in college leadership have spoken out on controversies of the moment, he has mostly stayed silent.
“There are issues that I feel very passionate about, as Mun Choi, an individual,” he said, over poke and gyoza at a Japanese restaurant in Columbia. “But I can’t let that influence the decisions that I make on behalf of the university.”
Some on the campus see this strategy as a cop-out — or even a betrayal. Choi emigrated from South Korea at age 9 and fulfilled an American dream that could now be slipping out of reach for people in similar circumstances amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on legal immigration.
It’s a trade-off that Choi is willing to make. And it appears to be paying off for the University of Missouri.
“The people who were leading the university led it off the rails, so to speak,” said A. Cooper Drury, then chair of the political science department and now dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, in a recent interview.
That fall, a series of racist campus incidents — occurring in the shadow of the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, in nearby Ferguson — led Black students at Mizzou to protest what they saw as a hostile climate for people of color and an indifferent attitude from administrators. The activists formed a group called Concerned Student 1950, a reference to the year the first Black student was admitted. They focused their frustrations on Timothy M. Wolfe, the system president at the time.
In October, students blocked Wolfe’s car in the homecoming parade, and the president refused to engage with them. Concerned Student 1950 released a list of demands targeted at increasing support for Black students, which Wolfe did not agree to. In early November, a graduate student began a hunger strike, promising to continue until the president resigned. Protesters set up an encampment, where a viral confrontation took place between a professor and a student journalist.
Todd P. Graves, now chair of the Missouri system’s Board of Curators, had a daughter at Mizzou at the time. He said that while the cultural problems at Mizzou may not have been worse than at any other university, “personal animosities” between the president and the Mizzou chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, “created a situation where this university paid in time and treasure and reputation for a long time.” Although Loftin was not the primary target of the Concerned Student 1950 movement, many on campus took issue with his management style and the decision to cancel graduate health-insurance subsidies at the last minute.
On November 7, 2015, members of the football team announced they would boycott athletics-related activities until Wolfe was gone. Two days later, Wolfe and Loftin both resigned.
On September 6, 2025, that turmoil felt very far away.
There are issues that I feel very passionate about, as Mun Choi, an individual. But I can’t let that influence the decisions that I make on behalf of the university.
The morning of the game against Kansas, Choi showed up at an SEC Nation taping in aviator sunglasses and took selfies with students. State universities with big football programs were increasingly popular with prospective students, and Mizzou was taking full advantage.
“Students are going to spend more time outside of the classroom than inside the classroom during their studies,” Choi told me. “They’re looking for a comprehensive experience, that total student experience that universities like ours provide — excellent education but great athletics and other extracurricular activities.”
Choi suggested at a gala the week of the Kansas game that perhaps Mizzou had been underselling its successes for too long.
This year, the university reported its highest-ever six-year graduation rate (76.6 percent), and in 2024, it achieved its highest first-year retention rate, 92.7 percent. The 2025 fiscal year saw Mizzou secure $535 million in research expenditures and $269 million in giving — both records — and the system receive an increase in its state appropriation for the sixth straight year.
“By all measures, Mizzou is back,” Choi said to a room full of donors and board members at the gala. “But you know why we’re back? Because we have your support. You never left us. And Missourians are taking notice.”
Mizzou bled enrollment and saw its fund raising drop. The system’s credit outlook was downgraded. Lawmakers cut the system’s funding.
Across the state, people felt embarrassed — either by the disorder on campus or the indifference to long-simmering problems with race. Prospective students went elsewhere, causing the freshman class to contract by a third over two years.
And the university, both at the system and the flagship level, was leaderless. As the board set out to hire a new system president, the path ahead was steep. The university needed someone who understood the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion and could communicate it broadly. It needed someone who was committed to improving relationships with skeptical taxpayers and Missouri politicians. And it needed someone who could craft a vision for the institution that the public would understand.
The job went to Choi, an engineer and provost of the University of Connecticut; he was announced as president on November 2, 2016, nearly a year after the Mizzou protests reached their apex. Choi took office the following March, overseeing the flagship in Columbia and campuses in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Rolla.
Almost immediately, the president imposed massive budget cuts across the four campuses to try to make up for declines in enrollment and state support, eliminating hundreds of jobs. But the university needed a longer-term strategy.
Choi wanted to make inroads with groups that had lost faith in the university, and so he and his team adopted classic political strategies. With the help of MU Extension, which has offices in all 114 counties, officials traveled across the state to talk with residents. Choi met with lawmakers and attended town halls and Rotary Club meetings, where people expressed anger about the “lack of leadership.”
It wasn’t just the protests that had frayed the contract between the university and the state: Missourians felt that the university had left them behind, said Marshall Stewart, then the vice chancellor for extension and engagement at Mizzou. In pursuit of a prestigious national brand, Stewart said, Mizzou had forgotten its land-grant mission.
“Their research was not connecting, the things that they maybe espoused in certain parts of the university just didn’t resonate well with Missourians,” Stewart, now the executive vice president of external engagement and chief of staff at Kansas State University, told me. “In a land-grant university, whether it be Missouri, Kansas, or anywhere else, your population is your biggest donor, because the state puts more money in than anybody else.”
Changing that perception would require administrators to explain how the university could help with, for instance, rural health, broadband expansion, and small-business development. “Once you get belief, enrollment comes,” Stewart said. “Philanthropy comes. All these other pieces come.”
When people brought up the 2015 protests and resignations, “it could have been easy for me to say, ‘Well, I wasn’t here for that,’” Choi said. “But now I am the person. So that’s the wrong approach. The right approach is, I took the input from colleagues at the university to listen, to do more listening than talking during those meetings, and not to give excuses, not to be defensive, but to say, ‘We can do better.’”
Graves, the board chair, said that for decades he watched university presidents deal with the Missouri legislature — which has been controlled by Republicans since 2003 — as though it were some “strange beast” to be interacted with “as infrequently as possible.”
But Choi, he said, “just goes down there and wraps his arms around it.”
Over time, circumstances at Mizzou improved. Applications and enrollment crept back up.
In 2020, when the Mizzou chancellor left to take the top post at the University of Central Florida, the Missouri system board appointed Choi as interim chancellor. A month later, the curators voted to merge the flagship chancellor and system president roles and appoint Choi to both.
Today, board members, lawmakers, and donors say Choi’s high-touch style makes a real difference in maintaining relations. He’s talented at remembering names and personal details and is present for many events, from football games to funerals.
“When you text or call, he responds in 30 minutes,” said State Rep. Kent Haden, a Republican representing a district in the Columbia area. “I don’t know when that man sleeps.”
In a land-grant university, your population is your biggest donor, because the state puts more money in than anybody else.
Haden and about a dozen other state legislators attended a groundbreaking ceremony for two new additions to the university’s research reactor, which creates radioisotopes used in cancer-fighting drugs. The General Assembly had recently allocated $50 million to Mizzou for its second nuclear reactor, which is slated to cost more than $1 billion and take eight to 10 years to construct.
State Rep. Kathy Steinhoff, a Democrat who represents Columbia, said she toured the reactor twice before Choi joined and explained what it did in plain speech. Being able to understand its practical applications, Steinhoff said, helped secure the state’s support.
“I could not believe the command that he had of all of the statistics and data and being able to answer the questions,” Steinhoff said. “To me, it felt just like somebody who was an expert in that field.” (Choi’s expertise is in mechanical and aerospace engineering, not nuclear science.)
State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Republican who represents a rural area north of Columbia and sits on the subcommittee on education appropriations, said Choi has been fiscally responsible.
“We’ve seen those monies not go into a progressive wish list of things, but go into funding things that are with the mission of the university,” Lewis said. “He stays in his lane.”
At the recent gala, Bill Schulz, an alum and donor, said Choi understands education is a business — complimentary, in this case, but also something higher-ed observers often say critically.
“I fear the day he is gone,” Schulz said. “We may hire an educator, and I fear that would be the worst thing for us.”
In his bid to move the University of Missouri into a higher research echelon, Choi has at times rankled faculty with attempts to redefine their productivity. In 2022, an initiative called Mizzou Forward committed $500 million toward performance-based raises for employees. Many were concerned about how performance would be measured. Around the same time, a systemwide policy allowing chancellors to designate criteria for reducing tenured faculty members’ salaries by up to 25 percent also alarmed the faculty, but Choi refused to rescind it.
In 2022, the Faculty Council polled faculty members in a review of Choi’s performance. Only 26 percent supported keeping him as the chancellor.
Choi responded by once again tapping the politician’s playbook, increasing face time with faculty members. In a 2024 review, 64 percent of survey takers said they wanted to keep him.
Carolyn Orbann, the chair of the Faculty Council and a teaching professor in the College of Health Sciences, said faculty members also indicated in the 2024 survey that communication issues with external stakeholders — such as lawmakers, members of the general population, and alumni — had improved significantly. The Faculty Council will administer another survey in 2026.
This year, faculty members at Mizzou haven’t faced drastic cuts to their research funding like their colleagues at other campuses. Although the federal government has canceled some grants for projects at Mizzou, especially related to sustainability and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Choi emphasized that the university is beginning to see an acceleration in new grants awarded. All four system campuses broke records for research spending this year.
“I think we’re going to be OK,” Choi said. “And we’ve not had any projects that were cut because we were targeted by the administration through an investigation.”
He was referring here to the civil-rights investigations that have disrupted several of Mizzou’s peers in the Association of American Universities. The Trump administration has accused these institutions of abiding antisemitism, discriminating against cisgender women, and staying committed to diversity-related programs, in violation of the civil-rights laws Title VI and Title IX. To punish these universities, agencies have frozen and canceled grants, levied fines, and made the institutions commit to policy changes.
Mizzou preempted a potential battering from state and federal officials by turning away early from DEI programs, reversing the substantial commitments and investments it made nearly a decade ago.
In 2023, the system scrapped diversity statements from its job applications. In 2024, Mizzou dissolved its diversity office, eliminated the position of vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity, and reassigned staff members. In a call with reporters last year, Choi said that the university was adopting a race-neutral approach to DEI, acknowledging the pressures on public universities as states pass anti-DEI laws.
Missouri doesn’t have an anti-DEI law, although 15 bills have been introduced since 2023, according to The Chronicle’s tracker. In February, long after Mizzou had made its changes, the governor of Missouri signed an executive order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across state agencies.
In this way, too, 2015 can seem unrecognizable. Student activists pushed for Mizzou to increase the percentage of Black faculty members from 2.8 percent to 10 percent by the 2017-18 academic year, and the next academic year MU announced plans — with a financial commitment — to double the percentage of faculty of color in four years.
Choi was on board with these efforts: The year he entered office, 2017, was “the best year Mizzou has had in terms of diversity hiring in the recent past,” he told a Missouri House committee in 2018.
Mizzou has diversified its faculty, but change has been slow. In 2016, 7.4 percent of full-time ranked faculty members were from underrepresented backgrounds, while in 2024, 10.1 percent of faculty members were. In 2024, 3.7 percent of full-time ranked professors were Black, up from 3 percent in 2016.
Meanwhile, the share of Black, degree-seeking, full-time undergraduate students at Mizzou has fallen significantly, from 7.8 percent in the fall of 2016 to 4.5 percent in the fall of 2025. The percentages of students who are white, Hispanic, two or more races, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, or Asian have all gone up.
Choi pointed out that the decline in the percentage of Black students had slowed, and he hoped to see an increase beginning next year. But it wasn’t a goal that Mizzou could actively work toward, Choi acknowledged, because it was no longer legal in the United States to consider race in admissions decisions.
In August, Mizzou canceled a “Black 2 Class” block party that the Legion of Black Collegians, the university’s Black student government, was planning to host for the new academic year. In a statement replying to an Instagram post the Legion had made, Choi said the name suggested the event would exclude people based on race. A similar flare-up happened last year, when Mizzou changed the name of a Legion-hosted barbecue from “Welcome Black” to “Welcome Black and Gold,” a reference to the Mizzou colors.
A statement from the Legion’s Instagram account said there had been a recent uptick in racist incidents and called on the university to organize a town hall, condemn racial harassment, and issue a reminder of the university’s antidiscrimination policies. The university has disputed the assertion that there are more racist incidents against Black students.
“This is not the first time that I’ve responded to groups that have approached me or the university with a list of demands,” Choi said. “And my response has been, ‘We don’t respond to demands, but we will have conversations with you about your concerns.’ That’s what we did.”
Amaya Morgan, the Legion’s president, said Black students don’t feel safe in certain campus spaces and that Choi has seemed unwilling to combat campus racism. She said she has never seen those meetings lead to any real action.
“He has a lot of purposeful blindness … so that he can keep his relationships with politicians in Jeff City and other places,” Morgan said, referring to the state capital, Jefferson City. “I really want him to understand that students’ lives and their equity [are] being hindered because of the things he fails to do.”
He has a lot of purposeful blindness … so that he can keep his relationships with politicians in Jeff City and other places.
Mizzou’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Young Democratic Socialists of America have a different, but related, set of frustrations with Choi, whom they accuse of having a permissive approach to student protest until it threatens the university’s bottom line. For months, the groups would collaborate on weekly protests against the war in Gaza, usually without a hitch. Leaders said they did their best to accommodate constraints placed on how they protested by the university.
“It’s all out the window once they don’t get what they want exactly,” said Isleen Atallah, a recent graduate and former president of Mizzou SJP.
In August, the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued Choi on behalf of Mizzou SJP for not permitting the group to participate in the 2024 homecoming parade, on safety grounds; the suit sought to compel Mizzou to allow the student group to participate in this year’s homecoming, for which it was also issued a denial.
In September, a judge ruled that Mizzou had to allow the SJP chapter to join the homecoming parade, observing that there was a good chance excluding the group would violate the First Amendment.
In 2017, a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion offerings was the order of the day. Today, it pays to shun DEI and commit to neutrality.
Among some students, there’s a sense that Choi is casting aside the interests of marginalized students — a group to which he would have belonged — in favor of those of people in power: lawmakers, board members, donors, and alumni, most of whom are white.
A core complaint of groups like the Young Democratic Socialists of America and Students for Justice in Palestine has been Choi’s silence on the scary climate for immigrant students.
“There’s a lack of empathy from him being an immigrant himself that, frankly, goes beyond what I would have assumed,” said Ian De Smet, a recent graduate and former co-chair of the YDSA. “If anything, I thought that would be like the one thing that he would actually try to care about.”
At a cafe in Columbia, De Smet, who is Chilean, and Atallah, who is Palestinian, agreed Choi had an obligation as an immigrant to speak out on immigration.
I asked Choi about that.
“There’s a lot that I want to say as a private citizen,” he said in his office. “My role doesn’t prevent me, but I know that what I say and what I convey will be reflected on the institution.”
Choi said he feels less pressure today from members of the community to speak out on national and global events than in the past. Even five years ago, Choi said, alumni, donors, and students would write to him to ask why he wasn’t commenting on something, and he’d have to reply that it was because the issue didn’t affect the university directly.
A few days after the Mizzou game, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a speaking event at Utah Valley University. Choi didn’t comment on it but did send a message to employees reminding them to practice discretion while expressing their personal opinions. Other institutions had suspended or fired employees for posts they had made that were perceived to be celebrating Kirk’s death.
A few weeks after that, a student at nearby Stephens College was shot and killed in downtown Columbia after a man fired into a crowd, injuring several others. Choi demanded the mayor come up with an immediate plan for dealing with crime in the city or he would raise the issue to the governor. He later sent his “call to action” to the campus, with a list of measures for local officials to take.
“The shooting incident early Saturday morning is just another example of the rampant crime problem that we are witnessing on a daily basis,” Choi wrote on September 28. “Many community members and business leaders have shared these concerns with me and city leadership. It’s time to act.”
The messaging — classic Choi, with its expectation of immediate action, or else — caused a flicker of conflict with the mayor. That was put out later when the two sent a letter to campus laying out a list of crime-fighting action items. Some thought it was brazen of Choi to put so much pressure on local officials. But the president was exercising the sole exception to his personal practice of neutrality: He could speak out on topics that directly affected the university.
“We can talk a good game about what we care about, what we’re going to defend, but protecting the students on campus and our constituents is of primary importance for me,” Choi said in an interview weeks before the downtown shooting. “If we don’t have a campus that is free of violence or free of retribution, then it’s not a healthy place to learn or to do research.”
Against Kansas, Mizzou surged ahead in the second half. As it became clear the Tigers were going to win, security staff lined up in front of the stands to deter fans from storming the field and leaving Mizzou responsible for a $500,000 fine from the Southeastern Conference. Mizzou won 42 to 31. (No one rushed the field.)
“This is the greatest game I think I’ve ever seen,” a 98-year-old former curator and alum, Fred Hall, observed from the university system’s suite.
We can talk a good game about what we care about, what we’re going to defend, but protecting the students on campus and our constituents is of primary importance for me.
Choi, a high-school football player, didn’t return to the suite that day, but there was no real urgency. The Tigers would be at home for the next four games. And Choi now had six years left in his contract. He has said that he plans to retire in Missouri, not jump ship.
A few weeks later, Mizzou’s fall enrollment numbers came out — 23,760 full-time, degree-seeking undergraduate students. It was the largest student body since the fall of 2016, before the fallout of the 2015 protests fully registered. No wonder tickets to the Kansas game were so hard to come by.
Here was what restraint had bought Mun Choi: not football success, at least not directly, but a happy board, donor base, and legislature; a faculty that was mostly bought into the vision; and an expanding student body.
“Everyone feels like we’ve got a winning hand, and we’ve been playing a winning hand for the last several years,” Graves, the board chair, said. “They’re happy with the university, therefore they’re happy with the president, and if he knows them personally, or he’s interacted with them, they believe that he made a special point to know them and interact with them.”
Sure, he can’t please everyone. He’s not trying to.
