COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A year later, the University of Missouri has lost enrollment, revenue and -- some might argue -- its way.

It hasn't lost a reputation that rests proudly at the corner of Eighth and Elm streets. Lee Hills Hall is where professor Berkley Hudson met this semester with the eight freshmen in his Journalism and Social Justice class.

They weren't scared away by arguably the most significant social upheaval on a college campus in decades. They came to Mizzou and its famous journalism school to cover it.

A year ago this week, a threatened boycott by Missouri's football team was largely responsible for the resignation of both system president Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.

The Tigers' actions turned a campus protest over racial inequality into a national discussion. Their intentions have not been forgotten in the locker room, the administration building or in Missouri's fabled J-school.

"One of the students in the class chose between Northwestern, North Carolina and here," Hudson said, naming three well-known journalism schools. "This is the place to be. She knew they could be turning out stories right now."

And so they have. One of Hudson's students wrote 3,000 words on the issue for Teen Vogue. Then-student photographer Tim Tai became an industry legend for defying protestors' attempts to keep him from chronicling their Carnahan Quad tent city.

Somehow, the protestors didn't understand the same reason he had a right to photograph them was the same reason they were able to protest in the first place: the First Amendment.

"For many students in journalism, this is the perfect place," Hudson said. "This is a laboratory for learning about the problems that America faces that have been articulated now in the current political campaign.

"It's an unwillingness to face one's own fears and misunderstandings. That's what is being made manifest in the country right now."

Missouri is many things at the moment, but it is not healed. Last fall, a group calling itself ConcernedStudent 1950 became frustrated at Wolfe's unwillingness to listen to their concerns over racial inequality. One of their own, a graduate student named Jonathan Butler, went on a hunger strike.

Some members of the football team met with Butler. They were so moved by his commitment that they took an unprecedented step of leveraging their athletic labor to seek change.

The players' historic tweet followed on a football Saturday night, Nov. 7, 2015. They decided to stop practicing and boycott the next week's game against BYU unless Wolfe resigned.

The sudden intersection of civil rights and football made it a national story. Two days after Mizzou's players threatened to withhold services, Wolfe stepped down.

Butler began to eat.

"The big picture, I feel like athletes are more empowered," said junior defensive end Charles Harris, one of the boycott leaders, on Monday. "That's something that can't go without notice."

"I guarantee you I wouldn't be here alive if the football team didn't step in," Butler said in the Spike Lee documentary on the topic "Two Fists Up."

You don't have to agree with what happened here, but you should prepare for more of it. What has followed is a tsunami of collegiate and societal change.

Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protests filtered down to college. The NCAA is trying to keep one step ahead of the courtroom in terms of player compensation.

There is an ongoing mandate to lessen time demands put on athletes for their sports.

"The Missouri athletes were a spark," said Mizzou doctoral student Reuben Faloughi. "These national anthem protests in the NFL? I definitely think they were influenced by what happened here at Mizzou."

Faloughi, 25, played football at Georgia before transferring to Missouri to pursue his graduate degree in counseling psychology. Along the way, he became an activist, joining ConcernedStudent 1950. Faloughi said the Ferguson protests 2 ½ years ago changed his outlook.

"When Michael Brown happened, it was like a veil was lifted from my eyes," said Faloughi, who is African-American. "Suddenly, I realized I could be Michael Brown.

"You have a growing mass of athletes who understand this is just a game. We have a platform. There's this social responsibility we can't back away from."

There is no closure a year later. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby has predicted there will be a day "the popcorn is popped, the TV cameras are there, the fans are in the stands and the team decides they're not going to play."

"Our games will be the target of civil disobedience," Bowlsby said Monday. "Like in the Missouri situation, outside entities will put pressure on the players."

Faloughi echoed a complaint from the Missouri players during last year's protests. They're heroes on game day but second-class citizens the rest of the week.

"I tell people, 'You're a demigod on Saturday,'" Faloughi said. "White people want you to kiss their baby. But the six other days in the week, you're just a black person in America."

All of it shed light on a reputation of racial intolerance this city and campus has had to live down. Columbia's nickname is "Little Dixie." Lee filmed that documentary earlier this year chronicling the recent unrest.

Interim president Michael Middleton, an African-American, came to Mizzou on a music scholarship and played in the marching band. It was a tradition at that time, he said, to play "Dixie" at halftime while a Confederate flag was unfurled.

Former coach Woody Widenhofer was still being asked questions in the 1980s about his ability to recruit African-American players out of St. Louis.

After the unrest of last year, a Missouri state representative suggested football players lose their scholarships.

In September, the Delta Upsilon fraternity here was temporarily suspended after a group of African-American students said racial slurs were hurled their way by frat members.

"We're Little Dixie. Need I remind you?" Hudson said in the film. "We're a border state. Need I remind you? Dred Scott is here."

Hudson was chair of a Missouri race relations committee that recently presented its findings on the matter to the faculty council. He advocated for a "Mizzou Miracle" where the school becomes a local, regional and national leader in race relations dialogue.

"We have no monopoly on any of this," Hudson said. "We just happened to be where all these forces and currents came together. It's giving us an incredible opportunity to learn about one another."

Still, it's hard to imagine any of this happening right now at places like Alabama, Northwestern, Texas or USC. Try to conceive of a group of protestors emerging out of a crowd to lock arms blocking the president's car in the homecoming parade.

It happened last fall at Mizzou. Wolfe sat stone-faced in the back of a convertible as ConcernedStudent 1950 protestors read off a litany of protests. At other places, it wouldn't have gotten that far. But Missouri has long been known for being more reactive than proactive.

CBS Sports requested comment from Middleton. On the one-year anniversary of one of the biggest events in the university's history, we were referred to a September video that contained Middleton comments.

Meanwhile, out-of-state enrollment is down 12 percent, according to reports. Tuition revenue is down $36.3 million. Much of it is attributed to fallout from the protests.

Coach Barry Odom sees no impact on recruiting where there is no honor among rivals in the best of times. Negative recruiting feeds off rumor, innuendo and flat-out lies. On this, opponents need only to hold up the headlines.

"I don't have it brought up much," Odom said of his recruiting visits. "But, also, I'm going to bring it up. There's nothing to run from."

Former athletic director Mack Rhoades left in July, trading his problems at Missouri for those at Baylor.

His replacement, Jim Sterk, arrived from San Diego State and quickly nailed down three sizable donations that will go toward a new $75 million football facility.

"I wanted to know really what kind of a place this was," Sterk said. "Everyone said the people are good, it's an inclusive place. Then I wanted to know how people felt now.

"In a difficult situation, they did as best they could. There wasn't anything violent."

A year later, ConcernedStudent 1950 has disbanded. Students have degrees to pursue. Lives to live. Some of their demands were met. Some weren't.

Butler has "dropped off the map," Faloughi said. The one-time face of a movement that sprung far beyond this campus only sometimes responds to texts.

What's left is social change, a damaged brand, athlete empowerment, financial downturn and some lingering uncertainty from it all.

"How do you make something beautiful out of our wounds?" Hudson wondered.