Tim Wolfe

COLUMBIA, Mo. — The president of the University of Missouri system and the head of its flagship campus resigned Monday with the football team and others on campus in open revolt over what they saw as indifference to racial tensions at the school.

President Tim Wolfe, a former business executive with no previous experience in academic leadership, took “full responsibility for the frustration” students expressed and said their complaints were “clear” and “real.”

For months, black student groups had complained Wolfe was unresponsive to racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white main campus of the state’s four-college system. The complaints came to a head two days ago, when at least 30 black football players announced they would not play until the president left. A graduate student went on a weeklong hunger strike.

Wolfe’s announcement came at the start of what had been expected to be a lengthy closed-door meeting of the school’s governing board.

“This is not the way change comes about,” he said in a halting statement that was simultaneously apologetic, clumsy and defiant. “We stopped listening to each other.”

He urged students, faculty and staff to use the resignation “to heal and start talking again to make the changes necessary.”

Hours later, the top administrator of the Columbia campus, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, announced he would step down at the end of the year.

The school’s undergraduate population is 79 percent white and 8 percent black. The state is about 83 percent white and nearly 12 percent black. The Columbia campus is about 120 miles west of Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown was killed last year in a shooting that helped spawn the national “Black Lives Matter” movement rebuking police treatment of minorities.