University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe resigned Monday morning, forced out of office by student protests alleging he had not done enough to address racism and other issues on campus.

Hours later, the university’s governing body said Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin would resign at the end of the year and transition to research.

Wolfe, a businessman who took charge of Missouri’s public university system in 2012, had become the focal point of demonstrators’ demands that he do something about the campus climate.

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“The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don’t doubt it for a second,” Wolfe said at a meeting of the university’s governing body, called over the weekend after the football team said it would strike in support of a hunger striker who was demanding Wolfe’s ouster.

Students have highlighted a series of disturbing racist incidents on campus, including being called racial epithets, and accused Wolfe of not acting decisively to address race issues.

“We stopped listening to each other,” Wolfe told a packed room of reporters at an open meeting of the system’s board of curators. “This is not the way change should come about.”

“I take full responsibility for this frustration and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred,” Wolfe said, adding: “Use my resignation to heal and start talking again.”

Missouri’s curators then voted to go to closed session.

The resignations of Wolfe and Loftin, a physicist, came after a series of protests on campus.

The school’s football team had gone on strike, and some professors were staging a walkout from their classes. A tent city had sprouted on a campus quad. A graduate student had gone on a hunger strike.

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Some state legislators also joined in calls for Wolfe’s removal. The university’s student government called for the president to resign Monday.

Wolfe was holed up in university offices past 1 a.m. Monday — seen through windows talking on a cellphone and meeting with other officials — having become the latest Missouri public figure caught in a maelstrom of radical protest as pressure on campus built for a year, incident after incident.

There was the anonymous threat University of Missouri students spotted on social media app Yik Yak in December, after riots in Ferguson, Mo.: “Let’s burn down the black culture center & give them a taste of their own medicine.”

This September, the president of the Missouri Student Association, Payton Head, who is black, said he was walking through campus when a man in a pickup truck shouted a racial epithet at him.

“I’ve experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here,” Head said in a Facebook post that went viral, with other students echoing his account with versions of their own.

Last month someone drew a swastika on a residence hall wall, using human feces.

The campus has since been increasingly roiled by protest, and campus observers say the dissatisfaction isn’t just limited to racial incidents.

Students also have accused university administrators of a lack of decisiveness in protecting graduate students’ health insurance plans from elimination and defending the university’s relationship with Planned Parenthood against attacks from conservative state lawmakers.

But race appears to have become the most volatile issue on a campus where racial unease has long simmered among black students and staff.

In 2010, two white students scattered white cotton balls on the lawn of the campus’ black culture center in what black students saw as a racist attack. They were convicted of littering.

Cynthia Frisby, a journalism professor, wrote in the Missourian newspaper this week that in her 18 years at the university, “I have been called the N-word too many times to count.”

Kim English, a black former player on the university’s basketball team, wrote on Twitter this weekend that “Oppression at my alma mater and in the state of my alma mater occurred LONG before the tenure of this System President.”

“If U were black at my alma mater, and ur name was not Maclin, Denmon, Pressey, English, Weatherspoon, Carroll, etc. You didn’t feel welcome,” English said, listing the names of some of the university’s most prominent black athletes over the last decade.

But campus activists appear to have been emboldened by the protests they watched last year in Ferguson, about a two-hour drive away.

“A lot of Mizzou students traveled to Ferguson,” and those who didn’t “wanted to stand up and make a change,” said Ayanna Poole, a 22-year-old senior from Tyler, Texas, who is one of the founding members of the black campus activist group Concerned Student 1950. “I do believe it’s been a domino effect.”

The campus coalition’s name reflects the year the university began accepting black students. Today, more than 75 percent of the university’s 35,000 students are white.

Several black students have said some white students use the N-word or otherwise discriminated against them.

Poole recalled how she was kicked out of a fraternity party her freshman year after a man used the N-word and said, “All you … girls have to leave.”

Andrea Fulgiam, 21, a junior studying psychology and sociology, said when she sat down in a lecture class freshman year, the student next to her muttered, “I’m not about to sit next to this black girl.”

Fulgiam said a professor once told her she was at the university only because of affirmative action.

Parnell said when she transferred to the university last year, other black students warned her, “Don’t walk through Greektown,” the cluster of fraternities and sororities just off campus.

Wolfe, a former businessman, became president of the University of Missouri system in 2012 and has been targeted by students who accuse him of a lack of empathy for racial minorities.

Campus tensions reached a boiling point during the Oct. 10 homecoming parade, when student protesters blocked the parade route by standing in front of a car containing Wolfe. The car inched forward and, according to communications professor Melissa Click, bumped into a protester. Wolfe did not speak to the protesters, and police took them off the street, threatening arrest.

Wolfe “allowed his driver to try to drive around us, even hit one of us,” said Parnell, who participated in the demonstration. She said police threatened protesters with pepper spray and pushed them, and Wolfe “did not intervene whatsoever.”