Mizzou News
Daily Clips Packet
November 19, 2015
Yael T. Abouhalkah: President Obama backs
free speech at MU, and conservatives harshly
unleash it
President Obama says free speech must endure at MU and other college campuses
But that means putting up with a lot of attacks on black students and their causes
BY YAEL T. ABOUHALKAH
abouhalkah@kcstar.com
Free speech on the University of Missouri campus — supported at the
highest levels by President Barack Obama — is scheduled to get
another stern test Thursday evening.
This time, the words will be delivered by the conservative voice of Breitbart News
Senior Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro, who said this a few days ago about his visit to
a campus roiled by racial tension:
“I’m not much older than these kids, but we’re not preparing kids for life — we’re
preparing them for a future of whining pantywaist fascism. We need to fight that
trend tooth and nail. Liberty is not a safe space.”
That blast was aimed at protesters including Concerned Student 1950, which has
made a number of demands and taken several actions designed to bring more
needed racial diversity to the campus.
Shapiro’s talk is sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, which advertises
“The conservative movement starts here” on its website.
Obama offered some insightful opinions right along these lines recently in an
interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
The president discussed recent events at MU, which have included a hunger
strike by graduate student Jonathan Butler, the forced resignation of President
Tim Wolfe and several other racially related events that have left many black
students scared and upset about their place on the MU campus.
“I care about civil rights and I care about kids not being discriminated against or
having swastikas painted on their doors or nooses hung, thinking it’s a joke,”
Obama said. “I think it’s entirely appropriate for any institution, including
universities, to say, ‘Don't walk around in black face. It offends people. Don’t
wear a headdress and beat your chest if Native American students have said, you
know, ‘This hurts us. This bothers us.’ There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Then came this direct point from Obama, almost aimed at Shapiro’s speech and
how it might be received at MU at this crucial time in the university’s history:
“But we also have these values of free speech. And it’s not free speech in the
abstract. The purpose of that kind of free speech is to make sure that we are
forced to use argument and reason and words in making our democracy work.
And you know, you don’t have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas. Just
out-argue ’em, beat ’em.”
Harsh conservative voices have been supplying that kind of “free speech” far
beyond the most celebrated incident of last week, when a photographer
confronted students and a few faculty members who didn’t want him getting near
protesters on the campus.
Butler has been the recipient of some attention for his family’s wealth.
A short story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentioned it this way: “... Butler’s father
is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union
Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to
regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
The conservative Daily Wire website was far more direct in criticizing the hunger
striker: “One of the catalysts of Missouri’s current state of ruin is none other than
a super-rich millennial brat named Jonathan Butler.”
Local sports radio host Kevin Kietzman made the point repeatedly on his show
last week. He claimed Butler’s family’s wealth should have been highly publicized
and, if it had, events at MU would have played out far differently.
My conclusion: No, it wouldn’t. Simply having rich parents doesn’t dismiss the
valid criticisms Butler and many other minority students had outlined about
practices at MU.
The Breitbart website also used Zapruder-like slowed down video to question Butler’s
claim that a car carrying president Wolfe struck the protester during a
homecoming parade at MU.
“However, a look at video of the incident itself shows that Jonathan Butler
actually rushes towards the car,” the article said.
The Concerned Student 1950 group also has found itself at the center of harsh
criticism by a number of people, as have the black football players who effectively
helped force Wolfe’s resignation by saying they would refuse to practice and play.
This week, one poll showed a pretty deep-seated rejection among Missourians of
the actions taken by the protesters, MU players and Coach Gary Pinkel.
Obama had perhaps the best advice as he discussed the racially tinged situations
occurring at MU and other college campuses.
He called on protesters not to shut out the voice of people who disagree with
them — and vice versa.
“And I do worry if young people start getting trained to think that if somebody
says something I don’t like if somebody says something that hurts my feelings
that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a
higher power to protect me from that. You know, and yes, does that put more of a
burden on minority students or gay students or Jewish students or others in a
majority that may be blind to history and blind to their hurt? It may put a slightly
higher burden on them.
“But you’re not going to make the kinds of deep changes in society — that those
students want, without taking it on, in a full and clear and courageous way.”
That’s great advice. It’s also tough advice to be followed by young minority
college students who feel as if they have been marginalized and ignored for way
too long.
National student blackout demonstration
supports Mizzou
COLUMBIA, Mo. — More than 20 college campuses participated in the national student
blackout protest Wednesday in support of the University of Missouri group Concerned
Student 1950.
The event was organized by the Black Liberation Collective. Organizers say it's a growing
movement to end campus racial injustice.
A movement that started at Mizzou when Concerned Student 1950 started protesting and one of
their own went on a hunger strike. Their efforts led to the resignation of the UM System
President and MU Chancellor.
"I would say keep going, don't stop," MU student Alexus Griffith said.
Griffith has attended every demonstration on campus and encourages students at other colleges
to continue standing up for their rights and to not give up.
"I love it. I think, I honestly think it's going to turn colleges around, universities around, the
nation around," Griffith said.
The hashtag #StudentBlackOut was tagged by many students representing colleges across the
nation including Stanford, MIT, Princeton and UCLA.
They dressed in black, gathered together and some participated in walkouts.
"I think just knowing they are accepted, they are recognized and we see you, I think that's all the
recognition they deserve. We love you. We love you for everything you stand for and everything
that you do and that's not going to stop."
We reached out to Concerned Student 1950 and at this time they had no comment and directed
us to their social media for any updates.
According to the Black Liberation Collective website they have three national demands:
1) WE DEMAND at the minimum, Black students and Black faculty to be reflected by the
national percentage of Black folk in the country
2) WE DEMAND free tuition for Black and indigenous students
3) WE DEMAND a divestment from prisons and an investment in communities.
If you are interested in viewing the demands of the individual campuses, you can find them at
this website: www.thedemands.org
A New Chapter for Bargaining?
November 19, 2015
By
Robert M. O'Neil
The recent resignation of the president of the University of Missouri
System and the chancellor of its Columbia campus followed a strike
of sorts by university football players. While the athletes did so
without benefit of a union, their success draws attention to the way
students who have organized -- for collective bargaining or
otherwise -- can significantly alter a university’s policies.
In fact, grad students at Missouri had already successfully campaigned
against a plan to terminate summarily their health insurance (the
administration rescinded the edict for this year), and they continue to seek a
longer-term insurance commitment, better pay and full tuition waivers -- as
well as to pursue unionization.
For graduate students at private universities, the real action may occur in
the wake of last month’s vote by the National Labor Relations Board to
reconsider collective bargaining by teaching and research assistants at such
institutions. The groundbreaking case involves the New School University in
New York City and the United Auto Workers, and the NLRB’s final decision in
the matter could have far-reaching implications.
The issue of grad student unionization at private higher education
institutions has a curiously checkered history, reflecting political fortunes
since World War II. In 1951, the NLRB declined to offer bargaining rights for
private university employees, including academic personnel. Two decades
later, however, the board reversed that ruling and declared that the federal
labor laws covered academic employees in private institutions. In 2000,
when the NLRB ruled that graduate teaching assistants are eligible for
collective bargaining and can be considered employees, New York University
became the first private university to recognize a graduate student union.
But in 2004, the NLRB changed course yet again, ruling that graduate
teaching and research assistants at Brown University were not “employees”
because “they have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with
their university.” Thus, when NYU’s initial contract expired, the university’s
board declined to renew it in response to the intervening ruling concerning
Brown. Keeping the players -- and the rules -- straight during this everchanging saga has understandably posed a challenge.
To put the issue of grad student unionization at private institutions in a
broader context, the legal status of full-time, tenure-track professors has
remained far more consistent. Most of those professors are effectively
barred from unionizing in the private sector by the Supreme Court’s 35year-old ruling in the Yeshiva University case, under which faculty members
at independent campuses are considered to be “managers” because of their
involvement in the governance of their institutions. While there has been
much recent discussion of possible reopening of the Yeshiva ruling, such a
prospect seems increasingly unlikely.
Indeed, as the Supreme Court in its current term revisits the status of public
school unions among K-12 teachers, the primacy of Yeshiva today seems, in
most cases, if anything even clearer than it was a decade ago. (I say, “in
most cases” because a handful of private campuses, such as Goddard
College in Vermont, have voluntarily recognized bargaining efforts by its
professors and have simply declined to oppose union efforts. In addition, the
labor board indicated last December its potential readiness, specifically in
the case of Pacific Lutheran University, to distinguish Yeshiva in certain
cases that involve religiously affiliated institutions and non-tenure-track
faculty whose role clearly involves less “managerial authority” than that of
tenured professors.)
Between the two extremes of graduate students, on the one hand, and fulltime faculty members, on the other, lies the anomalous legal status of
adjuncts and part-time faculty. Especially in the Boston and Washington
regions, aggressive organizing activity by unions such as Service Employees
International Union and United Auto Workers has greatly expanded
bargaining rights for such contingent faculty, including not only improved
salaries and working conditions but even opportunities for promotion to
tenure-track positions. Most academic employers at such independent
campuses as American University, Georgetown University, Tufts University
and a host of others have welcomed such efforts and have been quick to
negotiate bargaining agreements.
The legal landscape differs sharply when it comes to unionization in the
public sector. Full-time professors, adjuncts and graduate students are
mainly either covered by state-enacted public employee bargaining laws or
are barred from unionizing by “right to work” legislation. At this point, 28
states have embraced or sanction public employee bargaining, and many
public universities have long had unionized graduate teaching assistants.
Enjoying hybrid status, some graduate students at three New York private
universities (Alfred, Cornell and Syracuse) are already covered by a union
contract because they are enrolled at academic units of the State University
of New York within those three affiliated upstate private institutions.
The Shape of Things to Come
What will be the long-term implications of NLRB’s recent agreement to
reconsider whether graduate assistants at all private institutions are entitled
to collective bargaining? Until the board actually rules, the ramifications will
remain to be fully appraised. And even then, given the tortured and
protracted history of the central issue, it seems unlikely that in this area the
board would issue detailed guidance to potential institutions and unions.
Rather, we might expect the shaping of that emerging landscape would
generally follow the experience within public colleges and universities. We
should also recognize that each state is free to adopt whatever laws and
regulations it may choose to govern graduate student organizing, as with
full-time and adjunct faculty, including the option to be either more or less
welcoming to graduate organizing than it is with regard to other publicsector teachers. The potential for such state-level regulatory variation does
not, however, necessarily make the eventual outcome any easier to predict
or assess.
Meanwhile, as we await further developments from the NLRB, the higher
education community remains sharply divided on this issue. Groups like the
American Association of University Professors and the Association of
American Universities are, for example, diametrically opposed in this
respect, despite concordance on many other matters like race-sensitive
admissions.
Those boards and administrators (and some faculty groups) that strongly
oppose graduate student organizing argue that unionization would inevitably
intrude upon the optimally collegial professor-student relationship and
jeopardize academic freedom. Harvard University President Drew Faust may
have put it most forcefully in a recent Harvard Crimsoninterview: “We really
think that it’s a mistake for graduate students to unionize, that it changes a
mentoring relationship between faculty and students into a labor
relationship, which is not appropriate [and] is not what is represented by the
experience of graduate students in the university.” (It is also worth noting
that despite their resistance to unionization, a few major private universities
have made commendable efforts to enhance both tangible and intangible
benefits for graduated student employees. Graduate Students United at the
University of Chicago, for example, won substantial pay raises for its
members after a series of rallies and “teach outs.”)
On the other side of the table, proponents of the revised NLRB policy argue
with equal force that the universities’ fears are at least exaggerated if not
wholly misplaced. Such advocates insist that several decades of experience
at major public research campuses simply have not documented such
concerns. Moreover, the steady explosion of student indebtedness, increased
demands upon the time and energy of already burdened graduates, and
diminished opportunities for advancement only underscore the case for
unionization.
In fact, amid the seemingly endless debates about graduate student
unionization, several practical issues have been somewhat overlooked. For
one, the growing costs of graduate education (especially for independent
institutions) may well diminish racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at a
time when the higher education community seeks greater inclusiveness and
students are demanding it. Graduate student organizers argue that the
mounting financial burdens on such students will inevitably and regrettably
diminish diversity.
Indeed, graduate student unionization would appear to enhance prospects
both for greater diversity and for the mitigation of onerous financial burdens.
Speaking in support of organizing efforts for TAs and RAs, Matt Canfield (an
NYU doctoral student and member of the Student Organizing Committee)
has argued that “academia will become closed off to people of color, and
people with children -- and we want to be ensure that NYU reflects the
diversity of the city we’re in.”
In addition, while graduate teaching assistants and graduate research
assistants are often treated as homogeneous, there may be reasons for
separately reviewing their respective statuses. The mere fact of unionization
and the evolution of contract negotiations and board approval could well
differentiate more sharply the respective roles and responsibilities of
graduate teaching assistants, on one hand, and advanced students who aid
laboratory research, on the other. The distinction, though subtle,
nonetheless offers clarity. For example, under the exemplary personnel
policies of the University of California at Los Angeles, TAs “serve an
apprenticeship under the tutelage and supervision of regular faculty
members who are responsible for curriculum and instruction in the
university,” while RAs “are selected on the basis of scholastic achievement
and promise as creative scholars and serve an apprenticeship under the
direction and supervision of a faculty member.”
Whatever the NLRB’s final decision and its implications, it’s clear that grad
students remain relatively overworked and underpaid -- at the bottom of the
academic food chain, one might say. The reality is that they make up a
significant portion of the instructional workforce in higher education. The
Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions ventures that between half and
three-quarters of all university classes are actually taught by graduate
assistants or contingent faculty.
Thus, as we await further developments in this already complex and
contentious field of law and policy, we might invoke the wisdom of Lisa
Simpson (of The Simpsons) regarding student unionization.
As Lisa throws bread on the ground to feed some ducks, a hungry student
cohort converges, while a professor with a whip appears and barks, “No food
for you grad students until you grade 3,000 papers.” Lisa should claim the
final word.
BIO
Robert M. O’Neil is the former president of the University of Virginia and of the
University of Wisconsin System, former director of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult
Dialogues Initiative, and former general counsel of the American Association of
University Professors. He is currently a senior fellow at the Association of Governing
Boards of Colleges and Universities.
History, Words, Race
Princeton becomes flash point in campus protests as students demand end to links to
Woodrow Wilson. The same day, institution ends the use of "master" to describe
leaders of residential colleges.
November 19, 2015
By
Scott Jaschik
Campus protests over racial issues continue to spread -- and on Wednesday led to a
revived debate at Princeton University over the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and the use
of the word "master" to describe those who lead residential colleges.
By the end of the day, "master" was retired from use at Princeton (at least in that form
of the word). Students took over the president's office to demand that Woodrow
Wilson's name be removed from the many places it appears on the Princeton campus,
which Wilson led before he became president of the United States.
Both the university's decision to stop using "master" and the debate over Wilson
captured widespread attention on social media, with the university and the protest
leaders receiving both praise and criticism.
And the events at Princeton come as a protest movement launched at the
University of Missouri continued to reverberate through American higher
education. Students at many campuses participated in #StudentBlackOut
rallies, pushing for more diversity and inclusiveness on campuses. At the
University of Cincinnati, students put duct tape over their mouths to symbolize
how they feel silenced. At Lewis & Clark College, students protested racial
harassment on social media. At the University of Central Florida, students held
a sit-in. On other campuses, administrators continue to try to respond to
student grievances. The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, for example, on
Wednesday announced plans to create a chief diversity officer position.
At Princeton, the debates over Wilson may be difficult for the university. While some
campuses have moved to rename single buildings that honor people seen as bigots
today, the Wilson name is quite visible on the Princeton campus -- there is
the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and there is Wilson
College, one of Princeton's residential colleges.
The group Black Justice League occupied the office of President Christopher L. Eisgruber
at Princeton and offered a series of demands: that the university "acknowledge the
racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson and how he impacted campus policy and culture," and
that all buildings and programs named for Wilson have their names changed. The
students also demanded that a portrait of Wilson come down from a dining hall. Other
demands include having "classes on the history of marginalized peoples" be added to
distribution requirements, and that a "cultural space on campus" be "dedicated
specifically to black students."
A spokesperson for Princeton said Wednesday evening that "at this time there are no
plans to make changes, and the conversation is ongoing."
Wilson (at right) is known for many progressive policies and for idealistic views about
the spread of democracy around the world. But historians have also noted that he was
an unapologetic racist who took many actions as president of the United States that
held back even minimal rights for black people. And while many argue against judging
people from earlier generations by today's standards, this essay by William Keylor,
professor of history and international relations at Boston University, notes that
Wilson moved federal policy on racial equality backward. He undid moves toward
desegregation by federal agencies, and he defended segregation.
In an essay last month in The Daily Princetonian, the Black Justice League outlined its
case for removing honors on campus for Wilson.
"We owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed," the essay says. "There is an
impulsive reaction to want to ignore uncomfortable or questionable legacies. However,
what does it say about our society if we continue to glorify legacies without
acknowledging -- and at the very least caring about -- the continuous promotion of
unrectified inequalities and injustices? … By not recognizing the importance of this
discourse, the university is telling its marginalized community and the outside world
that it values its bleached-clean version of history over the prolonged discomfort and
alienation of students of color. This erasure is especially dangerous in the present
context of state-sanctioned violence against black people that prolongs this genocide."
Another essay in the student paper, published Wednesday, offered another point of
view. "While I agree that Wilson was a racist and a bigot, I think to judge him by
today’s standards is ahistorical. We cannot remove people from historical narratives
simply because we disagree with their positions," said the essay by Zeena Mubarak, a
junior.
"The fact of the matter is that Woodrow Wilson did not live in the 21st century. He was
not exposed to the same type of education and society that we have been exposed to.
Some people might respond to this by saying that there were other people in his time
who did not share his racist beliefs. This is true, but those people were remarkable. In
addition, some of those same people might have held other objectionable beliefs. For
example, someone in Wilson’s time might have supported racial equality, but still
professed homophobic or transphobic beliefs. Would we discount their antiracist work
for those reasons?"
If the Wilson name becomes toxic in academe, Princeton would not be the only
institution with academic ties with a problem. There is the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, which awards fellowship and sponsors scholarly
meetings and publications. And there is the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation.
No More "Masters"
Also on Wednesday, the masters of Princeton's residential colleges decided to stop
calling themselves masters and instead to use the term "head of the college."
At protests at Yale University, minority students have said that the word "master" is
associated with slavery in ways that make it an inappropriate title for a college official.
Princeton's announcement of the change noted that the use of "master" in the sense of
an academic leader predates American slavery and has nothing to do with it.
"Though we are aware that the term 'master' has a long history of use in universities
(indeed since medieval times), it seems to me by now to be anachronistic and
unfortunate for the positions we hold," said a statement from Sandra Bermann, head of
Whitman College, Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and professor of comparative
literature. "We are glad to take on the designation as 'head of the college' that
describes our role more aptly."
The Oxford English Dictionary backs up the point about the word's long history:
"Etymology: classical Latin magistr-,magister (usually taken to be related
to magis [adverb] more [the form magester cited by Quintilian as earlier is anomalous];
compare minister n.), reinforced in Middle English by AngloNorman maistre, mastre, meistre, mestre,mistre and Old
French maistre, mestre (Middle Frenchmaistre, French maître: compare maître n.), of
the same origin. Compare magister n. Old English forms are of two types: the first
(mægister, mægester, mægster) has æ in the first syllable, and is usually regarded as
a borrowing subsequent to the period of fronting, with later i-mutation (see A.
Campbell Old Eng. Gram. [1959] §496); the second and more common (magister)
has a (of uncertain length) in the first syllable. The first type appears to have given rise
to early Middle English forms like maister, maistre(corresponding to maȝȝstre in the
nonstandard orthography of the Ormulum). Middle English spellings
in ei and ey probably arise from forms with e for Old English æ (they are especially
common in texts of the west midlands and Kent, where e for Old English æ is common),
although reinforced by Anglo-Norman meistre, showing regular ai > ei (sporadic Middle
English e spellings reflect Anglo-Norman mestre, showing subsequent ei > e ). Middle
English ei forms predominate in the 13th cent.; ei spellings are rare later, after the
general change of ei > ai in later Middle English (the ai spelling in this word probably
being reinforced also by Anglo-Norman and Middle French maistre)."
On master, Princeton is ahead of others. Yale, where the issue has been discussed, has
not abandoned the title, which is also used at such institutions as Harvard
University, Northwestern University, Rice University, the University of Chicago and the
University of Oklahoma.
MU students reflect on weeks of protest,
change on campus
By Megan Favignano
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 2:00 pm
Racism and discrimination have been topics of countless conversations and demonstrations
at the University of Missouri in recent weeks.
R. J. Miller, an MU senior studying biology, said racism and discrimination are societal
problems that exist beyond campus. There will always be racist people in society, he said.
“You really can’t change a person’s opinion or how they’re raised,” Miller said. “It’s not just the
university’s problem — it’s bigger than the University of Missouri.”
UM System President Tim Wolfe and MU Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned last week after
weeks of protests over the racial climate on campus. Students camped at Carnahan Quadrangle,
and graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike to call for Wolfe’s resignation.
Students named the movement Concerned Student 1950 in honor of the first year a black student
was enrolled at MU. The group last month gave administrators a list of demands after several
racially charged issues on campus this semester.
MU should address racist incidents as soon as they happen, Miller said, adding he has never
personally experienced racism at MU. He said frustration over racist incidents motivated
students to act.
“A lot of it was based off of isolated events that happened to certain people,” Miller said. “I’m a
supporter of the cause, just not how they went about it.”
Miller said the peaceful protests were effective but that he felt students placed too much
emphasis on Butler’s hunger strike.
Andi Li, a junior history major and international student at MU, said seeing students protest
made him realize how much frustration students had toward the campus climate.
“What happened is representative of the overall environment or social pressure pushing on the
students,” Li said. “The deeper issues should be of concern. … After all these years we’ve been
working on student equality, why are things still not being fixed?”
Evan Bolts, a senior at MU studying journalism, said he was not surprised when students started
protesting.
“It was inevitable that something large like this would happen, but I didn’t think anything to the
scale that it did,” Bolts said.
Bolts said racism has been a major issue on campus during the past year. Loftin and MU
administrators hosted a listening session last December to hear concerns from faculty, staff and
students after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson last fall. The conversation that
day focused on students’ experiences with discrimination at MU. Conversations continued in the
spring, and the MU Faculty Council formed a Race Relations Committee to get a better idea of
the issues on campus.
Bolts said he hopes recent changes on campus eventually will benefit students who have felt
uncomfortable or unsafe. The discussions and changes have created tension at MU, Bolts said,
and students have not felt a sense of relief.
“Everyone’s just uncomfortable,” he said. “Even though it has brought awareness, I don’t think
we’ve begun to see the positive effects.”
Sophomore Maya Skinner said she was proud of what students were able to accomplish and how
they were able to inspire change elsewhere.
“We all stood together as one,” Skinner said. “It really impresses me how much power we
actually do have because we got them to resign.”
Skinner said she knew the student body was serious about change when 32 MU football players
joined the call for Wolfe’s ouster. Players circulated messages on social media the Saturday
before Wolfe resigned that said they would no longer participate in “football related activities”
until Wolfe was removed.
Students’ efforts and calls for change didn’t really make a difference until the football team
joined the cause, Miller said.
Butler “could have ended up dying from the hunger strike,” Miller said. “Nothing was going to
happen unless” the football team “got involved.”
When Wolfe resigned Nov. 9, he said the football team’s boycott was not his motivation for
resigning and that he had been considering stepping down for a couple of weeks. Sources said
Loftin’s transfer to other duties at MU was the result of distrust and animosity among faculty
members and had been brewing for weeks.
Li said he is waiting to see whether recent administrative changes and student actions have been
enough to improve campus.
How Mental-Health Care Entered the
Debate Over Racial Inequality
By Ellen Wexler
NOVEMBER 19, 2015
Just before midnight on Thursday, November 12, nearly 200 students gathered outside
the house of Peter Salovey, Yale University's president. Passing around a megaphone,
they read him their demands.
Among other things, they wanted mental-health professionals placed in each of the
university’s four cultural centers, which serve black, Asian-American, Hispanic, and
American Indian students. And in Yale’s Mental Health and Counseling Center, they
wanted more counselors of color.
"There is a preponderance of evidence," one of the students said, "that racist
environments, like Yale, harm the physical and mental health of people of color, like
us."
As students on campuses across the country protestracial inequality, mental-health
services for minority students keep coming up. It may not be students’ primary
concern, but when students present lists of demands, it is often one of them.
When students at the University of Missouri at Columbia issued their list of
demands, in October, they asked the university to hire additional mental-health
professionals, "particularly those of color." And this week at Occidental College,
students demanded physicians of color "to treat physical and emotional trauma
associated with issues of identity."
In the United States, minority students report higher rates of depression than do white
students, but they are less likely to seek mental-health treatment. And for college
students in all minority groups, stress related to race can predict psychological
distress, studies have found.
Minority students need culturally sensitive support, protesters say. Living in hostile,
unwelcoming environments changes how minority students experience campus life.
They face unique psychological challenges, the argument goes, and so need unique
mental-health services.
"When students of color feel unsafe on these predominantly white college campuses,
there are mental-health consequences," said Kevin Cokley, a professor of counseling
psychology and black studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Last week Mr. Cokley attended a "town hall" organized by African-American
students, who shared their experiences with racism and discrimination on the campus.
At times the gathering got emotional.
"The stories that we heard from them were heart-wrenching," Mr. Cokley said. "We
witnessed students breaking down during this town-hall meeting."
Mr. Cokley has studied what he calls "impostor feelings," which can affect minority
students’ confidence. Those students find it difficult to internalize success, and they
suffer from higher rates of mental illness.
As new concerns come to light, colleges and universities are trying to adapt. "I think
schools understand that it’s a new day now," said Darcy Gruttadaro, who oversees the
National Alliance on Mental Illness’s campus program. "They need to listen very
carefully."
A Cultural Shift
But in the national consciousness, minority mental health is a new issue. With little
precedent and scant research, college counseling centers don’t always know how to
move forward.
"I’m sure there are programs out there," Ms. Gruttadaro said. "There certainly is
training. But it's more than training. It's a whole cultural shift."
Ohio State University has suicide-prevention brochures tailored to students of different
races. The university's Counseling and Consultation Service runs groups specific to
students of color, and students can receive clinical services in six languages.
At North Carolina State University, the Counseling Center compares the racial
makeup of patients with the racial makeup of the student body. When there are
disparities, the Counseling Center can tell that a group is underserved.
Recently the center discovered that international students were underserved. The
university started including the center on campus tours, so students could see what the
office looks like. Twice a week a counselor holds drop-in hours at the Office of
International Services.
"We’re not asking them to walk through the doors of the Counseling Center first,"
said the center's director, Monica Osburn. "We’re meeting them where they are."
At Yale the students outside Mr. Salovey’s house asked for an answer by November
18.
On November 17 the president sent an email to the Yale community. "I have never
been as simultaneously moved, challenged, and encouraged by our community — and
all the promise it embodies — as in the past two weeks," he wrote. The email was 19
paragraphs long.
Near the middle of it, he responded to the students’ mental-health demands.
Professional counselors will schedule hours at each of the four cultural centers, he
said. Yale’s counseling staff will receive additional multicultural training, and the
university will make "renewed efforts" to increase staff diversity.
At the University of Missouri at Columbia, the vice chancellor for student affairs,
Catherine C. Scroggs, focused on the issue briefly in a statement to parents.
"We recognize many students were fearful, sad, and anxious," she wrote. "We have
made multiple resources available for your children, including additional counselors,
including counselors of color."
More Credibility
Many advocates agree that colleges' counseling centers should strive to better
understand their minority students’ cultural complexities, and then tailor their services
accordingly. But at universities like Yale, students are also demanding a more-diverse
counseling staff, a request many colleges struggle with.
When minority students can schedule appointments with minority practitioners,
supporters argue, they will be more likely to seek treatment.
"Folks already have some misgivings about approaching mental-health supporters and
practitioners," said Evan Rose, president of the Steve Fund. Mr. Rose’s family
established the fund, which supports mental-health services for students of color, after
his brother committed suicide, in 2014.
For students of color, Mr. Rose said, getting help becomes easier when they can
approach counselors of color — especially when they’re dealing with issues related to
being a member of a minority group.
"The more people can identify with your outward expression, the more likely you are
to have more ascribed credibility," said Michael G. Mason, an assistant dean of
African-American affairs at the University of Virginia.
Mr. Mason is also director of Project RISE, a peer-counseling program for AfricanAmerican students. When students work with a clinician of their race, he said, they
might feel more open and hopeful about their treatment. But talented clinicians will
earn credibility regardless of their race, he said.
Still, for many universities, finding a diverse pool of qualified practitioners is
difficult.
"We need to do a better job as a profession in attracting people of color to the
profession of counseling," North Carolina State's Ms. Osburn said. "Minority students
need to see someone in the Counseling Center they feel like they can connect and
identify with."
A generation on edge: A look at millennials and
mental health
She remembers the date: Aug. 22, 2013.
That’s the day MU journalism student Megan Armstrong, then a sophomore, attempted
to take her life. It was a Thursday, and her roommate wasn’t home. She felt excited as
she prepared to carry out the task.
But then something stopped her. Armstrong says her vision went cloudy. She
remembered how much death scared her. She saw the faces of the people she loves and
the things she still wanted to do. “I had an anxiety attack during my suicide attempt,”
she says, laughing at the irony.
Waking up the next day was hard because she had to face what she almost did. She
hadn’t planned to tell anyone, but her cousin, who also deals with mental illness, must
have realized something was off when they talked that day. He called her parents and
told them they needed to get to her — now.
After driving to Columbia, Armstrong’s parents found her on a bench near Cold Stone
Creamery on Elm Street. She looked dazed. She doesn’t remember much of that day.
What she does remember is going home with her parents and having to tell them what
she did — what she had almost done.
Being with her friends and family was the most traumatizing part for Armstrong. “When
you’re in that place in your mind, that stuff crowds up everything you actually care
about,” she says. “But then they’re right in front of you, and you can’t ignore them.”
She counts herself lucky, she says, because her family helped her find the support she
needed. Armstrong has regularly been to therapy since she was a sophomore in high
school. When she went to college, she continued to talk to a therapist in Kansas City
over the phone, but following her suicide attempt, she and her family found a therapist
in Columbia she is comfortable with. Today, she quotes what her therapist says in
conversation, making jokes about their close relationship. She’s doing better now. She’s
on track to graduate.
Armstrong is one of more than 5 million college students struggling with mental health,
according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the country’s largest grassroots
mental health organization. Rates of anxiety and depression in particular have
skyrocketed in what many are calling a crisis of mental health on college campuses.
Like Armstrong, more students than ever come to college on medication or in treatment
for mental health problems, according to a report by The Chronicle of Higher Education
in 2015. More than 25 percent of college students have a diagnosable mental illness and
have been treated in the past year, according to NAMI.
At MU, 61 percent of 1,010 college students who responded to an American
College Health Association assessment in fall 2014 reported feeling
overwhelming anxiety within the last year. And 35.5 percent said they “felt
so depressed that it was difficult to function.”
Mental health problems don’t just start in college. According to Psychology Today, “the
average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric
patient in the early 1950s.”
In an October 2014 article in The Atlantic, high school nurses describe daily encounters
with students suffering from anxiety. Amber Lutz, a counselor at Kirkwood High School
in St. Louis, says students are experiencing high performance expectations as the
competition rises for sports, school and future universities. Students show up to the
nurse not for skinned knees or a spare tampon, but for panic attacks.
Dr. Sharon Sevier, former chair of the board of the American School Counselor
Association and a counselor at Lafayette High School in St. Louis, says increased levels
of testing also contribute to the stress and pressure of the students she sees.
In a blog for Psychology Today in 2010, developmental psychologist Peter Gray says the
public school system has turned away from a philosophy of teaching for competence and
now teaches students that it is more important to get good grades than be allowed to
truly explore what interests them. It’s a system, he says, that “is almost designed to
produce anxiety and depression.”
The millennial generation, which includes ages 18 to 34, has a reputation of being
whiny, self-important and coddled, constantly patted on the head and rewarded by
parents and teachers for the smallest triumphs. They were raised to be competitive, to
achieve, to collect accomplishments and awards the way other generations might have
collected GI Joes or pet rocks. Many members of this generation have come to see
themselves as above average. They work hard, and many believe they deserve rewards
for their effort.
But for all of their preparation, millennials could be the first generation to make less
money than their parents, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.
When they enter college, millennials, raised to be successful fish in high school ponds,
find themselves competing with more fish for what will eventually be even fewer jobs.
What’s worse, they are more aware of their peer’s social and professional achievements
than ever before, thanks to the filtered highlight reels of Facebook, Instagram and
Snapchat.
There are many reasons college students might experience anxiety and
depression. As more students from varied backgrounds, classes and
ethnicities attend college at higher rates, the challenges they face can be
new, unexpected and isolating, according to Christy Hutton, assistant
director for outreach and prevention at the MU Counseling Center. At the
same time, students who are expected to go to college by either their family
or society feel pressure to be more successful than perhaps ever before.
The effects of these pressures are becoming more drastic. Suicide is the second leading
killer of college students — a rate that has tripled since 1950, according to the ACHA.
Dan Jones, past president of the Association for University and College Counseling
Center Directors, has noted an increase in self-harm behavior, including suicide ideation
or cutting. Professionals say the young people they see have trouble expressing feelings
and dealing with discomfort or negative emotions. “Millennials don’t feel comfortable
struggling,” Jones says. “They don’t have the resilience of previous generations.” He
attributes this to a lack of problem-solving skills due to parents continually removing all
obstacles for their children.
College age millennials were taught they were unique compared to others. And in the
case of mental health, it seems to ring true.
Heather Parrie, an MU junior sociology major who just ran for Missouri Students
Association vice president, holds several student leadership positions on campus. She
looks like the quintessential co-ed: ombré blond hair, thin frame, a no-nonsense
baseball hat paired with an oversized T-shirt, a phone that dings with emails and a
planner filled with meetings. She’s the type of college student whose accomplishments
parents brag about to their friends on Facebook and in holiday cards.
In spring, Parrie was hit with something unexpected. Burdened with the weight of the
expectations and relentlessly comparing herself to successful friends, she began to
crumble. In the grips of self-doubt, anxiety and depression, she began sleeping up to 20
hours a day. She canceled plans with friends, skipped class and preferred to stay
wrapped in a safe cocoon of blankets in her sorority house. She ended up failing an
accounting test and then the class itself, which just made things worse. In April, she was
diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Even in her darkest moments when she felt
she’d never get out of bed, Parrie managed to conceal her inner battle from most people.
When she later asked friends if they noticed her struggling, they told her, “You always
look like you have it together, so we didn’t ask you if you needed help.”
Researchers and mental health professionals explain the gap between college students’
tireless efforts to appear put together and their inward unraveling as the “duck
syndrome.” The term was first coined at Stanford University for the common conception
that anxiety and failure are seen as unacceptable at the school, and it was closely
mirrored by the term “Penn Face” at the University of Pennsylvania, where students
have striven to appear happy even when they aren’t.
The idea is this: Picture a duck swimming across a lake or pond. On the surface, the
duck seems to be gliding along effortlessly, gracefully. But beneath the surface, the
duck’s webbed feet are busy paddling — frantic, fraught, desperate — to keep itself
afloat.
Parrie’s battle with this façade has been played out in headlines about college students
who took their lives or contemplated doing so. A recentNew York Times article
chronicled the struggle of Kathryn DeWitt, a student at Penn who attempted to take her
life after facing extreme pressures at college. In May, ESPN’s Bleacher Report published
a piece about another Penn student, Madison Holleran, a gifted runner who took her life
freshman year. According to the article, Madison carefully crafted her social media
accounts to show a happy, fulfilled life. But she struggled to connect her outward
projection to herself, “as though she could never find validation for her struggle because
how could someone so beautiful, so seemingly put together, be unhappy?”
In July, after battling her mental illness for many months, Parrie wrote a blog post. She
wrote about her journey with mental illness and described her reasons for getting a
tattoo of a semicolon. In literary terms, the punctuation mark is used to take a pause,
but another phrase always follows it. For Parrie, this was a symbol for her continued
fight against mental illness.
The post went viral and reached an estimated 7 million people and even helped inspire a
new trend in tattoos. It was shared or written about on Huffington Post, the
International Business Times and Buzzfeed, to name a few. In the post, she delves into
the duality of her carefully crafted outward appearance of success versus her inward
battle against her perceived failure.
She writes: “I am depression, and I am the perfect picture of a 20-year-old sorority girl
at an SEC school. I am depression and I am oversized fraternity formal T-shirts and
Nike shorts that hang off my frail, starved hips that the Greek Town girls envy so much.
I am depression.”
Achievement Pressure
There are certain commonalities in the stories of college students such as Parrie who
struggle with depression and anxiety, but one in particular illustrates the intense
pressure they feel to achieve, and it often comes from parents.
“My parents expected me to be very successful,” Parrie says. “They weren’t overbearing,
but they expected me to be my best.” For Parrie, her best meant working toward a 4.0
high school GPA, being in the top 5 percent of her class, nailing the ACT and filling her
résumé with extracurriculars.
That kind of drive doesn’t stop once students get to college. “Students are juggling a lot
of roles,” Hutton says. Many students have a hard time balancing their laundry list of
responsibilities, including taking 12 to 15 credit hours, working part-time jobs or
internships, engaging in clubs and student leadership, maintaining relationships and
dealing with family obligations, Hutton adds. It’s overwhelming, and students struggle
to keep up.
“I was always taught that if you work hard, you’re going to be OK,” Parrie says.
Millennials, though, are finding this isn’t always the case. Many parents and teachers
have given their children and students resources, means and motivation to succeed, so
they are expected to constantly achieve. Students often build debt, work at unpaid
internships and make physical and mental sacrifices to stay competitive, all to enter an
ever-growing pool of applicants whom internships and employers sift through. In a 2012
study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 44 percent of recent grads aged 22 to 27
with at least a bachelor’s degree were underemployed, which means they were working
in jobs that didn’t require a college degree.
A happiness study started in the 1970s by Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me and
professor at San Diego State University, found an unusual trend: People aren’t
becoming happier as they get older. According to a 2015 Associated Press article about
the study, young adults could be suffering from “economic insecurity,” which means
they fear they won’t be able to achieve all they expected. “Our generation is the pioneer
for not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” Parrie says.
Millennials strive to succeed, but they haven’t always been taught to deal with the times
when they inevitably fail. As Jones puts it, they haven’t been allowed to struggle before.
Because of the way this generation was raised, Jones says, “people don’t get used to the
idea that they’re not always number one or not always the best.” This leads to college
students feeling self-doubt at substantial levels.
This generation oftentimes deals with “helicopter parents.” These parents choose college
classes for their children, call universities to ask about a bad test score and even tag
along to job interviews. A more recent term for a similar parenting style is “lawn mower
parenting,” in which parents mow down the obstacles in their children’s way. A 2011
study by Terri LeMoyne and Tom Buchanan at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga found that students with helicopter parents are more likely to be
medicated for anxiety and/or depression.
Indiana University psychologist Chris Meno says in an article by the Indiana University
News Room that college students are psychologically affected by this style of overparenting because they have not yet figured out the balance between independent
decision making and asking for help.
Twenge headed another study that examined the results of the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory — a mental health survey given to college students since 1938 and
high school students since 1951. She noticed that many students have shifted focus from
intrinsic to extrinsic goals. In other words, students have gradually begun valuing
material awards and outside approval over self-improvement or fulfillment. In the
1960s and 1970s, most college freshmen valued “developing a meaningful philosophy of
life” over “being well off financially.” Today, that exact opposite is true.
Many college students’ self worth is based on their achievements, whether that fulfills
them or not. Parrie is no different. “I pride myself on being a strong, hardworking,
mentally sound person,” she says.
Armstrong shares the same craving for achievements. “My therapist says I have a
tendency to want to accomplish really special things all the time.” Armstrong says when
she does something she’s proud of — like when she published a novel, Night Owls, in
May to reflect her mental health struggles or organized fundraising events in Chicago —
the warm, bright feeling of accomplishment wears off faster each time and leaves her
empty and searching for it again.
The College Debate
Demand increases for mental health services at universities
Throughout the past several decades, universities have been given more responsibility
for their students’ well-being. As parents and media became more concerned with the
safety of campuses, the legal and social pressures put on universities have resulted in a
more comprehensive view of the responsibilities universities have toward their students.
But with the demand for mental health services increasing, universities began to enter
what former president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center
Directors Dan Jones calls a perfect storm of setbacks. Universities were seeing their
federal or state funding reduced, which meant mental health services weren’t given as
much money. Because of the recession, many of the private practice services at
universities closed down. And on top of that, Jones says, “many centers were dismantled
by politicians in the name of reform.”
Despite limited funds, resources and outside support, university mental health centers
are seeing more clients than ever. Jones says a campus mental health center can expect
to service 10 percent of the student population at least once. In 2007, MU’s enrollment
broke a record for the fifth-straight year at 28,070.
In the 2015 school year, MU again welcomed the largest enrollment on
campus with 35,050 students. That means, using the conservative 10
percent rule, the counseling services will attempt to service almost 700
more clients this year than in 2007.
Other factors are contributing to counseling centers across the country becoming
overwhelmed. Jones says that more students are seeking help — not only because there
are more students, but also because more of them are experiencing problems such as
anxiety and depression. There is also less of a stigma for them to seek help. And with the
growing panic on campus shootings and the mental illness factor that might play into
that, university mental health centers have been expected to set up procedures,
education and treatment options for troubled or troubling students.
Social Media
A riddle: What do you get when you pair a generation of people who were raised to be
competitive and success-driven with a seemingly smaller world connected through
social media?
The answer: A lot of anxiety and overwhelming feelings of inferiority.
Millennials are the first generation to go through all the trials of reaching adulthood
through the ever-present lens of social media. According to a 2013 study by the Pew
Research Center, social media usage for people between the ages of 18 and 29 increased
1,000 percent in the past eight years. Up to 98 percent of college students use social
media, according to Experian Simmons, a consumer insight service.
Experts and those who work with college students are still questioning if all that screen
time has changed the way students interact with people face to face. Craig Rooney,
director of behavioral health services at the MU Student Health Center, says he’s seen
more social anxiety in students. “I’ve wondered if social media and phones have
contributed to that,” he says.
Armstrong describes the difference between her parents’ college experience and her
own. “My mom, for instance, she didn’t know anything else that existed outside of Baker
University — even outside of her tennis teammates and her friends in her sorority. And
it was the same with my dad.”
Now, she says she is constantly made aware of her peers’ activities through social media.
“You’re constantly hearing about what this person did that was really awesome. It
always makes me wonder, what am I doing? What should I be doing? Is it enough?”
Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Stress Center, told Business Insider that social media
often contributes to college students’ stress when it is used to perpetuate harassment or
bullying (or, at MU, anonymous Yik Yak threats during the height of a campus protest).
But, Sinha says, social media also exaggerates anxiety because students use it to
compare themselves with their peers.
An often-sited MU study this year connected heavy Facebook use to feelings
of envy, which led to increased symptoms of depression. In a thesis last year by
Angie Zuo at University of Michigan, she found that college students who spend time on
Facebook engage more in social comparison with their peers. And the more college
students compare themselves, the more they showed signs of low self-esteem and
mental health problems. Millennials are spending an average of 3 hours and 12 minutes
engaging with social networks every day, according to data curated by The Wall Street
Journal in 2013.
Many times, the feelings inspired by seeing a friend’s Facebook or Snapchat create what
researchers and marketers call “fear of missing out” or FOMO. To this generation, even
a night out can become a bragging point, or another way to prove they are living a
seemingly exciting life.
Essena O’Neill, a 19-year-old Instagram star from Australia with half a million followers,
quit social media in late October, saying farewell in a teary final YouTube video. She quit
because, as she said in an Instagram post: “Social media … isn’t real. It’s a system based
on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers. It’s perfectly
orchestrated self-absorbed judgment. I was consumed by it.”
After her announcement, O’Neill went back and recaptioned several of her Instagram
photos to describe the behind-the-scenes process. In one photo, she is lounging on a
beach towel doing homework. She wrote: “Stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up
boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspiration. It’s
contrived perfection made to get attention.”
Researchers often refer to social media as a person’s “highlight reel,” where people post
the shiniest parts of their lives while never addressing the humdrum daily activities or
failures.
College students who understand that social media is used as a near-constant high
school reunion, among other things, put extreme care in creating a positive online
presence. Even now, after Parrie has received treatment and is better able to deal with
her mental illness, she says social media makes her more critical of herself. “They’re
showing their best life, and you’re seeing the ugliest part of you,” she says.
Awareness and Acceptance
Millennials have grown up under increased attention on mental health disorders: ADD,
depression, eating disorders and suicide are some of the most talked about. They watch
it play out — mischaracterized or not — on news reports, in books and TV shows, in
their friends and in themselves.
Parrie says watching some of her friends go through depression from an early age is
what made her realize she needed help. “It didn’t take me very long to get help in
comparison with most people,” she says. “I think that’s because I’ve had so many friends
from high school who dealt with it. I was able to recognize in myself what I’d seen in my
friends.”
Millennials as a generation have benefited from the gradual slack for the stigma of
mental health. Despite being harder on themselves, millennials were found to be more
accepting of others with mental illness than previous generations, according to a survey
conducted by American University this year. Of those surveyed, 85 percent said they
would have no problem making friends or working with someone experiencing a mental
illness. Millennials are more accepting and supportive of others and more open to those
who lead different lifestyles, the study says. They cheer one another on across various
platforms, support LGBT rights, believe racial diversity increases the quality of a
campus or workplace and have a more diverse group of friends than previous
generations.
LGBT Mental Health
LGBT students are much more likely to experience discrimination.
This community often struggles to find a sense of belonging on a college campus, which
can exacerbate or trigger mental health disorders.
At MU, staff at the Behavioral Health Center and the Counseling Center are trained to
support these students. Craig Rooney, director of the Behavioral Health Center, is
openly gay, which he says can be important for some students to know as they seek help.
The follow data was collected by The Healthy Minds from a 2013 survey of 14,000
college students.
By the Numbers:
23.5% thought about committing suicide in the past year
18.4% have had bad experiences with medication or therapy, compared to 6.7 percent
for heterosexuals
11.7% said the services offered aren’t sensitive to people struggling with sexual identity
But when it comes to themselves, millennials still carefully craft how others perceive
them: Fewer than 50 percent of respondents said they would be able to talk to friends
and family about seeking help.
At MU, the local Active Minds chapter, a nonprofit group dedicated to
mental health awareness and education, is working to make it easier to get
help. Anthony Orso, vice president of the organization, says the ultimate
goal is to reduce the stigma enough to create a “supportive community that
encourages people to seek treatment.
In a big step toward acceptance of mental illnesses on MU’s campus, Active Minds
successfully petitioned the administration to put the MU Counseling Center’s number
on the back of student ID cards. That’s vital, Orso says, because it shows that mental
health is just as important as other forms of personal safety, such as MU Police
Department and STRIPES, a student-run safe-ride program.
Many MU administrators are working with students and student groups to
increase awareness and education for mental health. Wellness Resource Center
director Kim Dude says that during some presentations, students are asked to raise their
hands if they have witnessed a friend drink too much. She says pretty much all raise
their hand. Almost as many raise their hands when asked if they are concerned about a
depressed friend.
“We have a student body who does care,” Dude says. “So it’s about teaching them how to
care and teaching them the warning signs.” The bystander intervention training — often
associated with a sexual assault intervention program called Green Dot through the
Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center — is one of the first lines of
defense. Dude says they train more than 1,000 people a year for the program. One of the
things they learn to recognize are signs of a person struggling with mental illness and
how to help that person or direct them to get help. With signs of suicide ideation, she
says, there are specific steps. But in other cases, they’re teaching “just how to be a good
human to other humans.”
Millennials might have trouble with resilience, but as Danica Wolf, coordinator of the
RSVP Center, says, they’ve made it this far. “Our students, they’re coping in a lot of
ways, but they’re coping.”
Multicultural Resources
Students who are ethnic minorities often experience several different compounding
layers of stress
In a 2013 study of minority students at the University of Texas at Austin by The Journal
of Multicultural Counseling and Development, African-American students were more
likely to feel stress directly related to discrimination. Asian-American students often
reported experiencing “imposter feelings” when people didn’t believe they deserved the
success they’ve achieved.
The researchers behind the study believe stereotypes that are often and strongly applied
to minorities play out in the students’ perceptions of themselves — and that can include
how much success they expect of themselves.
One of the problems of serving minority students, though, is that there is not as much
research compared to white students. Part of the issue is that minority populations,
especially black communities, hold a stronger stigma against mental health and seeking
treatment, according to a study this year by The Ohio State University.
At MU, staff at the Counseling Center and Behavioral Health Center report
that African-American students are seeking help at a slightly higher rate.
Staff has been reaching out to the community with more presentations and outreach
about mental health. It has connected with groups such as the Legion of Black
Collegians, the Black Culture Center and other minority groups. Often, the students
come to the staff and ask for them for assistance with the programming.
The Behavioral Health Center and the Counseling Center have non-white therapists who
work with students, including a therapist fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. In its
second year, a People of Color support group through the Counseling Center allows
minority students to discuss problems such as encountered racism, micro-aggressions
and living on a majority-white campus.
In lieu of recent protests on campus, students are looking to increase this
outreach and programming at MU. In a list of demands, Concerned Student
1950 says, “We demand the University of Missouri increases funding and
resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose
of hiring additional mental health professionals; particularly those of
color…”
In a back room of the Wellness Resource Center on the MU campus sits a massage chair
that students can rent out for 15 minutes. Dude says 1,200 people used it last year just to
sit and have moments to themselves.
Terry Wilson, co-project director of health promotion and wellness at the Student
Health Center and coordinator of the Contemplative Practice Center, says student
demand led to the growth of several mindfulness-based classes. MU’s Contemplative
Practice Center won the Best Practices in College Health award by the American College
Health Association in 2015. The center offers sessions in mindfullness yoga and
meditation, stress reduction and biofeedback. Several of the courses can be taken for
credit.
Wilson says the Loving-Kindness course in particular has blown her away with the
change she sees in students. She says students who had previously been dependent on
alcohol or drugs tell her “they decided that’s not what they want to do anymore.” Wilson
says students learn “how to work with difficult people in their lives, or really just how to
love themselves.” It’s something Wilson believes is important to this generation of
students on campus, especially with the boiling-over tension of recent weeks.
Millennials still carefully craft how others perceive them: Fewer than 50 percent of
respondents said they would be able to talk to friends and family about seeking help.
One focus of her classes is to make students feel comfortable with their stress and
struggles. “They think they’re flawed and broken,” she says. “We’re all part of the human
being club.”
Wolf says she’s seen an increase in the interaction between student groups working
together to help one another feel heard and understood. She says faculty and student
groups are working to give students the chance to share their stories with one another.
“We all crave connection and community,” she says. “There’s so much power in hearing,
‘Me, too.’”
Moving Forward
For students such as Armstrong and Parrie, seeing hope from a place of feeling flawed,
doubtful and overwhelmed can seem impossible. But they’re finding ways to create a
meaningful life for themselves and helping others do the same.
Some students find strength in friends or family, some rely on the services offered on
campus, and some dig deep to find their passions. Perhaps one of the greatest strengths
of the millennial generation is how connected it is, especially to friends. Rooney says
friends are often the first resource students turn to for help with worries about mental
illness, and many times, those coming to the counseling center are accompanied by a
close friend.
Parrie is reconnecting to campus life, to friends and to herself. She’s taking on
responsibility and finds out if she was voted student body vice president on Wednesday
night. She tries to carve out time each day to take a breath and focus on herself. She’s
also learning how not to feel guilty for doing so.
Armstrong knows she’ll always be learning to manage her mental health, but she’s been
steady lately. She’s working on it. A character in Armstrong’s novel, inspired by one of
her closest friends, sees it as his mission to ask as many people, “Do you know what I
like about you?” His answer is always the same: “Everything.”
Armstrong has the acronym of that question “DYKWILAY” tattooed on her arm as a
reminder of what she went through, much like Parrie’s tattoo. They are permanent
reminders of defeating doubt.
With help, millennials can be comfortable with imperfection. They can find out that,
sometimes, it takes help to learn how to let go of what the world demands and seek
happiness instead. Sometimes it’s OK to show weakness.
Sometimes, it takes a pause to move forward.
GUEST COMMENTARY: Free speech must be
protected
Well, Mizzou, someone has to say something. Someone has to have what Otto von
Bismarck called, zivilcourage, i.e. civil courage.
Recent events at MU have made it abundantly clear that this university has
chosen to abdicate its liberal heritage. Freedom of thought and expression,
those Enlightenment pillars that the Western university is founded upon,
are seemingly no longer welcome here.
We have students who want words and phrases they despise “banished” from campus.
Moreover, the heroes of the hour, Concerned Student 1950 and their supporters don’t
apparently believe in freedom of the press if it infringes on their “safe space” that
happens to be on taxpayer-funded public property.
Additionally, offensive thoughts and racist subconscious impulses are to be purged via
diversity training to prevent them from occurring in “microaggressive” speech or
conduct that might make someone feel uncomfortable.
We’re also currently on a witch-hunt for “systematic” or “institutional racism,” whose
allegers haven’t bothered to clearly or comprehensively substantiate what it is or how it
permeates MU in their public discourse.
As they were deemed not true believers in witches, UM System President Tim Wolfe and
former Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin are thus far the first victims to be burned at the
stake, convicted, ironically, on charges of a type of witchcraft known as racial
insensitivity.
Now, the ascendant regime has wasted no time consolidating its power, taking steps to
find more heretics to commit to the flames. Meet their new “reporting mechanism,” our
own MU Police Department.
According to a widely disseminated evil, MUPD is asking for students and faculty to
inform them of “hateful/hurtful speech or actions,” so they can alert the MU Office of
Student Conduct for potential disciplinary action against the perpetrators.
Don’t worry though, according to Missourian reporting, Maj.— I mean Commissar —
Brian Weimer assures us, that “hateful speech is not a crime,” and there will be no
“citations” or “arrests,” just the threat of punishment, e.g. expulsion, obstacles to tenure
or termination, etc., for the violators that his outfit is supposed to expose to those
delivering such sentences.
Furthermore, Weimer also admits the subjective nature of these infractions, noting what
constitutes “hateful and hurtful speech” has no clear definition, as it’s “different for
various people.”
Therefore, in any future case involving purported hateful speech, as there is no objective
metric of what qualifies as hateful or hurtful, the accused’s guilt is largely to be
determined solely at the behest of his or her accuser’s personal and capricious whims.
As the last couple of months have lucidly illustrated, we have no shortage of ideologues,
who are easy to affront and punitive in response.
As they find racism and prejudice anywhere and everywhere, their feelings and
sensibilities are perpetually offended.
According to them, it’s in our minds, conscious or otherwise, as they are seemingly more
intimately familiar with our mental contents than we are, both individually and
collectively. Our “implicit bias” apparently can be regularly and accurately inferred from
our body language, as in the example of the safety officer who “chose to walk at a
moderate speed” instead of run after the student who slurred the Legion of Black
Collegians.
Thomas Jefferson’s statue off the Quad is apparently a traumatic eyesore and thereby a
“form of oppression.”
Moreover, what’s most disconcerting is supposedly failing to assent to their narratives is
an act of harm, i.e. “white silence is violence.” Indeed, given their penchants for
linguistic mischief and drama, my dissent is likely to be construed as “genocide.”
If Wolfe's and Loftin’s forced resignations are any indication, each member of MU’s
faculty, staff and student body better take care with every glance, word, action or lack
thereof because he or she could be next.
Thusly, and in an institution that’s supposed to cultivate heterodoxy, our liberal soul is
now imperiled by an overbearing orthodoxy that increasingly looks intent to crush those
opposed to its new order for creating higher education utopia. A weaponized MUPD
looking for those who besmirch paradise and or don’t comply with the dominant
ideology is just further evidence.
Disturbing assaults on liberty like this one need to be emphatically resisted. Regardless
of one’s views on race relations at MU, I’m imploring all my fellow members of the
Missouri School of Journalism to stand together and denounce this and any policy
designed to curb speech at MU as unacceptable. We need to protect freedom of
expression and thereby freedom of thought, ideals we claim to espouse in our
classrooms and value as fundamental to our profession.
If we don’t, it not only shows that the world’s oldest journalism school isn’t the best but
that we’re no journalism school at all.
Ben Kupiszewski is graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism.
Campus adults, protect free speech: Our
view
The Editorial Board 6:27 p.m. EST November 18, 2015
Students are right to protest for diversity, but First Amendment
protects offensive speech.
When student protests and the resignation of the university president revealed deep
racial problems at the University of Missouri last week, it seemed at first like a
singular event.
Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that similar tensions are raging on campuses
from Connecticut to California. Students are right to speak out for diversity and sensitivity
to racial and gender concerns. But too often, this has been happening in ways that
trample freedom of speech. It’s bad enough that college students don’t seem to grasp how
broad the nation's protections for free speech are. Worse is when the adults responsible
for running universities ignore what they surely know — that the First Amendment protects
just about all speech.
Consider the recent controversy at Yale, sparked by the mere potential of
offensiveHalloween costumes.
After an administration email suggested that students be sensitive about wearing such
costumes, Yale Associate House Master Erika Christakis politely suggested a different
tack: “If you don’t like a costume … look away, or tell them you are offended," she wrote in
an email, quoting her husband, House Master Nicholas Christakis. “Free speech and the
ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.”
For anyone aware of repeated Supreme Court decisions protecting Americans' right to say
outrageously offensive things — such as yelling "God hates fags" at soldiers' funerals
— this hardly seems objectionable. But at Yale, the reaction was swift and
unforgiving. Students confronted Nicholas Christakis, also a professor and physician,
shouting over his attempts to speak. “You are disgusting,” one young woman screamed at
him, tossing out expletives. Some students demanded that the couple be ousted from their
positions, presumably because they had the temerity to utter an idea with which students
disagreed.
The upshot? Nicholas Christakis apologized to students while senior administrators looked
on. Yale President Peter Salovey apologized, too. “We failed you,” he told a group of
minority students, according to news accounts.
If this were an isolated incident, it might mean little outside Yale. It isn’t.
On the Missouri campus, students and professors tried to stop a student photographer
from taking photos of a public gathering. At Wesleyan University, some students petitioned
to defund the college newspaper after it ran an op-ed questioning the tactics of the Black
Lives Matter movement. At California’s Claremont McKenna College, where protests and a
hunger strike erupted over racial bias last week, some students who disagreed with
protesters’ tactics were afraid to speak up. In a letter endorsed by nearly 300 students,
they wrote: “Fear of our fellow students’ rage silenced us.”
These incidents are emblematic of a scary trend in which students insist on being
protected from any speech they find hurtful, even if doing that threatens academic
freedom and silences debate.
A few universities are fighting these attacks by forcefully affirming devotion to free speech
— even speech that some find “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrong-headed,” as
the University of Chicago put it in a statement in January. Students battling bias today
might recall that civil rights activists exercised freedom of speech to knock down racial
barriers and change the nation’s laws and attitudes. Back then, many looked on the
activists' speech as offensive and answered with bats, fire hoses and guns.
The adults in charge of college campuses owe it to students to remind them that freedom
of expression is among the most fundamental of American rights, and that students can’t
get someone fired simply for expressing ideas they don’t like.
Several days after the public shaming of the Yale house master, university President
Salovey finally said publicly what needed saying all along, affirming the university's
"bedrock principle of the freedom to speak and be heard, without fear of intimidation,
threats or harm." Along with the new courses in diversity being promised at Yale and
elsewhere, college presidents ought to consider mandating a course in the history and
meaning of the First Amendment.
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news
staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
MU names new head of research, graduate
studies
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 11:52 am
University of Missouri interim Chancellor Hank Foley on Wednesday named Mark
McIntosh as interim vice chancellor for research, graduate studies and economic
development.
He takes over the position immediately, according to a university news release. McIntosh was
professor and chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology and Immunology and associate
vice chancellor for research and strategic initiatives. McIntosh's new job includes roles Foley
was filling before his appointment as interim chancellor — Foley held the titles of senior vice
chancellor for research and graduate studies at MU and executive vice president of academic
affairs for the UM System.
Foley said McIntosh will work to repair administration relations with graduate students.
"He has a wealth of institutional knowledge and has served in roles that provide the critical
background necessary to fill this position," Foley said in the news release. "I'm looking forward
to working with him as we move forward and continue to address issues related to our graduate
students as well as increase our research productivity."
McIntosh's career at the University of Missouri began in 1981. He was named the first director of
the university's DNA Core Facility, the first of several core research facilities at MU, in 1987. He
was named director of research core facilities in 2004. He also served as the director of graduate
studies for 14 years in the molecular biology and immunology department.
"Graduate education and research are critical components of the University of Missouri,"
McIntosh said in the news release. "Our graduate students provide the engine that drives our
research productivity and offer fresh and creative perspectives as they assist our faculty with
teaching and research every day here at MU."
He said it's important to maintain the strong research infrastructure at MU.
McIntosh earned his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a
postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry from 1978 to 1981 at the University of California at
Berkeley.
Interim chancellor names new interim vice
chancellor for research and graduate studies
COLUMBIA — MU interim chancellor Hank Foley named Mark McIntosh as
the new interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies.
McIntosh was formerly the professor and chair of the Department of Molecular
Microbiology and Immunology at MU. He will fill the vacancy Hank Foley left when he
moved from that position to interim MU chancellor following the resignation of R.
Bowen Loftin.
McIntosh will start working in his new position right away. The announcement was
made Wednesday morning.
In an email sent to MU students and faculty, Foley said McIntosh will bring to the job a
"wealth of institutional knowledge." Foley cited doctoral credentials as a strength that
McIntosh will bring to the job.
McIntosh received his undergraduate degree from Knox College in Illinois, followed by
his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Texas at Austin.
He has worked at MU since 1981 and served as the first director of MU's DNA Core
Facility in 1987. He started as the director of all research core facilities in 2004.
McIntosh said working with MU's Research Core Facilities staff has provided him with a
foundation for his new work. He said his work with investigators in the past has helped
him get to know many of them personally.
"I'm excited to work in this environment," McIntosh said. "I've gained lots of experience
and understanding of what our research strengths are in the different schools and can
integrate them all in seeking new resources."
Throughout his career, McIntosh's primary research involved bacterial pathogenesis,
the process by which bacteria infect organisms and cause disease. In the process, he has
received science grants from a variety of organizations, including the National Science
Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
McIntosh said he feels his new role is a wonderful opportunity for him to advance
research and graduate studies' missions on campus.
"I have been heavily involved at Mizzou for over 30 years, so this is a chance to work at
the campus level to advance both fields," he said.
Foley said in the email that he looks forward to working with McIntosh in his position as
interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies.
"I have the utmost confidence in Mark's ability," Foley said.
McIntosh said he hopes to address graduate education issues and aging research
infrastructure, including lab facilities and instruments.
"I want to put together a nurturing and supportive environment to attract and retain the
best graduate students and faculty," McIntosh said. "They're one of the driving forces in
our research, so we must sit down with them, discuss all issues and put together the best
possible program for everyone."
MU Alert and MUPD news releases explained
While both are intended to inform the public, news releases are intended for the media.
Whenever a crime unfolds on or around campus, MU Alert and MU Police Department
news releases bridge the gap between informed officials and affected students.
MU Alert uses text messages, emails, website updates and social media to quickly spread
awareness of potential or immediate threats to campus. These include “weather-related
emergencies, bomb threats and criminal activity on or near campus,” according to the MU Alert
website.
MU Alert is mainly coordinated by MUPD and MU spokesman Christian Basi, who collaborate
on informing the campus.
When sending out an alert, many factors are taken into consideration beyond just time, MUPD
Maj. Scott Richardson said.
“The reliability of the person reporting the information to us, the danger of what the person
might be reporting, what is the possibility of one of our faculty, student, staff or visitor getting
injured in our area ... Those types of things are what we take into consideration before sending
out an alert,” Richardson said.
Although MU Alert and MUPD news releases serve to inform the public, the information
platforms are geared toward different audiences, and each outlet reports different types of crime.
“A crime alert might come out for something that is immediate, and the campus needs to be
notified,” Richardson said. “That would come out to for example, if you signed up for the text
alerts or you received it in your email. So those are alerts. Press releases would be items that we
send to the press. We have an email that includes all of the news affiliates so that would be press
release.”
News releases typically detail recent arrests that were made, information that would be sought
out by the media, but would not be necessary to inform the public in an urgent way as featured in
MU Alert.
“Media releases and press releases are just simply what we want to get out to the media to inform
them of something,” MUPD Maj. Brian Weimer said. “We send them out a lot of times if we are
getting a lot of media calls about a specific subject so it’s easy to contact everyone at once that
way so I don’t get a lot of calls but it could be a lot of things, like if we want to alert the media of
something important, such as our reaccreditation efforts back in July.”
News releases also can potentially aid police efforts in locating a suspect involved in a crime,
informing the media and creating a chain of awareness ending ultimately with the public.
In instances like the threats made in the evening of Nov. 10, MU Alerts and news releases not
only work to inform affected students but also quell circulating rumors.
The MU Alert website was updated twice Nov. 10, stating that extra security measures were
being taken in light of MUPD's investigation of threats of violence made on Yik Yak.
On Nov. 11, MUPD updated users on the status of the investigation by announcing that a suspect
had been apprehended, and that MU leaders are working to improve the safety of the community.
"Mizzou leadership hears your concerns and condemns threats made against our community," an
MU alert website update said," We want you to know we're here and are focused on your safety
and well-being. We're working as a team to continue to move forward as a stronger community."
Critics ignore historical context:
Opposing view
Michelle Menchaca6:23 p.m. EST November 18, 2015
Campus protests across the country in recent weeks were not
reactions to isolated incidents.
The free speech critique is most often used to dismiss campus activists and detract from
issues of pervasive racism and inequality.
Campus protests across the country in recent weeks were not reactions to isolated
incidents. They were targeted responses to a history of administrative inaction on the
concerns of already marginalized groups. Activists organized to protest a system that has
disrespected, devalued and dehumanized people of color.
When activists bring up inclusion and racial injustice, almost by default, opponents attack
them for perceived political correctness, oversensitivity and supposed ignorance of First
Amendment rights.
At Yale, residential administrator Erika Christakis sent an email to students questioning the
university’s efforts to discourage offensive Halloween costumes. It was her right to express
these views, just as it is the right of students to respond and, yes, to call for her resignation
from a job whose role is to create a welcoming space for students. I don’t believe she or
her husband should be removed, but I support the students’ right to seek removal.
This activism at Yale is the result of longstanding racial tensions and marginalization of
black students. It is not an overzealous reaction to a single email. Yet that has garnered
disproportionate coverage.
At the University of Missouri, protesters blocked a student photographer from taking
pictures of a public gathering. Activists said they wanted to create a safe space, and
the news media went into a frenzy. The photographer had a legal right to take
pictures, but missing from articles lambasting the activists was the historical
context. The mainstream media do a disservice to black communities when they fail
to cover black pain. Later, protesters apologized and affirmed support for media
presence.
Campus activists understand what freedom of expression means — they exert these rights
each time they organize events and stage protests. But they also understand that civil
rights and free speech are not mutually exclusive, and one should not be used to dismiss
the other.
Michelle Menchaca, a Duke University senior, is a columnist for The Chronicle, an
independent student newspaper.
Three KU students refuse to resign campus
leadership positions
Jessie Pringle, Adam Moon and Zach George are leaders of KU Student Senate
Their leadership had been called into question by members of the student group
The controversy comes amid racial tensions on the Lawrence campus
BY MARÁ ROSE WILLIAMS
mdwilliams@kcstar.com
LAWRENCE
Three leaders of the University of Kansas Student Senate remained in their posts
Wednesday despite calls for their resignation by some group members.
Senate President Jessie Pringle, and chief of staff Adam Moon, whose leadership
had been questioned by members of a committee of the student organization amid
racial tensions on campus, said they had no plans to step down.
Vice President Zach George, who had also been asked to resign, could not be
reached for comment, but he participated in the student senate meeting
Wednesday night.
The three student government leaders had been given until 5 p.m. Wednesday to
resign or face an impeachment process. That process could take weeks.
At the Student Senate meeting, Moon said he expected a robust debate over a call
from the group to support lowering the election spending cap from $2,000 to
$1,000. That issue was included in demands made last week by Rock Chalk
Invisible Hawk, a predominantly black student group fighting for more diversity
and inclusion on the KU campus.
Lowering election spending would even the playing field at least financially, for
students from less affluent families interested in running for a student office.
The other matter that was expected to be debated was a call from the Invisible
Hawk group for a multicultural student government, separate from the Student
Senate.
“That is something that we have never had here at KU,” Moon said.
Earlier Wednesday, members of Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk spoke at a news
conference about changes they believe will make their campus more inclusive and
welcoming to minorities and marginalized students.
Dressed all in black, the members said they were showing solidarity with students
on other campuses who say their school administrations have failed to make
black and other marginalized students feel safe and welcome.
The Invisible Hawk group said they formed in August 2014 because they are
“tired of systemic racism“ not being addressed on the Lawerence campus.
“Racism and sexism is here on this campus and we need to address them,” said
Katherine Rainey, a senior psychology and anthropology major from Shawnee.
“We are tired of our cries for justice being silenced and dismissed,” said Kynnedi
Grant, a junior journalism major from St. Louis. “We are here. We are powerful.
You can't keep pushing us away.”
The student group became more visible on the KU campus last week
after an event on race and inclusion that followed the University of
Missouri student protests. At that forum, moderated by Chancellor
Gray-Little, and attended by hundreds of students, members of
Invisible Hawk took the stage with signs on racism and
discrimination.
The Invisible Hawk members who led Wednesday’s news conference said that
while they did not call for the ouster of the three student body leaders, they did
support the push for the resignations.
The group’s efforts to improve the KU campus climate have already made an
impact. The university is creating a team to address demands from student
protesters and expects to release a plan by mid-January that will include
mandatory diversity training for all students and staff.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Missouri protests
are 'awful déjà vu' of her own time at UGA
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the acclaimed journalist and the first African-American woman
to attend the University of Georgia, said Friday she was struck by "an awful déjà vu" when
reflecting on the recent campus protests at the University of Missouri.
Indeed, as she wrote in a new essay for the New Yorker, the Missouri protests, which students
said were sparked by the administration's unsatisfactory response in the face of a series of
racially motivated incidents on campus, echoed the injuries she faced as a student herself, at
UGA, 54 years ago.
Hunter-Gault's brief essay is a catalogue of some of what she faced as one of two black students
on campus sometimes surrounded by groups of racist white students.
One night, as Hunter-Gault remembered, a group of people, including students, massed outisde
her dorm, shouting racial slurs. The official response was late-coming.
"The town police threw around tear gas, ostensibly to disperse an already-thinning crowd. By the
time the state troopers arrived, the protesters were long gone," she wrote, adding that the school
briefly suspended her "for, they said, my own safety."
Slurs were a regular occurance, as was the shouted label of "Freedom Rider," Hunter-Gault
wrote — though "they didn’t realize they were complimenting me when they yelled (that) out."
One night, as Hunter-Gault remembered, a group of people, including students, massed outisde
her dorm, shouting racial slurs. The official response was late-coming.
"The town police threw around tear gas, ostensibly to disperse an already-thinning crowd. By the
time the state troopers arrived, the protesters were long gone," she wrote, adding that the school
briefly suspended her "for, they said, my own safety."
Slurs were a regular occurance, as was the shouted label of "Freedom Rider," Hunter-Gault
wrote — though "they didn’t realize they were complimenting me when they yelled (that) out."
Administrators at Mizzou are riding the gravy
train
Nov. 18, 2015
I was disgusted to see "Ousted Mizzou chancellor will keep most of salary" (Nov. 17) by reporter
Jeremy Kohler. He did some fine journalistic digging and uncovered that fired MU Chancellor R.
Bowen Loftin’s lifestyle will be far different than that of the students and taxpayers who were shafted
with the compensation package given to him.
The story details not just the compensation over $500,000, plus a free car and 90 days' free rent in the
chancellor’s mansion on campus, but what was most disturbing was Kohler’s uncovering that the
compensation places the ex-chancellor not at the top of the salary pyramid of coaches and administrators, but
as just one of the top 50 fat cats being paid for by the students' tuition and the state. I would love to know who
the other 49 administrators and coaches are, and how much the students are paying them.
As an alum, while in school, I had to work two jobs to pay for my four-year college education. It is clear that I
should have been an administrative bureaucrat at Mizzou, so I could have ridden the gravy train and had more
time each night to sleep rather than work the graveyard shift.
The reporting of the disgraces at Mizzou last week indicated that there are administrators hired for every
conceivable function, regardless of the necessity. I would love to see the Post-Dispatch publish the number of
non-teaching positions and who is filling them, along with what those individuals are paid.
The alumni association can kiss me goodbye; there obviously are enough funds available to Mizzou to give exchancellor Loftin a gift that will keep on giving.
Stuart M. Katz • Chesterfield
Woman sends interim chancellor letter about
Planned Parenthood
Watch story: http://www.komu.com/news/woman-sends-interim-chancellor-letter-aboutplanned-parenthood/
COLUMBIA - In a letter sent by email to MU Interim Chancellor Hank Foley, Jessi Miller of
Columbia said Planned Parenthood services are vital to her health and the health of women
across mid-Missouri.
Miller suffers from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, a disease that causes many complications for
women. She said one of her complications is a mentrual cycle that can take months to complete.
Birth control shots can help to prevent that issue, and Miller said she receives her shot from
Planned Parenthood of Columbia.
Miller said the next closest Planned Parenthood is in St. Louis, and she can not afford to make
that trip.
However, Miller said her own health issues are not the main reason she wrote the note. Her
biggest motivator was her now-deceased little brother Matthew. Miller said Matthew suffered
from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. She said she watched her brother go from a fun-loving
little boy to a teenager who couldn't walk. Eventually Matthew became bedridden and passed
away at the age of 24.
Duchenne is a genetic disease, and Miller is a carrier. She fears if she ever had a child, the child
would have the disease.
"For me, my situation, I do not want to pass on the gene," Miller said. "I don't want to put
anyone through that pain, I don't feel its right to do that. I can't go to a hospital and say 'my life is
in danger' because my life isn't in danger from that...my soul is."
Miller also said Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome makes her high-risk for pregnancy difficulties.
In Missouri, a woman can only get an abortion at a hospital if having the baby puts the mother in
a possible life-threatening situation. Currently, Planned Parenthood of Columbia is the only midMissouri facility where a woman can get an abortion, using the medication abortion method.
"We need these services in mid-Missouri. Not just because of my story, but because of safety.
Because we need to keep women safe."
KOMU 8 News spoke with Mike Hoey of the Missouri Catholic Conference. The organization
sent a letter to MU urging leadership to not renew its relationship with Planned Parenthood.
KOMU 8 News asked Hoey about abortions for women who are at a direct health risk if they
have the child.
"If a women has an at-risk pregnancy, she should go to the hospital to see if it can be treated and
taken care of, so the baby can be healthy and the women can be healthy as well," Hoey said. "In
the tragic situation that it is a life or death situation, the hospital can deal with that as well."
Hoey said Planned Parenthood does not need to be involved in these situations, because he
believes the hospital is the best place to get treatment.
KOMU 8 News also reached out to MU but has not received any comment on Miller's letter.
MU threat suspect bonds out of jail
Watch story: http://www.abc17news.com/news/lower-bond-approved-for-mu-threatsuspect/36526176
COLUMBIA, Mo. - ABC 17 confirmed a suspect who was arrested for posting online
threats to the MU campus has bonded out of jail Wednesday night.
A Boone County judge approved a $10,000 bond for Hunter Park early on Wednesday. Park was
initially held without bond, but on Wednesday he was granted access to home detention with a
GPS monitoring device.
The court decided on the changes with a few conditions, which includes no access to the internet
and a psychiatric evaluation.
Around 50 people were in court to support Park and his family.
Jeff Hillbrenner, Park's attorney, asked Judge Kimberly Shaw to lower the bond by citing two
other similar situations in which threats were made over social media in both Phelps and
Nodaway County.
Connor Stottlemyer, a student at Northwest Missouri State University, was also arrested last
week for making a threat toward black students on a social media site. He was later released on a
$10,000 bond.
Campus officials were flooded with calls last week, after three specific posts were made on the
site, YikYak.
According to a probable cause statement, Park admitted to making the posts in front of two MU
police officers in his dorm room at Missouri S&T in Rolla, but when asked if the posts "were a
saber rattling incident; [Park] replied 'pretty much.'"
Park's next court date is scheduled for December 23. His attorney told the court he has since
withdrawn from school.
Bond set for man accused of online threats
toward Mizzou
Nov. 18, 2015
By SUMMER BALLENTINE
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A judge on Wednesday set bond at $10,000 cash for a man accused of making
online threats against black students and faculty at University of Missouri's Columbia campus.
Boone County Associate Judge Kimberly Shaw previously denied bond for 19-year-old Hunter M. Park. She
agreed during a Wednesday court appearance to give him the opportunity to post bond and stay with his
parents in their Lake St. Louis home.
Authorities say the threats showed up Nov. 10 on the anonymous location-based messaging app Yik Yak. A
university police officer says Park, when confronted the next day in his Rolla college dorm room, admitted he
wrote the postings.
The threats came amid turmoil at the University of Missouri as students protested the handling of racial issues
and two top administrators stepped down.
Boone County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Brouck Jacobs, who argued against bond, said if Park is
released from jail there's no guarantee that he won't be able to access the internet and make a threat that would
"cause sheer panic."
Park said nothing during the hearing, but dozens of family and friends, some holding tissue paper and written
prayers, at one point stood to show support for him.
Defense attorney Jeff Hilbrenner had asked for bond to be set, saying his stay in the county jail made Park's
cystic fibrosis worse and that he doesn't believe Park poses a threat. Hilbrenner said Park has withdrawn from
college.
Police reports obtained by The Associated Press show University of Missouri police also responded in January
when a female friend at the Columbia campus reported that Park told her he planned to buy a firearm to kill
himself. Park at that time agreed to go to a psychiatric hospital and told police he had a history of depression,
but said he did not intend to kill himself.
Police at the Rolla campus, according to reports, also said Park in October 2014 had been involuntarily
committed to a psychiatric hospital after threatening to jump off a residence hall.
If Park is released on bond, he must stay in home detention under GPS monitoring. He would be banned from
accessing the internet, and would need to immediately seek psychiatric treatment.
Judge reconsiders, sets bond for suspect in MU
Yik Yak threats
COLUMBIA — Hunter M. Park, 19, cradled a blue medical device in his cuffed hands as
he stood before a judge Wednesday.
Park, a student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in
Rolla, was arrested in his dorm room Nov. 11. MU Police said they had
linked him to threats posted on Yik Yak, a social media platform that allows
users to keep their identities private. The threats expressed the intent to
shoot black people on MU's campus.
The Yik Yak threats caused a panic on campus and in Columbia on the night of Nov. 10
and into Nov. 11 as some businesses closed and some MU students didn't attend classes.
Park has been charged with the Class C felony of making a terrorist threat.
He had previously been denied bond, but Park’s attorney, Jeffrey Hilbrenner, asked
Boone County Associate Circuit Judge Kim Shaw to set a $10,000 cash-only bond
because Park has cystic fibrosis.
Hilbrenner filed a motion Friday detailing Park’s medical problems, which weren’t
specifically mentioned in the Nov. 11 bond hearing. Park takes 19 medications daily,
needs a special vest to loosen mucus in his lungs and requires sterile water to clean his
various masks, inhalers and nebulizers, according to court documents.
Hilbrenner called Park’s cystic fibrosis a “serious” health condition and said that his
client had required hospitalization during his week in jail.
Hilbrenner also noted that Park has the support of friends and family, gesturing toward
the unusually crowded courtroom. “Everyone here supporting Hunter, please stand,” he
said.
More than half the people in the rows — jammed with adults, teens and children —
stood. Those seated looked around in awe. A man waiting his turn in front of the judge
exclaimed, “Holy crap!”
Hilbrenner also said Park is not a threat to the community and that no weapons had
been found at his residence in Rolla or at his parents' home, which indicated he could
not have carried out his threat.
Assistant Boone County Prosecutor Jonathan Jacobs said whether or not Park could
have carried out the threat wasn’t the issue. Jacobs said Park caused “pandemonium” on
MU's campus. Jacobs said he was concerned Park could have access to a telephone or
computer after posting bond.
Jacobs said he wanted Park to receive psychiatric treatment if he was granted bond.
After a few minutes of silent deliberation, Shaw set Park’s bond for $10,000 cash with
the conditions that he remain in home detention, wear a GPS monitoring device, not use
the Internet and receive psychiatric treatment.
Park was being held in solitary confinement in the Boone County Jail. He had not
posted bond as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to a jail employee.
Judge grants bond to man involved in MU
threats
BOONE COUNTY - A Boone County judge granted bond to Hunter Park, the man charged
with allegedly making threats against MU on social media.
Park, 19, was arrested in Rolla last week after allegedly making threats on the anonymous app
Yik Yak.
Park is placed on a $10,000 cash-only bond. He will be on home detention with a GPS monitored
ankle bracelet.
Assistant Boone County Prosecutor Brouck Jacobs said Park will not be allowed internet access.
University of Missouri faces tough legislative
year, area lawmakers say
By Rudi Keller
Wednesday, November 18, 2015 at 2:00 pm
After the resignations last week of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe and
Columbia campus Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, state Rep. Chuck Basye attended meetings
in Macon and Sedalia that included several legislative colleagues.
One was a daytime business meeting and the other was a fundraiser, but the message was the
same — the university is in trouble with lawmakers.
“The big topic while we were eating lunch was the situation at MU, and it was not positive,”
Basye, R-Rocheport, told the MU Retirees Association during its inaugural legislative breakfast.
At the fundraiser, Basye said, “everyone that attended that was really angry it had taken place.”
About 50 members of the retirees’ association attended the breakfast, which is part of the group’s
effort to be more involved in monitoring and seeking to influence the legislature. Basye was
joined by Reps. Stephen Webber, D-Columbia, Caleb Rowden, R-Columbia, and Kip Kendrick,
D-Columbia, and all four predicted a difficult year ahead as lawmakers write the budget and
debate legislation.
“I don’t think any member of this organization who cares about the university would differ with
that,” president-elect Kitty Dickerson said. “We have invested large portions of our lives to build
up this place.”
The issues legislators will want to discuss range from the late notice that graduate students would
lose health insurance, the university’s relationship with Planned Parenthood and the protests that
helped bring down the administration, Webber said. The “golden parachute” for Loftin — a
$344,000 a year job with other payments next year — didn’t help either, Webber said.
Republicans hold a two-thirds majority in the legislature, and that will work against the
university, Webber said.
“There are a bunch of extremists in the Missouri legislature that do not value higher education,”
he said.
Two examples are efforts to limit research, he said. Missouri Right to Life has called for a ban on
embryonic stem cell research at public universities, and Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, has
attacked a research project intended to study the effect of a 72-hour waiting period for an
abortion.
“We cannot have legislators from Jefferson City demanding to check the research methodology
of graduate students and professors so they can decide whether that research is justified,”
Webber said.
Kendrick said he expects legislative efforts to redefine tenure and limit research. “MU is going to
be in a spotlight, and a lot of it is not going to be friendly legislation, either,” Kendrick said.
Rowden, who is competing with Webber for the Senate seat now held by Schaefer, said the goal
for area lawmakers will be to emphasize the university’s positives.
“If we can go down there and create the narrative in Jefferson City that Mizzou is still the best in
the state and one of the best in the country in spitting out and producing kids that are ready to
engage and thrive in the 21st century workforce, that means a lot,” Rowden said.
Right now, he said, his colleagues think the university is in turmoil, unable to cope with campus
racism and without effective leadership.
“It is going to be a tough year, there is no question about it,” Rowden said.
MU students vote against library fees
COLUMBIA — MU students voted Wednesday against an increase in tuition
fees that would have gone toward increasing services at MU Libraries.
Students would have paid an additional $5 per credit hour in 2016-17. The fee would
have increased to $15 per credit hour by 2021-22. With the “no” vote, MU Libraries will
remain the university’s only academic division without funding from a student fee.
Fifty-four percent of the 7,820 students that cast a ballot voted against the measure.
Emma Henderson, the Board of Elections Commissioners chairwoman, believes a
#FailtheFee Twitter campaign that advertised the fee as a $450 spike in annual tuition
turned students off to the idea.
“That seemed to be what garnered the most attention,” Henderson said.
The Missouri Students Association ballot said the funding would have gone toward
“continuation of newly implemented 24-hour access to library facilities; major
renovations to enhance study spaces; expanded collections of electronic and print
materials; innovative service.”
According to MU Libraries’ website, the annual library budget is $18 million. By the
2021-22 academic year if the measure had passed, the libraries would have had an
estimated additional $12.9 million.
Joshua Tennison, the MSA Senate historian, was disappointed the fee wasn’t passed
because of MU’s tenuous position as a member of the Association of American
Universities. MU has been a member of the AAU since 1908.
“We are currently at the bottom of that accreditation, and we are at risk of being kicked
out because we are such a low-quality research institution,” Tennison said. “We were
funded to be a research institution, and that is something we are severely lacking in
comparison to our fellow members.”
Amy Wasowicz, an MSA senator with the Journalism School, echoed that sentiment.
“It’s not just about renovating the spaces within the library,” Wasowicz said. “It’s
making sure we have all the proper journals and research facilities to keep high quality
professors that would help students retain the value of the degree they’re already paying
for.”
The MSA presidential election was also on the ballot, but announcing the results has
been postponed until 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Traditions Plaza. Two of the candidates
received campaign infractions, and the election commissioners want to give them due
process.
The votes for the library fee and MSA presidential election were supposed
to be on Nov. 11 but were pushed back one week in the wake of UM System
President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin’s resignations.
MU students fail library fee
After months of controversy, students decided that funding the library should not be entirely
their responsibility.
MU’s student body voted to fail the controversial library fee proposed by MU Libraries,
according to election results.
The library fee received a 54 percent vote against the fee, according to the Missouri Students
Association’s Twitter. The fee needed a 60 percent vote in favor to be implemented in summer
2016.
If passed, the fee would have cost each student $5 per credit hour and continued to increase by
$2 each year until it reaches $15 per credit hour in the year 2022. At its peak, the fee would have
encompassed 1.4 percent of the total cost of attendance and provided the library with $13
million.
MU Libraries originally tweeted that students voted 54 percent in favor of the fee but the fee
needed 60 percent in favor to be implemented. The tweet was deleted when MSA responded that
the fee had received 54 percent against.
When asked by The Maneater if this conflicting information is verified, MU Libraries did not
know for sure.
The fee, while supported by many students on campus, also received heavy criticism, as some
students felt that the administration should not put the responsibility of funding the library
entirely on them.
MU Libraries hosted several forums to educate students on the fee. These forums were co-hosted
by the Missouri Students Association, the Residence Halls Association and the Graduate
Professional Council.
MSA and RHA endorsed the library fee.
The fee would have not only paid for renovations in Ellis Library, but all other libraries on
campus apart from the School of Law library.
The fee would have accounted for $20 million to be put toward renovation and a compensation
plan for staff, as well as extended hours. It would have allowed for the opening of 40 new
positions, plus pay increases for current employees, who have not received raises for nine of the
past 12 years. Director of advancement for MU libraries Matt Gaunt, also said in recent forums
concerning the fee that improving library funding could protect MU’s ranking in the Association
of American Universities.
Part of the reason the fee was proposed involved Senate Bill 389, which capped tuition for state
schools at the consumer price index, making any additional costs of attendance subject to
potential fees.
Along with the proposal for the fee was the creation of the MU student advisory board, a group
of 25 students who would have had a say in the way the fee would have been allocated. Even
though the fee failed, the MU student advisory board will still function as a general voice for the
student body on library affairs.
Colleges update mascots, mottos, amid pressure
from students
Nov. 19, 2015 By COLLIN BINKLEY
0
BOSTON (AP) — Amherst College has turned on its mascot. Georgetown University is renaming buildings.
Union College has a new motto.
Faced with growing pressure from students, colleges across the U.S. are updating campus fixtures that
have been deemed insensitive or outdated. Inspired by racially charged protests at the University of
Missouri, students have demanded tweaks of that type among broader calls for improved treatment of
minority students.
Those behind the changes say they're long overdue. Critics say it's another example of coddling by American
universities. Here's a look at some recent changes:
___
MASCOTS
Amherst College in Massachusetts is poised to part ways with Lord Jeff, the school's unofficial mascot.
The mascot is based on 18th-century military general Jeffery Amherst. Along with his conquests in the British
army, Amherst is known for suggesting a plan to deliver smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans,
although historians debate whether the plan was carried out.
Students protesting the treatment of black students at Amherst issued a list of demands last week, including the
removal of Lord Jeff from all college memorabilia and imagery. Protesters demanded that the college president
condemn the "inherent racist nature" of the unofficial mascot.
College spokeswoman Caroline Hanna said that there are "understandably mixed views about a change to the
mascot."
During a recent informal vote, faculty members voted unanimously to leave the mascot behind. A survey by
the college found that 52 percent of students want to change the mascot, while 25 percent want to keep it. The
rest were indifferent. The school's trustees will take up the issue in January.
Other mascots and nicknames have fallen recently, too. The University of North Dakota adopted the nickname
the Fighting Hawks on Wednesday to replace the Fighting Sioux, which the school had previously abandoned.
In Pennsylvania, Susquehanna University recently dropped its Crusader nickname.
___
BUILDINGS
Georgetown University is renaming two buildings that previously honored slaveholders.
In an email circulated on Saturday, university President John DeGioia said that Mulledy Hall and McSherry
Hall, named after former university presidents with ties to slavery, will be called Freedom Hall and
Remembrance Hall, respectively, until the school settles on permanent names.
Students protested the names last week, staging a sit-in outside DeGioia's office and declaring solidarity with
protesters in Missouri.
In September, DeGioia asked a campus task force to make recommendations about how the school should
reconcile its historic ties to slavery. During the protests last week, the task force met and voted to rename the
buildings, which house a residence hall and a campus meditation center.
Historic ties to slavery also sparked conflict at Harvard University's law school. Some students want
administrators to replace the school's official seal, which is borrowed from the family seal of a slaveholder
who helped found the school. Students have yet to bring their demands to the administration.
___
A NEW MOTTO
Union College in Schenectady, New York, recently tweaked its motto to make room for women.
The original motto is a French phrase that was adopted when the college adopted only men. Its translation:
"Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers." But because the college has been accepting women since
1970, the motto will now end with "brothers and sisters."
Two students proposed the recent change, following three failed attempts to update the motto since the 1970s.
"We respect the tradition of the words carefully chosen by our original trustees, but it's important that those
words now make explicitly clear that Union is a place of inclusion and a shared intellectual mission for all,"
President Stephen Ainlay said in a statement in early November.
___
JOB TITLES
Faculty supervisors over Princeton University dorms will no longer take the title "master," instead being called
"head of the college."
The New Jersey Ivy League announced on Wednesday that the change will take place immediately. Dean of
College Jill Dolan said in a statement that master is an "anachronistic, historically vexed" title, while the newly
chosen replacement "better captures the spirit of their work."
Administrators announced the switch on Wednesday as students protested on campus, demanding better
treatment of black students.
The protesters also urged the university to acknowledge what they say is the racist legacy of former school
president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. They want the school to rename buildings and programs
named for Wilson, among other demands.
Princeton officials said they're in a continuing conversation with the protesters.
Editorial: Greek organizations should join
McCaskill-Gillibrand to fight campus sexual
assault
Nov. 18, 2015 • By the Editorial Board
When the organizations that guide fraternities and sororities around the nation can’t get behind the best bill in
Congress to prevent sexual assaults on college campuses, well then Houston, we have a problem.
After being personally contacted by letter from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a co-sponsor with Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand, D-N.Y., of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, the organizations have backed down.
The North-American Interfraternity Conference, which represents more than 70 fraternities, and the National
Panhellenic Conference, which represents 26 sororities, havewithdrawn their support for the Safe Campus Act.
Along with the letters, the organizations said they “listened to the groundswell of concern among our
members” before pulling their endorsement.
That was a first step. It shouldn’t have required such an effort to get these organizations rowing with the team.
And they still have a ways to go.
They now need to throw their support and members’ dues to the superior McCaskill-Gillibrand effort. The
organizations are worried that their members and their chapters could be suspended from college campuses
based on allegations of sexual assault and want to be assured that they will be accorded due process rights for
the accused.
The NIC said it would support any legislation that followed seven guidelines to protect alleged victims — and
one of the principles they want would “ensure due process rights for organizations to prohibit pre-emptive
group suspension of student organizations.”
Greek organizations are responding to an incident last year in which the University of Virginia president
suspended all fraternities and sororities after an article in Rolling Stone magazine alleged a gang rape had
occurred in a fraternity. The story later unraveled and was determined to be false, and lawsuits are pending
against Rolling Stone.
The Greek organizations’ rights were reinstated but with additional safeguards regarding drinking and
security.
Legislation authorizing the Safe Campus Act, a rival to the McCaskill-Gillibrand effort, was introduced by
Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., a gay rights and pro-choice opponent. Mr. Salmon’s measure would prevent
colleges and universities from taking action to make their campuses safer after a sexual assault until the victim
made an official report to local police.
It requires that allegations of sexual assault be handled by local police before campus discipline proceedings
move forward. As Ms. McCaskill and Ms. Gillibrand have noted, that requirement is a safety deterrent for
victims of campus sexual assaults.
The bill “would have tied schools’ hands and would have undermined safety for survivors,” the women said in
a joint statement commending the fraternity and sorority organizations for withdrawing their support.
“I am deeply concerned that this legislation will not keep campuses safe and may actually further
exacerbate the issue of sexual assault facing our students,” Ms. McCaskill wrote to the organizations
and to the presidents of three fraternities at the University of Missouri before they withdrew their
support.
Ms. McCaskill, an attorney and former prosecutor, and Ms. Gillibrand, also an attorney, say their legislation
includes due process rights for the accused and the victim in sexual assault cases. Organizations that work with
rape survivors have overwhelmingly supported the McCaskill-Gillibrand legislation and oppose Mr. Salmon’s
bill.
The NIC said it could support another rival bill, the Fair Campus Act, which is similar to Mr. Salmon’s but
omits the language about local law enforcement to which Ms. McCaskill and Ms. Gillibrand objected. If Greek
life organizations on college campuses want to protect people from sexual assaults — and why would they not
want to do that — they need to support the Campus Accountability and Safety Act.
Fraternities and sororities need to stop protecting their own organizations and members and work for the safety
of all students on colleges campuses. Students on campuses need to feel safe reporting sexual assaults to
college officials. Law enforcement agencies are not the place to begin. Legislation forcing victims to seek help
there first would seriously discourage victims from stepping forward and prevent them from being able to get
the support they need during that process.
The way sexual assault accusations are handled by police differs dramatically from the way they are addressed
by colleges. In the case of law enforcement, police will try to collect enough evidence to use to support a
conviction of a suspect. That person would then be labeled a sex offender, which would follow him for life,
and would probably serve time in jail. Those outcomes would work against the person in terms of future
employment and the opportunity to be a contributing member of society.
On a college campus, the main concern is about providing a safe learning environment. School authorities
would be able to take immediate action to remove the offender from university grounds, withhold a degree, or
deny access to classes. Colleges must take measures to prevent sexual assaults and create safe methods for
victims to seek help. Police and the courts do not have those same obligations.
If the victim and school authorities determine that a police report should be made, they can do that. But to
make that a first requirement would certainly chill the environment for victims to feel safe in coming forward.
New building will bring new brand for State
Historical Society
COLUMBIA — After years of deliberation, the State Historical Society of Missouri
expects to break ground on its new headquarters in late 2016 or early 2017.
The new building planned on the north edge of the MU campus represents a
symbolic change for the nonprofit organization that dates to 1898.
“We’re thinking about how a new building is going to transform who we are and what we
do,” Gary Kremer, executive director of the Historical Society, said. “In a very real sense,
it’s an opportunity to recreate and reimagine the State Historical Society of Missouri and
reimagine how we connect with people who are interested in Missouri history.”
The new location will be what is now a parking lot adjacent to the Heinkel Building in
downtown Columbia at Sixth and Elm streets.
Along with a new space, the headquarters will have a new name to solidify the
rebranding: The State Historical Society of Missouri’s Center for Missouri Studies.
“We’ve always been interested in education, but we haven’t had the facility where we
could emphasize educational programs,” Kremer said. “Our statutory mission is, in part,
to collect and preserve Missouri history, but the other part of that mission is to promote
the study of Missouri history.”
Kremer hopes that eventually faculty members from MU and other universities can have
joint appointments at the Historical Society to research and write about Missouri history
and culture in fields ranging from political science and geology to music and religion.
Preliminary plans for the building are expected to be ready by next summer with
construction beginning soon after. The project will take roughly three years to complete,
and architects hope it will be finished in early 2019.
Gould Evans, a Kansas City-based architecture firm, will be helping with the designs.
The firm has worked on projects for Arizona State University, Florida State University
and the University of Kansas.
MU staff working in the Heinkel Building will lose 140 parking spaces once construction
begins. The city and MU are negotiating to let the staff use a parking lot at Fifth and
Walnut streets.
A lack of parking is the leading complaint among people who use the State Historical
Society, and architects will be working on including parking for about 100 cars as part of
the building plans. One possible solution is underground parking, but that could also
prove to be too costly.
The building will be 100,000 square feet, roughly the same size as MU’s Cornell Hall or
the Columbia Public Library. The existing headquarters at MU’s Ellis Library is so small
the society can display less than one quarter of 1 percent of its artwork.
The world-class collection of more than 10,000 pieces includes works from Thomas
Hart Benton and George Caleb Bingham, as well as 18,000 political cartoons, 4,000
maps and 6,000 Civil War manuscript pages.
Kevin Walsh, a security guard at the historical society for the past eight years, said he
believes the new building will give people a better opportunity to understand the
character of Missouri.
“It’s where the prairie meets the Plains,” Walsh said. “It’s got a lot of contrasts, and that
goes right to the bone. During the Civil War, we were a star on both flags. There’s a kind
of duality to the Missouri character.”
Another part of the rebrand is the hope that a new building will allow the Historical
Society to host more events. When the organization has hosted performances in the
past, it hasn't had an auditorium of its own.
Lectures have been relegated to its tiny art gallery or conference room. A proposed
auditorium or multi-purpose room in the new building would allow more lectures and
musical and theatrical performances.
State funding will cover the majority of the estimated $40 million cost of the building.
In May, the Missouri legislature approved $35 million in state bonds to be sold for the
project.
The Missouri Development Finance Board can’t approve the bonds to be sold until there
are agreements in place between the Historical Society, MU, the city of Columbia and
the state of Missouri for the land, building, parking and maintenance costs.
The historical society believes the bonds will be sold in February, Mary Ellen Lohmann,
the society's coordinator of publications and media relations, said.
Private fundraising will cover the rest of the costs, and the society has set a goal of $20
million over the next five years. The society hopes to have raised at least the $5 million
necessary to finish the project by the time it has spent the $35 million from the state,
Kremer said.
Kremer said the additional $15 million the society hopes to raise will go toward creating
an endowment, purchasing new artwork, making unprocessed collections unavailable
and encouraging research and publication.
The endowment would provide a cushion so that any state budget cuts won’t be as
detrimental as they have been in the past, Lohmann said.
The Historical Society has been planning the new building since 2008, and in 2011 it
reached an agreement with MU and the city of Columbia to construct it.
MU Women's and Children's Hospital unveils lowintervention birthing rooms
COLUMBIA — The MU Women’s and Children’s Hospital unveiled two new
birthing rooms Wednesday as part of the hospital's low-intervention
birthing program.
The birthing rooms are for women who want a more natural, unmedicated birthing
experience and have low-risk pregnancies.
The hospital is also adding midwives to its staff. Its first midwife, Lori Anderson, was
hired in June, and the plan is to add two more.
The new birthing rooms look homey, with a full-sized bed, a large tub with an endless
supply of hot water, specialized birthing stools ordered from Europe, a labor ball and a
suspension rope. The rooms are also equipped with soft, adjustable lighting and
peaceful music, and they are decorated in a calming color palate of purple and neutral
beige and browns.
Courtney Barnes, medical director of the low-intervention birth program, said the
rooms are made to offer some of the comforts mothers would have at home giving birth
but within the safety net of the hospital in case an emergency arises.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of mothers
choosing to have out-of-hospital births in the U.S. has been increasing since 2004. In
2012, 1.36 percent of U.S. births were outside of a hospital.
Women's and Children's Hospital is the fourth in Missouri to receive a
"baby-friendly" designation, which means the program strives to keep
mothers and infants together immediately after birth, experiencing skin-toskin contact. It also emphasizes breast-feeding support.
Barnes said the birthing room project was just the natural progression of the babyfriendly efforts.
Melisa Johnston, a pediatric orthopedic nurse at Women's and Children's, was one of
the first women to use one of the birthing rooms.
With her first child, she wanted to have a low-intervention birthing experience, but
there wasn't a program in Columbia yet, so she went and stayed with in-laws who lived a
few minutes from a Kansas City birthing center and had her baby with the help of two
nurse midwives.
Although the room wasn’t quite finished when she delivered her second child, Joshua, in
the Women's and Children's Hospital in September, she said the experience was almost
exactly like the one she had in Kansas City with her first child.
“It’s a great way to do things if you’re a low-risk mom and that’s what you desire,”
Johnston said.
Anderson said women who choose home births don’t want to be forced into
intervention. They want to do things their way — a more natural way.
“We try not to offer anything that they don’t want because that can kind of change their
whole mindset,” Anderson said. “If you intervene, then you’re adding a risk factor. So if
we just let the body do what it’s supposed to do naturally, then our interventions aren’t
going to cause any dire consequences.”
Along with the midwives, all labor and delivering nurses have also undergone doula
training. Doulas are women who provide advice, emotional support and comfort to a
mother before, during and after childbirth.
“The rooms are so beautiful and they’re so wonderful, but really that’s just the tip of the
iceberg of what you’re seeing,” Barnes said. “Really the beautiful part of the program is
the change that we’ve seen in our culture of providing for patients at every level."
Athletics director talks about Missouri football
coach search
COLUMBIA — Mack Rhoades isn’t in an enviable position at the moment.
He certainly wasn’t expecting to have to hire a new football coach when he
took the job in the spring as MU's athletics director . At the time, it looked
as if Gary Pinkel would be at the helm of the Missouri football team for
several more years. Pinkel received a contract extension in April that ran
through 2021.
Now, Rhoades must find a replacement for the Missouri icon. The Tigers haven’t needed
a new coach in 15 years, and it’s up to Rhoades to make the hire that could define the
Missouri football program’s future. Here’s how he addressed the impending search for a
coach before various media members at Mizzou Arena on Wednesday.
‘Selling’ the Missouri job
Missouri is far from the only team searching for a coach this winter. Among Power 5
programs, Southern California, Miami , South Carolina, Virginia Tech, Maryland and
Illinois are also looking for new head coaches.
It’s also possible that other schools will join the list, and candidates that Missouri shows
interest in could be lured to those jobs instead.
“What we’re going to do is we’ll sell Mizzou,” Rhoades said. “I think it’s one of the best
jobs in the country.”
Rhoades also said there are factors that make the Missouri job more attractive than
some of the other openings. One of those factors is having both Kansas City and St.
Louis as recruiting bases, but he also stressed Missouri’s ability to recruit in Texas and
Georgia in recent years. He also mentioned the fact that Missouri plays in the
Southeastern Conference and cited Columbia as a place in which people would want to
live.
The groundwork that Pinkel has laid doesn’t hurt, either. Missouri’s winningest coach
has brought the team within one win of playing for the national title twice (2007 and
2013). Rhoades thinks Missouri’s next coach can put the team in position to take it one
step further.
“I fully believe you can win a national championship here at the University of Missouri,”
Rhoades said. “What coach wouldn’t want to do that?”
Fuente, Herman and the ‘hottest names’
Coach searches always bring endless speculation, but two names in particular have been
flying around over the past week: Memphis’ Justin Fuente and Houston’s Tom Herman.
Both coaches have connections to Missouri. Rhoades hired Herman away from Ohio
State months before taking the Missouri job. The first-year head coach has led Houston
to a 10-0 start and No. 19 ranking. As Ohio State's offensive coordinator last season,
Herman helped the Buckeyes win the national championship with a third-string
quarterback.
“I’m certainly partial to Tom Herman,” Rhoades said. “I think he’s a terrific coach.”
Fuente, whose Memphis Tigers are 8-2 and ranked No. 21, worked with Missouri
defensive coordinator Barry Odom at Memphis from 2012-14. Prior to Fuente’s arrival
at Memphis, the Tigers had never finished with more than nine wins in a season. If
Memphis can win two more games, it’ll have done so for the second straight year.
Yet while Rhoades spoke highly of both coaches, he made it clear that the search for
Missouri’s next coach won’t be limited to them.
“I’m not into the hottest names out there,” he said. “Those are certainly two of them.
That doesn’t mean they’ll come here and be a great fit.”
The search process and addressing the campus climate
Rhoades didn’t shy away from answering questions about race protests, the football
boycott or other recent developments at MU. He won’t turn his head when potential
candidates ask about them, either.
“We’ll sit down with each candidate and provide as much specifics as we can,” he said.
“We’ll spend a lot of time on how this (the changes happening on campus) makes us
better as an institution.”
The current campus environment isn’t one that has sat well with everyone in the football
program. Shortly after the football team’s boycott began, an unnamed Missouri player
told ESPN that many players weren’t happy with the decision. Additionally, the Tigers
have already had a 2016 recruit decommit over the incidents that have occurred in
recent weeks.
Rhoades, however, isn’t worried about any of that.
“I do not believe that will hamper usin any way,” he said.
Rhoades also mentioned that he’s open to hiring someone who’s never been a head
coach, and he added that age won’t be a factor in the final decision. There will, however,
be one thing that plays a bigger role than any other when it comes to deciding who takes
the reins as Missouri’s next coach.
“You can look at analytics and all the past records, but at the end of the day, it’s really a
gut feel,” he said. “It comes down to fit.”