The Wesboro Amendment

Posted on March 14, 2016 by bpriddy

Anger and disgust can provoke competing and counterproductive emotions.

One leaves an observer of events rendered speechless. The other leaves the observer spewing heated words that tumble over themselves and become so tangled that their value is lost.

So it is with the accounts of last week’s Missouri Senate passage of a proposed constitutional amendment under the guise of protecting religious freedom. Perhaps through the discipline of writing and editing, thoughts will have some order.

Thank God, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was not discovered in, say, 1953, before Brown v. the Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Millions of Americans and thousands of Missourians might today still be denied equal access to housing, education, jobs, bathrooms, and drinking fountains if RFRA allowed them to be targeted for exclusion from equality under law by those who claimed to be motivated by a “sincere religious belief.” Unfortunately, sexual orientation was not a high enough profile issue fifty or sixty years ago when civil rights, public accommodations, and fair housing laws were enacted with protections for various citizen groups that had suffered discrimination for decades, which is why bigotry in the guise of religious freedom is today able to attack a segment of our citizenry that was far less visible in 1964.

Only a few hours after Senate leader Ron Richard threatened reprisals against fellow senators who did not respect the traditions of the Senate, he was one of 21 Republican senators who signed a Previous Question motion that immediately stopped the Democrat’s filibuster against Senate Joint Resolution 39. So much for the Senate tradition of respecting the right of the minority to try to keep the majority from steamrolling legislation opponents think detrimental to the general population. We have observed the Republicans being quite reluctant to move the PQ when a filibuster is led by their own members.

Two, and sometimes three, Republicans voted with the Democrats who wanted the official record of the proceedings to reflect some of the things that happened during that filibuster. Three Republican Senators, Bob Dixon, Ryan Silvey, and Rob Schaaf, voted with the Democrats against the move to stop the debate.

But Dixon and Silvey voted for the bill.

Schaaf was the only Republican to split with his party and join all of the Democrats who voted “no” on final approval of the proposed constitutional amendment.

Dixon and Silvey supported Democrats’ unsuccessful effort to amend the official record of the filibuster to show that the sponsor of the bill, Bob Onder, had suggested summoning the Highway Patrol to get two absent senators back into the chamber.

Dixon was furious when his fellow Republicans refused to let the amendments to the record be adopted. The normally soft-spoken Dixon was uncharacteristically loud in his attack: “I am a senator, and I am disgusted at the slope and the speed with which this body is descending. When one member is disrespected, when any member has their rights disregarded in such a dastardly way, every Senator loses. And not only that, our constituents are disrespected, the people are disrespected!”

But Dixon, who was concerned about disrespect for his constituents and for “the people” generally, voted for the bill.

Silvey also was angry about the rejection of the wording explaining what had happened during the debate. “To say this did not happen is ridiculous,” he told his colleagues on the senate floor. And he continued, “What happened yesterday at the end of the debate was disturbing at best. The fact we had members seeking recognition and ignored regardless of party should offend everyone in this room…What this debate is about is the soul of the Senate.”

But Silvey voted for the bill.

Senator Rob Schaaf, who has been part of Republican-led filibusters that were not stopped with PQs was the only one who continued to stand with Democrats. “The beauty of the Senate design is destroyed…by not following our rules,” he said. He called his party’s treatment of filibustering Democrats “disrespectful.”

Schaaf would have voted for the bill.

But he did not because he thought his party’s forced shutdown of debate raised “the stink of tyranny.”

This bill—which might be on our ballots later this year, thus presenting voters with the opportunity to further define Missouri’s narrowness or reject it (both, we suspect, in the name of religion)—and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act seem to spring from those who want to enforce the idea that this always-pluralistic country has always been some kind of “Christian nation.”

They want to be the ones who define “Christian.”

And that should strike a chord of fear in all of us.

You know who probably is cheering for our legislature as it works on SJR39? The folks at the Wesboro Baptist Church in Topeka. This is their kind of religion. The kind of people who show up at military funerals with signs reading “God Hates Fags,” whose web site says it stands against “the fag lifestyle of soul-damning nation-destroying filth,” love the kind of politics behind this kind of legislation.

So let’s just call this bill “The Wesboro Amendment.”

Interestingly, the Wesboro Baptist Church hasn’t needed RFRA to protect its religious freedoms. It has the First Amendment, as we all do. Is the Missouri legislature so craven in its desire to appeal to the voting bloc known as “Evangelicals” that it advocates making the theology of the Wesboro Baptist Church part of our state constitution? The actions last week are an answer to the prayers of the Wesboro faithful.

In Christian worship centers for the hundreds of denominations and non-denominational believers, a faith that advocates love for others is preached. We wonder how many of those who voted for this bill have opened their hymnals on Sunday mornings and have sung Peter Scholtes hymn:

We are one in the spirit; we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored.

We will walk with each other; we will walk hand-in-hand, and together we’ll spread the news that God is in our land.

All praise to the Father from whom all things come and all praise to the spirit who makes us one.

(chorus): And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Or the words from the thirteenth chapter of the New Testament book of Paul’s letter to the Christians at Corinth that are familiar and often used in marriage ceremonies—of all kinds– perhaps some of the ceremonies involving some of those who voted for the Wesboro Amendment:

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it, but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing…”

Three things last forever—faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

In a matter of hours last week, the State Senate and its leaders demonstrated that talk of respect for tradition is cynical babbling in the face of partisan narrowness and they demonstrated how religion used for political purposes ignores the basic tenant of the teachings of the its founders.

Some of us, in observing recent events in the Senate, have heard the noisy gongs and the clanging cymbals. And the noise and the clanging played a tune called “riffra” as the Wesboro Amendment moved closer to a ballot in Missouri this year.

Correction

Posted on March 10, 2016 by bpriddy

Your correspondent was awakened far too early this morning with the thought that he had made a grievous error in criticizing the leader of the Missouri Senate in yesterday’s entry for his effort to kick former colleagues in the press corps out of the historic press table on the Senate floor.

We regret that error.

In these pre-dawn hours, as we type this, we realize there are TEN chairs at the press table, not eight as we said. That lowers the cost of the move from the $16,000 per chair that we mentioned yesterday to only $12,700 per chair.

And it follows that we would commend the Senate leaders for delaying the move to avoid overtime costs that would have made the price for each chair $17,100 instead of the $20,000 that we mentioned.

And in all honesty, our mention of the Pentagon’s $700 toilet seat in the 1980s also was an unfair comparison. We checked with the Federal Reserve System and the Fed calculates $700 in 1980 is equivalent to $2010.44 today, so the toilet seat-to-press corps chair cost is not as excessive as we portrayed yesterday.

But our early-morning conscience, which forced the publication of this correction, wonders what kind of new chairs our former colleagues will get for $12,700. For that price, one might expect a leather upholstered recliner with cupholders, a warming system, and maybe a therapeutic massage feature.

We apologize to the Senate leadership for our miscalculation.

To a candidate

Posted on February 29, 2016 by bpriddy

Congratulations. You have put your name on the line and paid your fee and you are now a political candidate.

For some of you and the others who will add their names to ballots in the next few days, this is your first venture into a world that will test your integrity in ways you cannot now imagine (although some of you might already have flunked, based on whose money you already have taken or will get). This might be your first step but you are bringing your family with you and while you envision the ads that show you and your family smiling confidently about your future and the future of your state, it is important that your family recognize they will share the lows as well as the highs in the months ahead. And in fact, they might feel these things even more than you do.

How you run your campaign and how you respond to the campaigns others will run against you will test their character as well as yours. And maybe it will be a sterner test for them than for you, believe it or not.

If you descend to the lower levels of campaigning, as is all too easy, you might find your family as well as some long-time friends questioning whether you are the person they have known and loved. If you become the target of opponents or of the sewer rats who supposedly are completely independent of them, your friends and family might feel the attacks even more than you do.

We speak from experience of watching the process and of knowing winners and losers by the hundreds. We know the state capitol or the national capitol can be places where ideals are sent to die. We recall one office-holder from years ago who reflected on his re-election loss. This person had been seen as a person with potential for greater things. But the loss stopped that potential cold. The candidate spoke of the double impact felt by a spouse. Spouses, you see, not only share a candidate’s dreams of success and perhaps of higher office, but they have their own dreams that accompany that possibility. When the candidate lost, the spouse saw the devastating effects on the candidate and also felt the death of their own vision.

If you win, do not think yourself more important than the family you take with you. If you lose, be aware that you are not the only one dealing with the loss.

You might find the first of a series of new people who want to be your friends. Do not kid yourself. They are your friends only because they think you will do something for them, even if it is damaging to the general welfare. They will want you be narrow, selfish, petty, and forgetful because it benefits them even to the disadvantage of many who will vote for you. They will expect you to turn your back on your constituents, sometimes offering help in future elections so you can keep serving their interests.

You will be tempted to become something you are not today. Of course, some of you have signed that candidacy statement because some of those interests already have invested in you and you already are theirs. They prefer that you not develop a conscience during your candidacy or even your term of office. And if you do, well, there’s no shortage of people who can be bought to replace you.

And finally, by signing the declaration of candidacy you have become something you might claim during your campaign that you are not. You have become a politician. If you win a few months from now, you will move from being a trusted friend at home to becoming a member of one of the most untrustworthy organizations there is—the government.

Congratulations on becoming a candidate for public office. Surveys indicate the public has a low opinion of what you are becoming and the current crop seems to show little concern about their status or the damage they do to public confidence in the American system of government. It takes courage to want to step into that arena. If you have done so to satisfy a personal agenda or to carry the agenda of someone who has, in effect, bought you with a big donation, you will in the end deserve the scorn that the public feels for what you are becoming.

A question you should be prepared to answer—if only to yourself—is “What am I doing that will increase public regard for government and the people in it?” We hope you hear that question often, even after you win.

ESPECIALLY if you win. We have seen, however, that you will be able to easily ignore it. The concept of integrity, you will find, is fragile and is easily altered inside the walls of a capitol.

We’ll probably reflect on that after the election.

Show Me State

Posted on February 25, 2016 by bpriddy

The generally-accepted version of how we came to be called “The Show Me State” is that Congressman Willard Vandiver, who represented a district in southeast Missouri, used the phrase in a speech to the Five O’Clock Club in Philadelphia. There are other stories about the use of the phrase but the Vandiver version is the conventional wisdom.

One of the pleasures of digging through historical records is the discovery of things other than the object of the search. While we were going through the papers of Governor Herbert Hadley (1909-1913) while researching the latest book on the Missouri Capitol, we came across this letter from Hadley to George W. Eads at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on February 11, 1911. Eads had asked Hadley a couple of days later about the origin of the expression, “I’m from Missouri, you have to show me.” Hadley didn’t much like the expression although he reconciles himself to it by the end of the letter.

The incident referred to in your letter did not arise from any objection upon my part to this expression. The question was as to whether Missouri should be known as the “Show Me” state, and if not by that name, by what name it should be known. It was suggested by Mr. Curran, the Immigration Commissioner, that a prize might be offered to the one suggesting the best name for the State. In the discussion that followed, I stated in a newspaper interview that I preferred the designation “Pioneer State,” for the reason that the Missourians had been the pioneers in the development of the country west of the Mississippi. I also stated that I had never been particularly enthusiastic over the expression “I am from Missouri you have got to show me,” as it had in it as much of a suggestion of the incredulity of ignorance as of hard-headed inquisitiveness. However, it was apparent from the discussion that there was quite a general satisfaction throughout the State with the expression in that it was supposed to carry with it the suggestion that the Missourian did not propose to have anything “put over” on him.

Viewed from this standpoint, the impression and the designation which has been applied to the State is not uncomplimentary or unsatisfactory. I do not know the origin of the expression. I remember to have read a newspaper story in which it was stated that it originated in one of the Southwestern states by a cow boy who had a habit of using this expression which soon became general in the community and gradually spread throughout the country. But whether this story is true or not, and wherever the expression came from, it is evident that it has come to stay. It stands as a protest against shams, pretense and hypocrisy. It signifies the conservatively aggressive attitude of the people of this State against that which seems to be wrong or presents the appearance of having a “joker” in it.

That’s the definition Governor Hadley felt the motto had in 1911. How much does it still apply today? Might be something to discuss at the coffee shop or the salad bar someday. Or maybe it’s a high school or college debate topic.

Your faithful scribe has thought about Hadley’s interpretation from time to time and isn’t sure which side to take. But the discussion would be fun.

Regardless, “Show Me State” is better than some of the other unofficial state mottos we’ve had. The one we’re glad did NOT make it to our license plate is one from the nineteenth century.

The Puke State.

Jocks among us

Posted on February 22, 2016 by bpriddy

Missouri Tiger basketball coach Kim Anderson was talking about team discipline the other day after he had suspended a couple of his players who were found to have some drug paraphernalia in their apartment. Police searched the place because one of their roommates, not a university athlete, had been arrested in connection with a house robbery.

It’s easy to ask how athletes at the top level of university sports can so often get caught with drugs or be involved in drug issues or have other problems. As is the case throughout society, it’s the few who bend the rules, who think they won’t get caught, or who don’t think at all, who embarrass the many who behave themselves.

One part of Brandon Foster’s article in the Jefferson City newspaper that caught this reader’s eye was a discussion of the athletes’ living arrangements. “A team spokesman said the team makes sure players have a place to live and that they’re paying rent. The team will help players find a place to live if they’re struggling to do so, but that’s rarely a problem because athletes tend to choose one of the many off-campus developments south of the University.” And later, Brandon writes, “Anderson said housing with athletes is a persistent issue with college athletes.”

We are reminded of our own freshman year at the university, living in 313 Graham Hall. Across the hall, just down from the bathroom and the telephone was the room where Charlie Henke and Joe Scott lived. They were the leaders of the Tiger basketball team. Henke was a 6-7 center, the tallest person I’d ever seen, and Scott was a 6-4 guard. They had to live by the same rules all the rest of us in the dormitory lived by, including “silent hour” when students were supposed to be studying behind closed doors. In truth, there also was card-playing but it had to be done quietly because our Residential Assistant, the den-dad of King House, would prowl the halls with sharp ears and no hesitation about knocking on a door to tell the inhabitants to “hold it down” or to non-verbally suggest that card-playing wasn’t what responsible university students did during quiet hours.

Charlie was an All-American in his senior year and still has the second-highest season scoring average in the Missouri record book. He got a degree in conservation science but found his niche as a high school basketball coach and spent 22 years at Carrollton. Scott, who was called “the Gainesville Gunner” by Mahlon Aldridge—who began the Tiger sports network broadcasts—went to law school and is a lawyer in Poplar Bluff. I watched him set the still-standing school record for points in one game—46. That was before the three-point line. Scott has said that his father once figured he would have had 65 that night if there had been the three-point shot. (I was also in the stands the day Henke and Kansas Center Wayne Hightower got into a fist-fight that led to an on-court brawl involving fans and players. I wasn’t about to get involved. Too many guys were much bigger and stronger than I was.) Both Henke and Scott are in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame now.

When we went to the post office in the cafeteria building that served the four dormitories in the South Residence Hall group, I would sometimes see Dan LaRose looming over the rest of us as he came to get his mail. LaRose was a 6-5 two-way All-American end for Dan Devine’s football team who went on to a five-year career in the NFL.

Sometimes when I’d go into the bathroom/shower room there would be a guy in there swinging a baseball bat. I think he had a minor league baseball contract.

This was, as I recall, university policy—that student-athletes lived in the student dormitories with all the other guys (Title IX hadn’t come along yet to create women’s sports of any substance and the idea of co-ed dormitories was not a matter of polite discussion).

One of the writers for the “Rock M Nation” webpage recalled a few years ago a jock who lived a floor above him in Hatch Hall, a 6-8, 275-pound tight end named John Matuszak. Matuszak lasted only one year at the University. He was dismissed from the team after he beat up an Air Force Academy cadet who was a foot shorter and half a Matuszak lighter at a fraternity party. He went on to a notable career in the NFL before he died young, at 38. He’s considered an early casualty of steroidal drugs.

Anyway, in those days, those we still call student-athletes were reminded of the first part of their roles at the university by having to live with the student-non-athletes in the dormitories.

This was a looooonnnnngggg time ago when off-campus housing was fraternity and sorority houses or extra rooms in private homes or in the basements of homes. But we don’t recall hearing about some of the problems that have made the news for several years in reporting on collegiate athletics. The university has dormitory space for only about one-fourth of the students today and off-campus apartments are a big business in Columbia.

It was a much different time, a much different culture on campuses and in the nation. Coaches have to deal with a lot of players who bring baggage to college with them that students and student-athletes didn’t have back then. But having jocks among us in the dormitory had some values that worked both ways, it seems.

Would integration of the jocks with dormitory students work today? Dunno. It seemed to once upon a time.

But the whole climate is different now and coaches are dealing with young people coming from a totally different society. Maybe there’s more growing-up that has to happen today than there was when a college education was a rarer thing.

We like Kim Anderson—spent a little time with him and his wife during a meeting in Joplin a few years ago—and we want him to succeed. It’s painful to watch but surely not as painful as it is from his viewpoint. Recalling the “good old days” doesn’t do much good in situations like his right now. And, come to think of it, the “good old days” that we’ve just recalled weren’t all that good anyway. The Tigers were only 12-13 that year, 5-9 for sixth in the Big Eight. They would have losing records for six straight years before a new coach came in and posted a 42-80 record in the next five years. Then Norm Stewart came to town.

He was 10-16 his first year and didn’t break .500 in conference play for his first three years.

Patience, folks. Painful Patience. But Patience.

Find some other place to lie

Posted on February 18, 2016 by bpriddy

Sometimes when you feel that the world has gone too serious for you, pick up Gary Scharnhorst’s book of Mark Twain’s letters to the editor, Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics. Scharnhorst is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico whose collection of Twain’s letters has been published by the University of Missouri Press.

Twain’s letters to the editor are a delight. He sent one to the St. Louis Sunday Republican that was published March 17, 1867 asking for public sympathy. As a journalist, I was first caught by his proclamation, “I have been in the newspaper business a long time, and I have some little peculiarities natural to the profession, one or two propensities, in fact, which are pleasant to me but which I have a delicacy in indulging in without explanation when among strangers.”

Sometimes, he wrote, he sought “relief” in a secluded spot in St. Louis’ Lafayette Park but he kept seeing signs saying “Visitors are forbidden to walk or lie on the grass.” He set out to find someone to talk to about them and found a man he took to be a watchman he presumed was taking care of the grounds. I can hear the voice of Hal Holbrook as Twain relates more of the story.

“When the sign says I cannot walk or lie on the grass, it is a plain intimation that I can walk or lie in the public roadways of the park, ain’t it?”

He said, “Certainly, certainly—nobody ain’t going to interfere.”

“Very well,” I said, “it is a great relief to me—just give me your arm. You were going toward the other end of the grounds, I believe? Just so. Well, sir, I once had an uncle—got him yet for that matter—an uncle whose name was Isaac—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—named after the whole tribe, you know, and—don’t interrupt me, please—this Isaac was rather stupid, stupid as an owl, sir, but a muscular man, and a man of prodigious appetite. Why, as to his strength, nothing like it was ever seen in the world before—Samson was an infant to him—he carried off a church once, and you know it created dissatisfaction and considerable comment, and he went back after the congregation—DON’T interrupt me, if you please—and his plantation contained, well, say eighteen hundred acres of beautiful land, beautiful! But it was out of the way, some, and with no other implements, sir, than a wheelbarrow and a common shovel, he removed that entire plantation in a single night and deposited it in a most eligible position alongside the railroad. It was a splendid idea, sir, splendid. It increased the value of his plantation more than ten thousand percent.; but, as you perceive, sir, it utterly beggared the man whose plantation he covered up. Strong? Why, my friend, just the mere ballast of sin that that man carried around him would have crushed a common athlete to the earth; crush him? It would annihilate him, sir! My uncle, sir, could carry more sin on an even keel, and draw less water, and steer better than—please don’t interrupt me, sir—and he was a most remarkable man! But at last, noble sir, that fell accident happened, which cast a blight over my life, and banished the roses from my cheek, alas! Never to return, watchman. Heaven knows it was a sad day for me. Well, that day my uncle had taken the oath, and several drinks, and a handful of spoons and various other articles and was feeling very well—he was always of a cheerful disposition—when all at once a sort of spontaneous combustion got started in his stomach, because, you see, he had been drinking a lot of uncommon bad whiskey, and trying to tell the truth all the while, and the truth and that sort of whiskey don’t really mix readily you know—but you understand these things. This spontaneous combustion got started, and it extended upward and upward and upward, until at last it left go like an earthquake and blew the whole top of his head to the moon!—brains and all!—I pledge you my word of honor, there wasn’t the hundredth part of a teaspoonful of brains left in that idolized frame. It was awful. Well, the whole top of his head was gone, you know, and so there was nothing for it but to put a tin roof on him—don’t interrupt me, can’t you?—no way but to put a tin roof on him, which disfigured him greatly, but was perfectly safe although it attracted heat of course, and might have caused brain fever, only, as I said before, the brains were all gone—but now comes the dickens of it, you know—what to do with him!—what the very nation to do with him! He couldn’t mould bricks, he couldn’t be a doctor, he couldn’t make more than a mere ordinary sort of a preacher—it didn’t really seem as if he were fitted for anything better than a kind of Mayor or City Councilman, or something of that description, and so, gifted sir, you can imaging the desolation that fell upon all our hearts and drove hope and happiness from our breasts—till at last, Heaven be praised, the people, the high and noble, the wisdom-inspired people, saw what Providence had intended him to be and they sent him to Congress, sir! They sent him to Congress…”

Twain reported the watchman at that point had had enough and left in a huff, which left Twain surprised and “grieved.” After all, the watchman had told him he couldn’t lie or walk on the grass but could lie and walk on the walks as much as he wanted to, it seemed discourteous of him to leave. “Can I lie with any satisfaction without I have got somebody to lie to? Why, certainly not. Did that idiot suppose I wanted to march around that dismal park and lie all to myself? It is absurd.” He asked the editor to request the signs prohibiting lying or walking on the grass to be removed. Their restrictions, he said, “amounts to heartless inhumanity.”

Your correspondent and his own “peculiarities natural to the profession” of journalism loves that letter. The failure of mixing truth with too much bad whiskey. A tin-headed member of Congress. The futility of a “march around that dismal park” lying only to himself.

It was a letter to the editor in 1867. Is it a parable for the election year of 2016?

———-

(editor’s note: We’ve seen Hal Holbrook and his “Mark Twain Tonight” show many times, spent a wonderful hour interviewing him once, and helped arrange for him to perform in Jefferson City on the last night of the 2014 legislative session. Unfortunately, few members of the legislature stuck around to see him.

After his two-hour performance, he spent quite a bit of time with some folks backstage and later had dinner with several of the concert folks. Your correspondent, exhausted from the last week of the session, had to skip the dinner. But the president of the concert association, Mark Comley, related that during dinner he told Holbrook one of the memorable routines he had seen Holbrook perform many years earlier was the story of the “Begum of Bengal,” the story of a pipsqueak boat captain challenging a great trading ship from the orient. He said Holbrook grew quiet for a while and then, there at the table, performed the story! Mark figured Holbrook had been going through his voluminous mental files of Twain stories during that quiet time. If you’d like to see Holbrook/Twain tell the story, go to this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V65G_xA5eKc&list=PL7fTLA1i5h4Bhnlv1nhFTtsvSBUFb5myF&index=10

The story of the “Begum of Bengal” starts about 4:20 in.

He’s 91 today, February 17, and as far as we know still does his show on stage. He’s been Mark Twain longer than Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain. He is simply one of the greatest performers in the history of American theatre. And that’s no lie.)

The spirit of the St. Louis

Posted on February 5, 2016 by bpriddy

There’s always somebody. Somebody not good enough for us no matter their circumstances. Somebody we can always tell, “Go back where you came from.” Some of the campaign rhetoric this year reminds us of the story of a ship named for our second-largest city.

Let’s go back to Germany, 1938, where the Nazi government’s increasing persecution of Jews caused many to try to flee. Representatives of several western nations met at Evian, France in July, 1938, to discuss the worsening situation. Major nations such as the United States, France, and Britain refused to loosen their immigration laws to allow more refugees from Germany, even as Germany was tightening its laws against Jews wanting to flee. German policies against Jews broke into violence with the Kristallnacht on November 9-10 and in ensuing months, thousands of Jews were arrested.

Nine-hundred-thirty-seven Jewish passengers were aboard the S. S. St. Louis when it left Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939, hoping to find safety in Cuba or the United States. But Cuba allowed fewer than thirty to disembark.

The St. Louis headed north, hoping to dock in the United States. But this country had enacted a restrictive immigration law in 1924. The state department worried that the Jews would be security risks or be dependent on government handouts if they were allowed in. Passengers could not get tourist visas because they had no home address. And there were a lot of other German immigrants waiting for entry.

After more than a month the St. Louis headed back to Europe, although not to Germany. Britain agreed to take 288 of the passengers. The remaining 620 went to Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, countries still at peace.

It was while the St. Louis was still at sea, its passengers still hoping to find asylum or at least safety in the United States that Heywood Broun, one of the great newspaper columnists of the time, wrote “There is a Ship” for the New York World-Telegram. It was published June 9, 1939.

——-

There is a ship. It is called the St. Louis. If suddenly the vessel flashed an SOS to indicate that the crew and the 900 passengers were in danger every other steamer within call would be hurrying to the rescue. That is the rule of the sea.

And no vessel which got the flash would pause to inquire the economic, political, religious or national position of those in distress. It would want no more than the position of the ship.

And the captain on the bridge, according to the prevailing tradition, would ask the engineer to put on all speed so that the work of rescue could be completed as expeditiously as possible. And this would be true of the skipper of a totalitarian merchantman, one from a democratic nation or a ship flying under the flag of a monarchy, liberal or otherwise.

But there is a ship. It carries 900 passengers—men, women and small children. This is a group of God-fearing people guilty of no crime whatsoever. And they are in peril.

They are in peril which threatens not only their lives but their very souls and spiritual freedom. It would be better for them by far if the St. Louis has ripped its plates in a collision with some other craft, or if an impersonal iceberg had slashed the hull below the water line.

Then there would be not the slightest hesitation in a movement of all the allied fleets to save these members of the human race in deep and immediate distress.

But this is not an iceberg or a plate which has been ripped away. The passengers—men, women and children—are Jewish. It is not an accident of nature but an inhuman equation which has put them in deadly peril. It is quite true that when the St. Louis gets back to Hamburg these 900, with possibly a few exceptions, will not die immediately. They will starve slowly, since they have already spent their all. Or they will linger in concentration camps—I refer to the men and women. God knows what will happen to the children.

And so the whole world stuffs its ears and pays no attention to any wireless.

There is a ship. And almost two thousand years have elapsed since the message of universal brotherhood was brought to earth.

What have we done with that message? After so many years we have not yet put into practice those principles to which we pay lip service. Nine hundred are to suffer a crucifixion while the world passes by on the other side.

At any luncheon, banquet or public meeting the orator of the occasion can draw cheers if he raises his right hand in the air and pledges himself, his heart and soul to the declaration that he is for peace and amity and that all men are brothers. He means it, generally, and so do the diners who pound the table until the coffee cups and the cream dishes rattle into a symphony of good feeling and international sympathy.

But there is a ship. If one were to look upon it with cold logic it would be better for every one of the 900 if the vessel suddenly buckled and went down in forty fathoms. That would be more merciful.

Against the palpable threat of death we can muster brotherhood. But against the even more plain sentence of life in death we pretend to be helpless.

Our answer is, “We must look after ourselves. What can we do about it? Life is greater than death.” We agree. Here is our test. What price civilization? There is a ship. Who will take up an oar to save 900 men, women and children?

——-

Heywood Broun died at 51 years of age on December 18, 1939. About the time he wrote this column, he had forsaken his professed agnosticism after extensive discussions with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and had become a member of the Catholic faith.

Germany invaded the safe countries of Western Europe on May 10, 1940. The Netherlands surrendered five days later. Belgium gave up May 28. And France fell June 22. The Holocaust Museum in Washington estimates 254 former passengers on the St. Louis died during the holocaust, most of them at Sobibor and Auschwitz. Fewer than one-hundred eventually made it to the United States.

The St. Louis was a German naval accommodation ship until it was damaged by the bombing of Kiel in August, 1944. She was fixed and was a hotel ship in Hamburg for a while before being scrapped in 1952.

But the ghost of the spirit of the ship still hangs over us.

Jews in 1939. Mexicans and Syrians in 2016.

There’s always somebody.

Killing death

Posted on January 27, 2016 by bpriddy

We’ve gotten emails from a conservative group proudly announcing that the conservatives appear to have realized the death penalty needs reassessment.

It’s interesting that there is a certain amount of chest-thumping about this discovery because until now the conservative majority in the Missouri legislature has turned up its collective nose at any proposal by Democrats to study the issue or to just repeal the death penalty.

You can ask Senate minority leader Joseph Keaveny about the seemingly sudden shift. He has tried to get legislation approved to study the issue for several years but has been rebuffed repeatedly.

Be that as it may, Senator Paul Wieland’s bill to repeal the death penalty has cleared a Senate committee and is going to the full senate for debate with a committee recommendation that the Senate approve the bill. Wieland’s latest press release squarely addresses an issue that critics say the pro-life forces have sidestepped for years—at least in the eyes of death penalty opponents. “I am a devout Catholic,” says Wieland in his release, “and I believe if I’m going to be pro-life, I should be so on both ends of the spectrum—from conception to natural death.”

No one will be watching this bill more than Earl M. Forrest.

The state Supreme Court has set a May 11 execution date for him because back in 2002 he got into an argument with a woman about her purchase of a mobile home and a lawn mower from him. He killed her and a man who was at her home, took $25,000 worth me meth and went to his home. When law enforcement officers showed up, he got into a shootout with them and killed a Dent County deputy sheriff and wounded the county sheriff. Forrest was wounded. He’s now 66 years old. The U. S. Supreme Court has refused to review his case and all of his state and federal appeals otherwise appear to have run out. The legislature is to adjourn two days after his scheduled execution so there is some urgency to deal with Wieland’s bill.

Lloyd Leo Anderson, the last man to be executed by lethal gas in Missouri, was in a position similar to that of Forrest. After Anderson’s appeals ran out, St. Louis Representative Jay Howard introduced a bill to end capital punishment. Governor Warren Hearnes stayed Anderson’s execution until the legislature decided the issue. When the legislature killed Howard’s bill, Hearnes lifted the stay and Anderson was gassed on January 26, 1965. But not before some angry last words: “Tell them I didn’t get a fair trial. Tell Hearnes to kiss my ___ ass. The same to the rest of you guys,” apparently referring to the large number of witnesses that crowded around the gas chamber, peering through windows to watch him die minutes later.

Missouri executed eighteen men between November, 2013 and September 1, 2015 when I watched Roderick Nunley die quietly for the kidnap, rape, and murder of a fifteen-year old Kansas City school girl a quarter century earlier. He was the eighty-sixth Missouri inmate executed by drugs. The first drug-induced execution was that of George Mercer January 6, 1989—in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary. No new execution facilities were available then.

There are twenty-seven men left under a death sentence in Missouri. No one has been sentenced to death in the last two years, mostly because of plea bargains—as we understand the situation.

Wieland’s bill says anyone sentenced to death by the time his bill would become law on August 28 would be re-sentenced to life without parole. At least twenty men who had been sentenced to death already have been re-sentenced to life without parole after further re-evaluation of their cases. Two men, Robert Driscoll and Joseph Amrine, have been released after their death sentences were overturned. One has been declared mentally incompetent to be executed although he’s still under a death penalty.

Your correspondent has watched more than twenty men die on a gurney from lethal injection. After several of those executions, relatives of the victims have spoken with reporters in a prison press room. No one has ever indicated any regret about the inmate’s ultimate fate. And in the last few times, they have expressed resentment at a system that has taken so long to put a killer away. More than once they have complained about the cruel and unusual punishment that the system has inflicted on the survivors of the victims. We wonder how the families of the victims of the twenty-seven men under a death sentence feel about Wieland’s bill.

Missouri has repealed the death penalty before. It did it in 1917 only to have the legislature reinstate it in 1919 when sponsors spoke of a marked increase in murders since the repeal. It was repealed again after Anderson’s 1965 gassing and a U. S. Supreme Court ruling in 1972 that gassing was cruel and unusual punishment. That let every inmate in America under a death sentence be re-sentenced to life. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a new system of executions was not cruel and unusual punishment, leading Missouri to reinstitute the penalty in 1977. The legislature changed the law allowing executions by gas or lethal injection in 1988 with lethal injection the preferred means.

So now, it appears, conservatives seem to be deciding that liberals might have had a good idea after all. Is this just the start of a new cycle of thinking or has society forever changed on this issue? Is there nobody whose crime is so abhorrent that the forfeiture of life is the only just punishment? Is life in prison with no hope of ever getting out the worst possible penalty?

Consider part of the last statement of David Zink before his execution July 14, 2015:

“For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering death.”

Open government

Posted on January 26, 2016 by bpriddy

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people SHOULD operate from the presumption that its actions are open to those people. But government is more likely to indicate it fears the people and tends to keep things secret.

There’s probably not a lot of objection to the first sentence. The second sentence has a certain two-way paranoia about it that might be more difficult to accept.

But the two sentences indicate a collision of the ideal with the practical and we’re seeing them played out—again—with legislation in Missouri and in other states on a topic that has emerged in recent years: police body cameras.

At this writing, the legislature has four bills before it instituting the use of body cameras by police officers when they’re on duty. In three of the bills, the images captured by the cameras are to be kept secret by the police agency unless a citizen can prove to a judge that they should be made public. It’s not a new standard. The state open records/open meetings law has a lengthy list of exemptions for certain records, particularly police records.

Those of us who lined up years ago in favor of the so-called Sunshine Law and those who live by it and with it today have never been comfortable with the exemptions written into it even while admitting the difficulties in reconciling free press/fair trial issues. Likewise, it’s a conflict between the general public’s right to know and the general public’s right to privacy. It’s hard to believe a lasting solution to this matter of competing constitutional and public interests will ever be found. That’s why courts have to consider the proper weight of arguments of the two sides in specific instances and decide which argument moves the needle on the scale of justice one way or the other.

There is a precedent of a sort that comes readily to mind. As we recall, Jefferson City television station KRCG asked the Cole County Sheriff in 1997 for county jail security video tapes showing the booking of a state representative picked up for DWI. The sheriff didn’t want to release the images and filed a lawsuit to protect his position, naming the station as the defendant. A circuit judge ruled the tape was not a public record. A state appeals court upheld that ruling but sent the matter back to the circuit judge to calculate how attorney fees should be calculated. The state supreme court intervened at that point.

The state Supreme Court ruled the videotape WAS a public record and ordered the sheriff to pay the attorney fees and other costs of the television station since the station was the requester of the records. A pretty readable analysis of the case can be found at http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol66/iss2/5. That’s Missouri Law Review, 2001, issue two, article five. Author Michele L. Mekel wrote that the court’s ruling eliminated “the possibility that a government agency will employ its resources to force an economically weaker record seeker to forego his or her right of access to public records due to the costs associated with being forced to defend in court.”

Two bills introduced in the Senate, however, provide that the person seeking the disclosure might have to pay the costs and attorney fees of the government agency if the citizen loses. A bill introduced in the House contains the same provision. So a citizen or a media organization wanting to get the video from police cameras, under the proposed laws, would get stuck with attorney fees if they lose. The situation recalls the story of a sixteenth-century British livery stable owner, Thomas Hobson, who told people visiting his business that they if they didn’t take the horse in the stall closest to the door, they couldn’t get a horse. We call that a “Hobson’s Choice” today. As Frank Sinatra sang it, “All or Nothing at All.”

So the proposed bills appear to lean toward government forcing citizens into a Hobson’s Choice that the state Supreme Court seems to have addressed in the KRCG-sheriff case.

A similar issue is brewing in Indiana where the head of the Indiana Association of Chiefs of Police, Jason Dombrowski, says police would be reluctant to give up the body camera footage because of, among other things, the potential costs of open records lawsuits could lead police agencies to not use the cameras. On the other side is the Chairman of the Indiana Broadcasters Association, Dave Crooks, who thinks that “most people would have never seen the videos that have been released out of Chicago involving the police incident shootings” if Illinois had the law being considered in Indiana.

And we can’t ignore the issue of harassment. Some will argue public release of body cam footage will help curtail what they see as police harassment of private citizens. On the other side is a concern that the blanket ruling that all body camera video is a public record can produce citizen harassment of police in one way or another.

But in a government of the people, should a person who thinks an officer has abused him or her in a traffic stop have to risk paying the police department’s attorney fees if the motorist wants to see the body cam footage? Or, should police departments have to face lawsuits by motorists who are angry about being stopped and seek revenge by filing a lawsuit?

Legislators are asked to balance those issues.

The state laws—several touch on assumptions that government shall operate in an open manner—generally say openness will rule UNLESS otherwise provided by law. That’s why the introduced bills include the loser-pays language (that the Missouri Supreme Court ruled many years ago could tilt the scales against the information seeker).

Should the language in law say government records will be open unless the agency takes action to defend its decision to withhold them—and the agency shall bear the costs of defending its position, win or lose. All the citizen would have to do is notify the agency that the citizen disagrees with the position and asks for arbitration through the court system. If the agency wins, it’s a cost of doing business and the citizen is not liable for the agency legal costs. If the agency loses, it should pay any costs that the citizens have borne in questioning that policy. If government of the people, by the people, and for the people really means anything, this might be worth considering.

Admittedly, this could be called “the lawyers’ full employment” position. But in a country that supposedly believes in a system that puts the people above the government, the issue is worth discussion. And if we look at history, we find ample examples the political system and society will adjust, accommodate, and move on when authority over people is adjusted to lean toward the people—as long as the people act responsibly.

And that’s the balance.

What in the world ?

Posted on November 13, 2015 by bpriddy

Two people are standing at the railing of an ocean liner gazing at the miles of Pacific Ocean all around them. Nothing is out there but water. All the way to the horizon. All the way around them.

“Sure is a lot of water,” one observes.

“Yeah,” says the other. “And that’s just the top of it.”

This observer has been getting emails from friends as far away as Vancouver and Los Angeles who have been watching, hearing, and reading about things happening at the University of Missouri for the last several days. In various ways they have asked, “What in the world is going on at the University of Missouri?” What follows will be long and does not pretend to be an analysis that will preclude other thoughts or actions that disagree or contribute to consensus.

The reporting of the way events have spiraled and spread has been most comparable to that first observer on the ocean liner: “Sure is a lot of water.” That is not a criticism of the reporting. Those who have been on the ground as journalists in situations such as this and—more prominently, in Ferguson last year—know that when you are being swept along by the tide there isn’t much time to think about how the coral was formed ten feet below you. The same often is true for those who are drawn into participation in those events. Thinking about the deeper issues that are involved or the deeper consequences that might result becomes secondary. Passing judgment on participants, whether demonstrators, administrators, reporters, observers—the list could be longer if we try to think of more categories—is easily done from a distance and the situation becomes more complicated when others with other agendas try to capitalize on it.

So, to answer the friends and neighbors who have asked, “What in the world is going on…?” we offer some observations. They are made from a short geographical distance and they are made by someone who is no longer in the business of being in the middle of the events or in a newsroom.

VIOLENCE

This is an important thing to remember. No buildings were set on fire. No roving gangs of demonstrators were going up and down Ninth Street throwing bricks through windows and looting businesses. As far as we know, guns were not part of the demonstration(s) and nobody was hurt. Some headlines were generated when a reporter and a cameraman were pushed around in a regrettable incident but the students who advocated a non-violent protest achieved that goal. While some of their actions might be properly questioned, let us not lose sight of the fact that this is one incident that did not turn violent.

But their activities have created image problems or feared image problems for the university, for some of its schools, and the athletic department. Andrew Kloster, a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, has written of what he calls “mob rule…in higher education.” He writes about recent disturbances at Yale and the disturbances in Columbia, “Both situations involve student activists disrupting education, allegedly on behalf of education…At Mizzou, activists claimed that failing to deal with ‘structural racism’ was harming their education. Both groups listed not specific harms, but rather vague interest in feeling good at their university.”

That kind of reaction, nationally circulated, is not what the protestors want to hear or want to hear said about them. What can it teach them? What can be learned from these experiences? Is the result as simple as Kloster suggests?

Nobody was hurt in these protests. At least not physically. That’s important to remember.

WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT GONE

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe is gone. Columbia Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin is gone. This observer met both of them during a meeting a few months ago and found both of them personally likable. Wolfe was candid in our discussions and represented the university well. Perhaps ironically, one of the products of our meeting was a resolution of some communications problems between the group I was with and the university. Loftin, I thought, was approachable and willing to discuss the issues we brought to the table. That’s a personal impression drawn from a single hour-long meeting. I was not left with any perspective on relations between the people in University Hall and the people who were on the campus. But clearly, those who saw things on a daily basis had distinctly different impressions.

Who’s still there? A guy in the pickup truck. A drunk white guy who went where he wasn’t wanted at the Legion of Black Collegians meeting. The person who scrawled the feces swastika in a bathroom. A spirit of intolerance that bubbles under all of society, occasionally seeping to the surface. And intolerance knows no sides. They’re still there.

THE EVENTS

Critics on the campus felt the school administration was detached and unresponsive. On Monday, the day Wolfe resigned and Loftin announced he would be stepping down, the deans of nine of the university’s colleges asked that the Board of Curators to fire Loftin. They cited a “multitude of crises” on the Columbia campus. They said they had met with Wolfe and Loftin as well as Provost Garnett Stokes twice in October but had seen the issues they talked about continue to deteriorate.

A day earlier the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures notified curators that 28 of the department’s thirty faculty members had expressed no confidence in Loftin. The other two faculty members abstained. A few days earlier, the English Department faculty had voted 26-0 for a no-confidence motion targeting Loftin. Two faculty members abstained.

Loftin also was the center of other controversies including the elimination of health insurance for graduate assistants who teach many of the school’s classes. The insurance was later reinstated. He also was unpopular because of the dismissal of the Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences.

He also was in the middle of a partisan political criticism about a doctor with some privileges at University Hospital doing abortions at the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Columbia. As usual lately, anything to do with Planned Parenthood became an issue of political capital that transcended rational discussion. The situation has reached the absurd stage that one state senator wanting to firm up pro-life support in a statewide candidacy has demanded the university tell a graduate student to stop studying whether a 72-hour waiting period for an abortion really accomplishes anything.

One side claims it was absolutely right and the university is absolutely wrong. And when the absolutely right side is the one that controls the university’s budget, academic freedom can become expendable—or at least a perception can arise that it is. The university revoked the doctor’s privileges at the hospital. Planned Parenthood and its supporters charged the university over-reacted. As far as we know, the graduate student is still researching.

Student demonstrators aimed their biggest complaints at Wolfe. An incident early in the school year in which someone in a pickup truck shouted “Nigger” at the student body president Payton Head appears to have begun the unrest. Several days later, a white man, described as drunk, interrupted a meeting of the Legion of Black Collegians and complained, “These niggers are getting aggressive with me” when the group showed him he was not welcome.

An incident during the homecoming parade last month, though, is what seems to have really gotten things rolling. A group of black students stopped in front of the car carrying Wolfe and started talking about the school’s history of racial incidents since its founding in 1839. Wolfe did not react and the driver of the car tried to move around the group and bumped a couple of the students.

About then, graduate student Jonathan Butler said he wouldn’t eat until Wolfe quit. Four days later, November 6, Wolfe issued a statement and an apology that seemed weak to the students in the homecoming parade event, and to the students whose resentment about administration detachment from campus concerns continued to simmer. Wolfe admitted that the situation might not have deteriorated if he had gotten out of his car during the parade and talked with the students.

Or would such an action only have compounded the disturbance that day? It’s easy to second-guess on that issue. Many will argue the students were out of line by stopping Wolfe’s car at all, let alone for several minutes before the blockade was ended.

This writer recalls an incident in the Missouri Senate a couple of years ago when a group led by a number of ministers entered the gallery of the senate and stopped floor action with songs, prayers, and statements urging expansion of the Medicaid program. Several were arrested and charged. Their cases have yet to come to trial. One of their arguments would be familiar to the students: they were frustrated by inaction on the part of those who could do something to deal with the problems they perceived.

And so a fair question has to be asked. What is left when you think the powers-that-be are not responsive to perceived serous issues you have raised?

The organizers of the demonstrations, Concerned Student 1-9-5-0, (1950 was the year the university admitted its first black student) issued eight demands including an apology from Wolfe in which he would “acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfill (the organization’s) demands”. The group demanded Wolfe’s removal and a presidential selection process involving faculty, staff, and students of diverse backgrounds. The group wants a mandatory “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum in all departments,” increased percentages of black faculty and staff, more money for the university counseling center that will allow hiring of mental health professionals as well as increases in funding for social justice centers.

The demands and the rhetoric that appeared to some people as overcooked took the situation beyond discussion. By now, too, various political figures were weighing in with veiled suggestions that time was running out for Wolfe.

Then several members of the football team announced they supported the student group.

THE TEAM

The announced “strike” by several football players pushed the issue into national headlines. International headlines in fact. Suddenly the confrontation was on the BBC. Suddenly it was on the national networks. And it put the coaching staff in a difficult position in what already has been a difficult year. They’ve already dealt with some unfortunate situations within the team this year apart from the win-loss record. It was important that the team understand that it IS a team and this episode threatened to pit involved members against those who didn’t feel touched by the controversy. Coach Gary Pinkel knew that however this event turned out, this incident had the potential to turn the locker room into at least two camps. So the word went out that the whole team supported Jonathan Butler and was concerned about his health. Pinkel has admitted, however, that some players were not enthusiastic about the “team” support of Butler. And in a press conference after the resignations, he didn’t take a position on the departures of Wolfe and Loftin.

The upcoming game with Brigham Young was endangered. The university could lose a million dollars and that was only a beginning.

There were doubtless some who immediately started thinking the football program was trying to run the university. Some undoubtedly felt cancellation of the game, the season, the players’ scholarships would be appropriate because the players were getting outside their roles. After all, the university is about education, not sports and—they might argue—the sports program was getting out of line.

Others could argue that athletes are also people and they do not give up being people just because they play sports. In fact, some might argue on their behalf that the players’ actions were a recognition that some things are far more important than collegiate sports. After all, these young men sit in classrooms with many of those who had pitched their tents on Carnahan Quadrangle. They are not apart from them just because they play football.

The university basketball players also were talking about taking action, which coach Kim Anderson says he would have supported, when Wolfe resigned.

It is easy to dismiss the action of the football players and the backing they got from their coach and the school’s athletic director as the athletic department throwing its weight around. But was it, really? Or was it people who were students first creating by their actions a situation the athletic department had to deal with at a time when it had been only an observer that was focused on fulfilling its special role in the university?

Regardless, SEC coaches in their weekly teleconference praised Pinkel’s integrity in supporting his team.

The entrance of the football team into the picture made the news story, for whatever reason, one that could not be contained in Columbia. It went global. And nobody knew how much worse it could become if something didn’t happen at University Hall.

THE CHOICE

We don’t know and maybe will never know what kind of conversations were going on between the university administration and the curators. We don’t know when or if somebody finally said, “Tim, the only way to end this situation is for you to leave.” Or maybe he’s the one who told the curators that he realized there was no way the situation could be resolved as long as he stayed.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has reported the curators continued to support Wolfe, who left without any kind of a severance package. The newspaper says that’s an indication he was not forced out. But Loftin was a different case. The curators voted to assign him to a new job. The newspaper says Loftin “made enemies out of deans, faculty and graduate students” and “frequently blindsided the curators with his decision making, stirring up controversies, then having to backtrack.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/missteps-not-student-revolt-led-to-mizzou-chancellor-s-demise/article_f955e9cf-6fc8-5fb0-b2cc-1b798d53fccc.html

The student group wasted no time issuing new demands for an “immediate” meeting with the university system faculty council, curators, and with Governor Nixon “to discuss shared governance and create a system of holistic inclusion for all constituents,” as one of the group members, Marshall Allen, put it, saying the demands have to me met “in totality.”

The resignations create some breathing space. There comes a time when heated rhetoric (“in totality,” for example) needs to be tempered so productive steps can be taken to produce change. Shared governance? That term as well as “a system of holistic inclusion” is good for pumping up a crowd. Creating realistic definitions is harder. The students are not going to run the University of Missouri. Or the faculty. But the point has to be acknowledged that the administration cannot be apart from the campus and the issues that personally touch those on it.

THE PROFS AND THE GREEK LADY

The Dean of the School of Journalism, David Kurpius, quickly put out a statement when a video went viral showing Professor Melissa Click helped block reporters from covering the post-resignation reactions of students in their encampment on the Carnahan Quadrangle. The video showed Click calling for some “muscle” to help remove student Mark Schierbecker who was shooting video of a confrontation between freelance photographer Tim Tai and Janna Basler, the assistant director of Greek Life and Leadership. Tai was shooting for ESPN News.

The video shows Basler telling Tai, “You need to back off. Back off, go!” When he asks her if she is with the Office of Greek Life, she responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student 1-9-5-0.”

Tai is heard saying that his First Amendment rights to be there are equal with the First Amendment rights of the students who have been demonstrating.

And a third person, identified as Professor Richard Callahan, the Chairman of Religious Studies, is shown with the protestors throwing up his hands to block the view Tai could get with his camera.

The J-School dean wanted to make it clear that Click is a member of the Department of Communications, which is part of the School of Arts and Sciences, not a member of the School of Journalism faculty. The J-School also released a statement discussing how it had used the events of the last several days as teaching opportunities for future journalists.

The national reaction on social media and in mainline media to the actions of those faculty members has been generally severe. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says Click locked herself in the office all day Tuesday and at times could be heard sobbing. At the end of the day she issued written apology for her actions, and said she had personally apologized to the journalists involved. She resigned her tenuous tie to the Journalism School. She had a “courtesy title” that let her serve on a graduate committee. Although Tai says he has accepted Click’s apology, Schierbecker has told the Washington Post he has not. “She made no acknowledgement that what she did was assault,” he told the newspaper.

Callahan is Click’s husband. Thai has told the Post that he also has apologized “for getting in my face and yelling about it.” We’ve heard no word about whether his behavior also is being scrutinized.

Basler has been put on administrative leave and relieved of her duties as the Director of Greek Life while the investigation of her activities continues. Tai says he’s had a personal meeting with Basler and has accepted her apologies.

There have been calls for the three to be fired. Washington Post blogger Erik Wemple, for example, has written “These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead they stood up for coercion and darkness.”

Who’s right and who’s wrong in all of this? From this reporter’s perspective (once a journalist, always a journalist), the students and the teachers were wrong. The young journalists were legitimately trying to cover a story, to help listeners, viewers, and readers gain some kind of insight into the situation. But this incident, as is the case with the larger activities, is not so black and white. KBIA, the University’s public radio station that relies heavily on journalism students in its newsroom—and has done outstanding work in covering these events—published this story on its webpage:

http://kbia.org/post/rights-activists-and-media-no-clear-answer

And KBIA News Director Ryan Famuliner, a former Missourinet reporter, added some context to help people see “below the surface of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/4-things-you-might-have-wrong-about-mizzou-story

Tuesday, the day after the confrontations, protestors decided reporters were welcome at their encampment. They took down signs telling the media to stay out and they passed out pages urging protestors to cooperate with the media. The headline on the flyers said “Teachable Moment.”

OKAY, SO—–

We talked to a distressed former member of the Board of Curators the other day who fears these events have set a “horrible precedent.” Some of those we have talked to who also have watched things from a distance suggest the university is in for an extremely difficult time finding someone to step into the president’s job. “Who in his right mind would want it?” one person asked.

What has been accomplished by all of this shouting and pushing and demanding is that impediments the protesting students, graduate students, and faculty members saw to communications between the folks on campus and the folks in University Hall have been removed. They’ve gotten the university’s attention.

Now, it appears, talking instead of shouting, discussing instead of demanding can start.

THE TEAM 2.0

No, the athletic department does not run the university. It is, however, the most publicly prominent entity that represents it. It would be nice if the public found the teaching of English, Journalism, Agriculture, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, and so forth to be something it would buy tickets to watch. But the fact is the public is more likely to cheer for an All-American football or basketball player than it is to cheer for a Nobel Prize winner. Another fact is that the university would continue to do its work educating students even if another fan never walks into Memorial Stadium.

However, the virtues of “the team” or as some of the players said, “the family,” should not dissipate as time passes and, in fact, might be good to keep in mind as the university re-shapes its administration. Teams work when they share a common goal. They fail when they break into factions. Factionalism breeds resentment. Resentment brings conflict. And conflict destroys the family, the team.

Take a look at this effort to help us see below “the top of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/mizzou-football-sets-precedent-student-athlete-activism

One of the jobs of a coach is to hold the team together. It would be fair to include questions to presidential candidates about how good a coach a new president and chancellor might need to be.

THE TEACHABLE MOMENT

One reason Click, Callahan, and Basler are in trouble is because they forgot that teachers remain teachers outside as well as inside the classroom. Whether the teachable moments represented by their apologies reverse the negative teachable moments of the confrontation with Tai and with Schierbecker is hard to determine. Perhaps the changed attitude of the protestors the next day, when they removed the signs and welcomed reporters, indicates some learning has taken place.

Did the change of attitude represent a learning moment resulting from the teachable moment? One would hope so, for students and teachers alike.

The events have created numerous teachable moments and they have provided learning moments as well. And those moments go beyond the teaching and learning that might happen in the new diversity and social respect programs the university is moving toward.

POLITICS

Events such as these are potential minefields for politicians—witness the no-win situations Governor Nixon found himself in, or put himself in, last year in Ferguson. These events also can be opportunities to say and advocate things that appeal to the public gut and gain some points for candidates and office-holders. Before Wolfe’s resignation, various office-holders put out fence-riding statements that tried to sound, well for lack of a better word, leaderly without running the risk of antagonizing potential voters, protestors, and those who thought Wolfe and Loftin were just fine. “This is serious stuff,” the statements generally said, “and I am sure the right things will be done.” Afterwards the same people who had not publicly come out specifically in favor of Wolfe’s departure courageously said he had done the right thing and they were glad he did.

But there’s another political matter that is hinted at in a part of the scenario that has been overshadowed by the events on the Carnahan Quadrangle. One of the graduate students who sent a letter “For my dear friends outside of Missouri campus” alluded to it when she wrote, “for many of us, it was clear we were just expected to pay ever-increasing fees (mine are currently about $1000 per semester above and beyond tuition), ½ tuition waivers for some grad students (where prior had been full waivers, which drastically impacts recruiting and retention efforts), an insurance debacle…and ongoing racial discrimination.”

Students are going deeper in debt. Some graduate students are paying increased fees. Insurance coverage for them was dropped, then restored when they made enough noise. And state support for higher education in Missouri is a fraction of what it was a decade ago. Data compiled earlier this year by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association says funding per full-time student has dropped almost 28 percent in the last five years while college enrollment has increased by twenty percent.

Your reporter was in a meeting yesterday with a former legislator who recalled that when he started in the General Assembly a few decades ago, state funding for higher education paid about half the costs of educating a student. Now, he said, it’s only about ten percent. There might be more accurate figures but the trend is accurate.

A seminar at Truman State University last March was called “Crisis in Missouri: The decline of state funding for higher education.” The announcement of the meeting that listed discussion points said, “For decades, public support for higher education in the state of Missouri has declined precipitously. The impact of this underfunding has been widespread and deeply felt: An increased financial burden on Missouri’s student population; An inability to recruit top teachers and scholars; a deterioration of the quality of education at our state institutions; A weakening of morale for the vast majority of those who work at those institutions; A culture on our campuses of frustration with the present and fear for the future instead of a culture of innovation.”

Fear. Frustration. It’s top to bottom in Missouri’s higher education system. The definitions of those words differ according to position within that system but all strata have them. Not to give the university administration a pass, but funding issues are a huge issue and at the highest levels are one of the primary ones. The President of the University of Missouri is seen by many as a manager and a fund-raiser. The chancellors are the on-campus managers.

But the buck has to stop somewhere. And ultimately, Wolfe felt the whole package of bucks rose to his level and the best alternative was to leave so that healing could begin on a campus he loved.

But don’t expect the people in Jefferson City to do anything financially that would ease the concerns that dog all of our campuses. Advocates of smaller government are more concerned with shrinking the state’s capability to pay its bills and obligations than they are in easing financial pressures on higher education and those it serves. Or other services to the general public.

“You can’t cure a problem by throwing money at it,” some like to say. That might be true. But you certainly can’t solve many problems by financially starving them. In 2013, then-auditor Tom Schweich released a study showing Missouri tax collections are about four-BILLION dollars below the amount allowed by the Hancock Amendment adopted in 1980 as a way to control over-taxation and over-spending. But the legislature only wants to widen that gap. So the concerns and frustrations of some of those who called for the departures of Wolfe and Loftin will go unanswered.

WINNERS?

It’s easy to pronounce winners and losers in these situations. But that’s a mistake because many participants are both. Victory has a cost. Loss has an opportunity.

Well, Wolfe is gone and so is Loftin. An African-American temporary president who was the first black graduate of the law school has been installed. An African-American law professor and associate dean has become an interim vice-chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equality. Curators have promised to restore “a culture of respect,” to hire more minorities, step up recruitment, and offer support to students who feel aggrieved.

Beyond that——-

Three people have been arrested for turning social media into anti-social media by making threats on the internet. The threats, especially in a time when mass shootings are not so uncommon anymore, honestly frightened some people on the campus.

Someone painted out the word “Black” on the sign in front of the University’s Black Cultural Center; the paint has since been removed. (Someday, maybe, there will be some discussions about whether cultural centers for various ethnic groups are long-term counter-productive to advancement toward a color-blind multicultural society many of these groups seek. Someday. Perhaps not this day, though, when emotions that would detract from the kind of discussion that needs to be held are likely to rise.)

The person or persons so consumed by—whatever—that he or she put a piece of human excrement into their hand and drew a swastika on the wall of a co-ed dormitory bathroom and left feces on the floor is still unknown. The student protests about racism overshadowed concerns by those to whom a swastika has a special significance.

Hate, ignorance, and downright idiocy are inescapable parts of our existence, whether on our campuses or elsewhere in our world. The events in Columbia have a double edge—protests against wrongs perceived by one segment of society while a hate message that hurts another segment of society stays in the background.

Those of us who were in college in the days when one of the popular songs was “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” a time when demonstrators thought they could help stop wars by putting flowers down the barrels of the guns held by National Guardsmen trying to control demonstrations, still hope for peace and love and harmony.

Each generation has to confront that issue and each generation learns that there are those who think the flower children and their idealistic descendants (and forebears) are fools and troublemakers. But a generation without ideals offers little to the future.

Comedian Pat Paulsen, whose satiric presidential candidacy in the days of the flower generation, put together a campaign book in 1968. He wrote, “This book is dedicated to the time when all of us spicks, niggers, white trash, hunkies, wops, kikes, mackerel snappers, micks, gooks, chinks, red necks, beans and hippies get together as Americans.”

Columbia in the past week reminded us we still have a ways to go.

Perhaps this long, long reflection helps answer the questions from friends in Vancouver and in Los Angeles and gives some insight into the coral beneath the surface.

Bob Priddy

A journalist's random observations

Category Archives: people

The Wesboro Amendment

Correction

To a candidate

Show Me State

Jocks among us

Find some other place to lie

The spirit of the St. Louis

Killing death

Open government

What in the world ?

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