Four Front meets with campus administrators

By Anna Koeppel
May 9, 2008

Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs and Chancellor Brady Deaton take questions from students during a Four Front meeting Tuesday in the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center.

Student groups brought concerns about a variety of issues to administrators during Chancellor Brady Deaton’s semi-annual visit to Four Front, a coalition of campus minority groups. Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Jim Spain also attended the meeting.

The meeting started with the re-election of Chairwoman Bria Scudder and Vice Chairwoman Rachel Kuo. The two ran unopposed, and included forums, collaboration with Sustain Mizzou and a camping trip for Four Front organizations as future goals.

One new concern, raised by Kuo, was Deaton’s practice of attending international cultural events, but sometimes missing domestic diversity events.

Deaton said he tries to make it to all events, but his busy schedule precludes him from doing so.

“Make sure I get an invite and if it gets on my calendar, I promise I will be there,” he said.

Scroggs said groups should contact her with an invitation as well.

Members of the Hispanic American Leadership Organization came prepared with several questions regarding minority scholarships, admissions and recruitment.

One topic the group focused on was a low number of diversity scholarships available for non-resident students. Group members suggested offering the scholarships to all students, not just freshmen, and not giving preference to Missouri residents because the state is not very diverse.

Jennifer Claxton, who works on diversity issues with the Missouri Students Association, cautioned that though she is glad an initiative to ban most forms of affirmative action in Missouri did not garner enough signatures to get on the November ballot, the fight is not over. She said she felt the administration did not fight the initiative hard enough, and asked how administrators plan to act if the issue comes up again.

“You have way more power than we do as students, and I feel all the administration did was talk about what to do if it passes,” she said. “There was nothing about preventing it. I feel all that energy could have been spent on fighting it.”

Deaton said administrators tried to be as vocal as possible about their opposition to the initiative, but “our voices on that were not as loud as they could have been.”

“There was probably not enough attention given across the spectrum to stopping it,” he said. “But it was a fair concern, how to deal with it if it did pass.”

Other topics of conversation included: benefits and health coverage for domestic partners, whether the new student center will retain the Thomas A. Brady name and the difficulty the Asian American Association dance team has in finding practice space.

Spain sought to reassure students about sharing their concerns.

“Let’s not wait for our once-a-semester meetings,” he said. “My door is always open.”

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Four Front meets with campus administrators

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