On May 9, the faculty of William Jewell College voted to adopt a resolution which tasked members of the Faculty Council committee to investigate claims concerning academic freedom violations raised by members of the Slavery, Memory and Justice Project (SMJP). The SMJP is a group of faculty, alumni and 25 students who have conducted extensive research in the history of slavery’s influence on the College since August 2020. 

The SMJP claimed that actions taken by the College undermined students’ and faculty’s academic freedom — understood as the freedom to conduct research and publish findings without the administration’s interference or attempted interference. Further, the SMJP claimed that the College gave preferential treatment in terms of academic freedom to its own investigative council: the Racial Reconciliation Commission (RRC). The RRC was established in April 2021 by Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, president of the College. Its purpose is to “[find] and [express] both an historical and moral truth about the racial history of William Jewell College spanning the years of our founding until today.” 

On Nov. 18, 2022, a general version of the faculty council’s executive summary of the report was released to faculty. The summary reports on whether the academic freedom of the SMJP was jeopardized in this context. On Nov. 19, an e-mail signed by MacLeod Walls, president of the College, and by Gary Armstrong, interim vice president of academic affairs, was sent to the faculty in response to this executive summary. Further, on Nov. 30, a more specific version of faculty council’s report was released to faculty department chairs and program leaders. The general executive summary, the administration’s response to the summary, and the more specific report will not be released to the student body for reasons of confidentiality and protection of personnel privacy. 

With the purpose of sharing these reports with the broader student body, The Hilltop Monitor reached out to administration for a copy of the executive summary and the subsequent e-mail. The Hilltop Monitor’s request for access to these documents, redacted or otherwise, was denied. Though it is important to safeguard confidentiality and the privacy of College personnel, the administration’s refusal to provide an appropriately redacted version of the report and official communication about the report constitutes a violation of the Student Handbook. The administration commits itself to the protection of academic freedom, but their failure to provide crucial information about an investigation that was at least partly constituted by student rights and interests contravenes the College’s commitments.

According to the handbook, the faculty and the College have a joint responsibility to safeguard student academic freedom: for the “affirmation of academic freedom of students should be accepted as a reciprocal understanding by each individual student and among groups of students and the faculty and administration” (emphasis added). 

The handbook goes on to describe the scope of academic freedom, constructed under this reciprocal understanding amongst students, faculty and administration.

First: students have a right to freedom of expression in the classroom without fear of retaliation from faculty. 

But further, the handbook tasks students with the responsibility of “owning” their curricular experience at Jewell: “While it’s every student’s goal to earn a degree from William Jewell College, Jewell students experience invaluable learning outside the classroom. Students are expected to ‘own’ their co-curricular education which only occurs through immersion in and engaging the Jewell community” (emphasis added).

For students to be able to live up to the responsibility, the College must work “to provide and maintain an academic climate which is conducive to learning.” The executive summary of the report – in addressing student interests and rights with respect to academic freedom – has an impact on the kind of immersion and engagement students have with the Jewell community. Additionally, a determination on student academic freedom, as made in the report, shapes the academic climate that students learn in. 

To support students’ responsibility to “own” their co-curricular education, the College should give students access to the executive summary. The handbook tasks the College with just this responsibility: “Students have the right to the best education possible and the responsibility to be active co-creators in their learning. Students have the right to ready access to academic information, ideas, and material promoting their learning” (emphasis added). 

The handbook also stipulates that: “Students have the right to access to College administration. The College Administration will seek to foster lines of communication with students, consulting student opinion and representation prior to major changes in college policy, especially changes directly affecting students. Students will seek active and responsible participation in such changes. Implementation of such changes shall be publicly announced before going into effect.”

A determination of student academic freedom is just the sort of thing which directly affects students. According to the handbook, the administration has a responsibility to share relevant information about such crucial determinations with the student body, but no official communication about faculty council’s investigation has been shared with the student body.

It is the case that administration often communicates – whether in e-mails, reports, or meetings –  with faculty without the student body’s input. However, in this particular situation, where there is student unrest concerning the matter of academic freedom, continued communication without the inclusion of the student body breaks down institutional trust.

If the concern about releasing the executive summary of the report is a concern about confidentiality, then the report should be appropriately redacted, as per legal counsel’s advice. If the concern about sharing an e-mail response with the student body is about a potential breach in the privacy of personnel, the relevant personnel should be asked whether they think it would be beneficial to share the response with the student body. If the relevant personnel express concerns about their own privacy, then it is legitimate to not broadly disseminate the e-mail response. 

To fulfill their commitments to academic freedom, the College should find a way to mediate confidentiality and privacy concerns and the rights and interests of students. Foreclosing materials to the student body that are relevant to an understanding of the academic environment denigrates the quality of education and undermines trust in the administration. 

According to Ernie Stufflebean, Director of Student Life, the major changes to the handbook for the 2018-2019 school year included revising the layout and format of information.

“For the most part, there haven’t been any significant changes to policy, per say, but we reorganized the way the policies are presented. In the previous rendition of the handbook, we had policies arranged to reflect how they supported the values of the institution,” said Stufflebean. “However, the feedback we received from organizations like Student Senate, while they appreciated seeing the alignment… it made it difficult sometimes to find things they were looking for in the handbook. They didn’t know where to look.”

In order to help students know where to look for the information they were seeking, the student handbook was given a new look. Stufflebean and other leaders on campus viewed the student handbooks of other institutions and worked to connect and link specific policies with common themes together.

“We took that feedback and looked at other institutional handbooks as well, and we tried to develop a format for the handbook that was organized in a different fashion. We tried to make it very quick and easy to get to a particular policy or to the information that students were seeking. So everything is linked to or directly from the Table of Contents,” said Stufflebean. “Much of the student handbook, especially with regards to policies, can be found through clicking on the links that go to our institutional policy library that houses all of our institutional policies. Some of those links may go to the Student Consumer Information website, and if a policy is not found in one of those two locations, it links to a page internally within the book.”

Stufflebean and others are hoping that the recent changes will help students have an easier time navigating the handbook, and that they might come across additional useful information due to the new links included throughout the policies included in the handbook.

Although the major changes to this school year’s handbook were made to address its organization and ease of use, additional changes were made to the college’s values, with the hope that the new values would help to guide every student’s experience at William Jewell. The changes to the college’s values help to define and provide reason for the learning outcomes that Jewell is trying to promote.

“I think the values reinforce the sense of community and culture that define who we are and how we go about education and how we live in community. I think those values just really provide that construct and framework for us as an institution, which really identifies who we are and what we believe and what we value. And of course we have the larger mission statement for our institution which provides some definition and parameters as to how we intend to move towards the mission of the institution… I think it just provides that definition for who we are, what we value, and what it is we are trying to achieve here at William Jewell,” said Stufflebean.

A new addition to the handbook this year is the implementation of co-curricular learning. The Critical Thought and Inquiry classes are already well implemented into students’ class schedules, but the new co-curricular learning aims to frame the student experience outside of the classroom.  

“Well, I think it is important to identify the learning outcomes that we strive to meet with regards to our programs and with what we are doing outside of the classroom… I think students are very used to seeing learning outcomes and objectives in a particular course, and we have kind of moved that ideology and that thinking to everything that is occurring outside of the classroom as well. We know that students living off campus and being engaged outside of class has significant value, and there is a lot of learning that occurs through those opportunities and experiences, but I think this helps the different programs and departments providing that out of classroom experience. It makes us think about what we do, how we do it and why are we doing it. What is the intended outcome of what we do, what are the intended learning objectives from the things that we do? It becomes intentional, its tangible and you can really identify where students are growing and hopefully students can identify where they are growing and learning through their involvement and leadership positions on campus through service learning and community service and those kinds of events,” said Stufflebean.

The co-curricular learning will be visible on campus in various ways. The varying goals of the co-curricular learning have been broken down into common statements, which will now be tagged onto the descriptions for many events advertised on platforms including the Presence application and flyers.

“One of the things you are going to see on Presence is that all of our events and activities, even those sponsored by student organizations, we are asking them to identify specific learning outcomes, and we’ve organized those in our specific learning domains and dimensions. On every event that you see on Presence, it’s going to be tagged with one particular dimension of a learning domain that that program is striving to fulfill or achieve. So students will hopefully then begin to recognize how these opportunities and activities really fill in their total educational experience at Jewell, and where that fits within the larger picture of what the institution hopes to achieve regarding the co-curricular experience of being a Jewell student. This is why we want our students here, why we want them living on campus, we want them to be immersed in this experience for the entire four years, so that when they leave Jewell they have a skill set that will be invaluable to them, whether that next step will be their first job or starting their career or graduate school, whatever that may be, we are trying to prepare them for that,” said Stufflebean.

Overall, the biggest change to the look of the student handbooks this year is its new organization and layout. The focus of the handbook’s makeover was to make it more effective and user-friendly for all students, staff and faculty.

“I think it is most definitely the layout and presentation… the way it’s organized, it’s broken down with information about the college including our story and our traditions, it talks about our student development philosophy, and from there it goes into the array of policies that are upheld in this institution. We’ve tried to organize it in a way that is hopefully more user-friendly and can help students to be able to fund what they need with regards to that information in one place. That was our objective,” Stufflebean said when asked about the most important changes to the handbook.

The 2018-2019 William Jewell College student handbook has been given a face-lift and can be viewed by all on the Jewell Central website under the students tab. The changes to the handbook were done in hopes of better serving the Jewell community and adding framework for the student experience outside the classroom through the implementation of co-curricular learning.

Photo courtesy of Sofia Arthurs-Schoppe. 

Emotional Support Animal Policy (ESA)

According to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Fair Housing Act (FHA), no individual should face discrimination based on a disability from a program receiving federal funds. These acts include the protection and defense of individuals facing housing discrimination and also applies to students of the College. With this in mind, the ESA policy has been added to the Student Handbook.

“The fair housing act tells us that students with disabilities enjoy fair and equal enjoyment of their dwelling. And so one thing that we can do for them, depending on what their disability is sometimes, is allow them to have an assistance animal,” said Missy Henry, 504 and Compliance Coordinator.

Henry began working on creating an appropriate ESA policy for Jewell’s campus during the summer of 2015. She received help from the Student Life office during the drafting process.

“It’s really a right that students have had for a while, but it’s good to outline it so that people know that they can qualify for [an ESA],” said Henry.

The process of applying for an ESA is detailed in the Handbook and includes such steps as: providing documentation for the student’s disability, how the animal aids the student and why the animal is necessary.

Macy Tush, sophomore and first-year Resident Assistant (RA), recognized the importance of a policy such as this.

“College is a difficult transition, I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would be if I had to worry about my mental health. I think this policy takes a huge weight off of some students’ shoulders,” said Tush.

For more information on the process of applying for an ESA, please see Missy Henry in Gano 200-A, visit this link or enroll in the iTunes-U course with this code: CJN-ECR-CRA.

Smoking Restriction Policy

For the 2015-2016 academic year, the campus is in a transitional period in which smoking is still allowed in designated areas outside groups of residential buildings. The College aimed to give students this year to acclimate to the new policy and provided smoking cessation support. For students, the nurse practitioner, whose office is located in the Wellness Center, is the main contact. For faculty and staff, the Human Resources office has this information as well. 

Paula Brown, nurse practitioner, explained her role in helping students who want to stop smoking.

“They’ve [the College] left it very open-ended, which I think is good. The typical role of the nurse practitioner is to prescribe medicine, but certainly there are other strategies that work. There’s over the counter things that work, there’s counseling that works. They’ve left it very open-ended; I haven’t really received any direction ‘do it this way.’ I know what the policy says and I know what I’ve done in the past in my prior practice so I’ll try to meld those things together,” said Brown.

Dr. Anne Dema, Provost of the College, commented on a main reason for the transitional period.

“The big concern there, which is real, is that for employees, who are here part of the day, there is an understanding that you can go use the [smoking cessation] supports. We’ve got support through HR and through the health center, but you [faculty or staff members] can go home and…have whatever private behaviors you want to have when you’re not here, but that’s not the case for students,” said Dema.

The designated smoking areas are located somewhere near the first-year building in the central area of Jones, Melrose and Semple, on the back patio of Shumaker Hall and on a concrete block outside of the fraternity houses. 

Discussions about smoking and secondhand smoke on campus have happened continuously for some time, most notably with Student Senate approaching administration approximately five years ago with requests for smoking zones.

“Senate came to the administration with a proposal to create zones for smoking. There was some dissatisfaction of coming in and out of the buildings and walking through second hand smoke. Senate wanted to do something to help control that,” said Dema.

After Senate approached administration with a proposal for smoking zones 15 feet away from doors that were in compliance with county law, the issue seemed to dissipate. However, with the completion of the Pryor Learning Commons (PLC), discussions around smoking on campus were revived.

“So this past summer, we said, you know what, the institution had been working on creating a healthier environment. We’ve got to deal with this. We had over the years several requests from the nursing students and their association to do something to better educate and support in reducing secondhand smoke. We just decided that it is time,” said Dema.

On Wednesday,  June 29 the student body received an email from Jewell Campus News stating that the campus would become smoke and tobacco free starting Aug. 1, citing that “Student Senate, student focus groups, academic department chairs, Administrative Council and the President’s Council” participated in conversations pertaining to the move to smoke and tobacco free.

Included in this email were two documents, an FAQ and an outline of the policy. The FAQ detailed the exact meaning of “smoke and tobacco free,” which includes cigarettes, chew and e-cigarettes. 

“Why smoke-free? [Because] the emergence of e-cigarettes. Smoking has been banned in our buildings, but what do you do about an e-cigarette? Most of [the] tobacco-free [part], if you read the policy statement, is linked to a health concern. What we want to do is create a healthy environment and e-cigarettes are too new. There’s not a lot out there about it being a health concern,” said Dema.

Current Student Senate cabinet worked over the summer with Student Life on the policy.

“They [Student Life] reached out to the original cabinet, so Harry’s [Harry Schwartz] cabinet, and they had communicated the same message that we did, that students weren’t going to be fans of it [a smoking restriction] and people weren’t going to support a no smoking or no tobacco policy,” said Brennan Canuteson, senior and Student Senate Vice-President.

Throughout this process, Canuteson and the rest of Senate cabinet shared survey responses collected during their campaign and personal opinions about the policy with Student Life.

“Overall they [Student Life] know student feedback does not support the policy and that Student Senate doesn’t support the policy. That was very candid throughout the entire thing,” said Canuteson.

Much of the policy emphasizes the need to respect the health of nonsmokers and the Jewell community in general. 

“Jewell is definitely not on the cutting edge here. But a lot of colleges and universities are moving towards implementing a policy like this so really truly it’s a healthy and comfortable environment for everyone,” said Shelly King, Dean of Students.

While secondhand smoke may be a health concern for students who are nonsmokers, many question the need for smoking and tobacco to be completely absent from campus.

“They [the College] truly do believe that they are doing it for the health of students and the betterment of our school community,” said Canuteson. “As much as it is easy for us to disagree with it and to be frustrated by the policy, it really is better for us to move forward as a collective unit. We’ve voiced our concerns to Student Life and there are times where we are going to be heard and there are times we are not. But at some point I think respecting the overall decision that they’ve come to is the main thing that we can do as group.”

Infographic by Kelsey Neth.