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Response from the men’s baseball team
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Thursday, April 14, 2016
A student voice of Saint Louis University since 1921
Vol. XCV No. 23
ARTS, PAGE 6
Baseball team at center of online bias incident Administrators prescribe restorative justice for affected parties
In May of 2015, a racially biased exchange occurred between a current and former member of the Saint Louis University baseball team. The conversation took place in a pitchers-only GroupMe, a group messaging application, while the team was on a trip to Washington D.C. The thread of messages included insensitive racial comments and stereotypes. One player took a photograph of the messages and sent it to his roommate, Brenden Twomey, an African-American senior at SLU and former manager of the baseball team. Twomey viewed the message, but he kept the photograph to himself for almost a year. “When I received that screen shot, obviously I knew it was wrong, but I was in a tough situation because I didn’t want to necessarily hurt anybody,” said Twomey. During his time as manager, from the start of the spring 2014 semester until the spring of 2015 semester, Twomey said he experienced a culture of racial insensitivity. “You become close [to the players] because you do spend so much time with them, so you overlook [that],” he said, adding: “At the same time, I felt extremely disrespected. I knew there should be some sort of punishment,
but I didn’t know how to go about that.” It wasn’t until late March of 2016 that Twomey addressed the incident. His friend, Dominique Morgan, a fellow SLU student, saw the photograph of the conversation on his phone and prompted him to file a biasrelated incident, which the University defines as “any act or behavior that is a violation of the Code of Student Conduct and/or the Policy on Harassment and reasonably believed to be motivated by
“
I was in a tough situation because I didn’t want to necessarily hurt anybody
“
By EMILY HIGGINBOTHAM Associate News Editor
-Brenden Twomey, Student
a consideration (real or perceived) of race, sex, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sexual orientation, marital status, military status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other protected classification.” On April 4, the pair filed the report with the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity. According to Dr. Mona Hicks, Associate Vice President and Dean of Students, the University handles bias-
related incidents on a caseby-case basis. However, she explained that in all incidents reported, the University documents the initial report and moves forward by gathering more information and context of the incident from all parties involved. Hicks said in this case, after Twomey and Morgan filed the initial report, the pair spoke with the investigator, who was activated by the bias-incident response team, the next day, on Tuesday, April 5. But Hicks added that the case still warranted more investigation. “Like in any investigation, we need to talk to all parties. In this case, some of those parties were not here. Either no longer enrolled [at SLU] or not in the city of St. Louis by the virtue of their role on campus, i.e. away game, away game, away game.” Hicks said. The baseball team was out of town for away games from April 5 to the 10. By April 11, Twomey and Morgan had not received any additional information about the status of the report or the investigation, which they said lead them to assume that action was not being taken. “We waited a week, and then we decided to contact BSA [Black Student Alliance],” said Morgan. “We went public because we felt like it was being swept under the rug.” Morgan sent the photograph of the messages to
Taken from Facebook
GroupMe: Two members, one current and one former, sent insensitive racial comments during an exchange on a trip to Washington D.C. in May 2015. BSA along with an email, supplying context from their perspective. Jonathan Pulphus, the incoming president of BSA, then posted both the photo of the messages and the email on Facebook, saying that the intention was to raise awareness about these events. Although the reporting
parties felt that seven days was too long not to hear back from the University, Hicks said that the this timeline was typical for these investigations. “On Monday [April 11], we scheduled a meeting for Tuesday, and in the transition of Monday to Tuesday, that note became a writ-
large notification to the campus because of the interpretation that there was too much time [that had gone by],” said Hicks. “That was a misunderstanding on our parts. On my part, I think that’s quick.” Hicks has since met with Morgan and Twomey and updated the pair on the status of the report. According to the biasrelated incident-report log, the investigation into the incident was closed on April 7 and referred to Dr. Jonathan Smith, the Special Assistant to President Pestello for Diversity and Inclusion. It was also labeled not applicable for disciplinary action. Due to the nature of the incident, since it was a private conversation rather than a message directed at one person, Hicks did not believe that it met the criteria for adjudication. “If I were to directly state to you, ‘You suck because of all of your social identities that God gave you.’ That would be wrong. That would require some adjudication,” said Hicks. “We also need to respect laws. This was a private conversation, or at least the perception of private between in-group parties.” Since the messages went public, the baseball team met with Hicks, Smith and other administrators to dis-
See “Bias” on Page 3
Breel spotlights mental health through humor Comedian tells his version of overcoming depression
Emily Higginbotham / The University News
BREEL: The comic performed in the Center for Global Citizenship on April 11, speaking about the depression he recounted in a viral TED Talk three years ago. By LUKE VEST Staff Writer
In an age where social media makes people appear to look so happy, twentytwo-year-old comedian Kevin Breel confronts an uncomfortable issue: mental health. On Monday, April 11, Breel visited Saint Louis University on a nationwide tour promoting his book “Boy Meets Depression: Or Life Sucks and Then You Live.” The event was hosted by SLU Wellness in the Center for Global Citizenship. Breel spoke to an audience of hundreds of SLU stu-
dents at the Center for Global Citizenship. He described his childhood depression, which was fueled by his father’s alcoholism and the death of a close friend. “I didn’t know how to help myself,” he said. “I spent all of my time in my room.” After years of suppressing his illness, Breel decided that he would commit suicide in February of 2011. While writing a note to his family, he realized that he had never told anyone the things that he was writing. “They’re just things that I’m afraid to talk about, and I just had this thought, which
was that I shouldn’t quit on myself if I’ve never tried to help myself.” He told his mother about his thoughts the next day, and she took him to counseling. He described the counselor as a mirror, “an angle that can show you a different part of who you are.” After a year of treatment, Breel finally felt at ease. But then a seventeen-year-old girl in his community committed suicide, and for the first time, Breel knew that he was not the only one who dealt with depression. “I had spent four years of my life really thinking that I
was alone in the struggle and that I was weird and sort of like the only person dealing with that.” Breel began researching mental health seriously, and found that in his native Canada, suicide is the number one cause of death for persons ages 17 to 25, and that there were more than one millions suicides worldwide within the previous year. He struggled with these facts and felt compelled to act. His counselor told him that “All of us in our life are living our own version of a story… and with that, you can either share it, or you can be ashamed of it.” Breel chose to share it. In 2013, Breel gained international attention with his TED Talk, “Confessions of a Depressed Comic,” which today has more than four million internet views. He received thousands of emails in response to the video, most of which were from people who related to his story. He found that the red thread connecting all the messages was that “Not only do people struggle with [this], but they don’t know how to talk about it and they really just don’t think they can.” During a visit to his mother’s house, Breel found old journals that he had written in as a teenager. “I would
See “Breel” on Page 3
nuclear-waste dump By PAUL BRUNKHORST Editor-in-Chief
Weldon Spring, the downtown site, the Latty Avenue site, West Lake Landfill, Coldwater Creek: these are all terms used frequently in the documentary “The First Secret City,” which will be shown in the AnheuserBusch Auditorium of the John Cook School of Business on Wednesday, April 20 at 7 p.m. And they are used frequently for good reason; it is at these sites that nuclear material and its waste have been produced and disposed of since the U.S. government hired St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Company early in the 1940s to purify uranium for use in an atomic weapon – the weapon that would be used to bomb Japan during World War II. In fact, as filmmakers Alison Carrick and C.D. Stelzer – the makers of “The First Secret City” – say, since the 1940s, when the government first hired Mallinckrodt, the process of dealing with the waste from this purification of uranium – which Mallinckrodt did for the government until 1967 – has caused a great deal of environmental and human damage and has led to frustrating confrontations with the bureaucratic juggernaut of local and national politics. As Carrick and Stelzer outlined in an interview with The University News, since the 1940s, the radioactive
waste produced by Mallinckrodt during the period in which it purified uranium has been shuffled to various locations and has been illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, which was capped by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 and currently has an underground fire ravaging its space – a fire which Carrick and Stelzer say is approaching the nuclear waste that was dumped there. Indeed, they said, this is the story the film tells: how nuclear waste was produced in St. Louis, how it was moved around to many places – including Mallinckrodt’s downtown site and the residential areas near Coldwater Creek in north St. Louis County – and how the various local governments and the federal government, both of who have a stake in its cleanup, have not acted. “The reason we looked into this is because in every newspaper article … it would just say [that] it was illegally dumped, [and] it would use the passive voice,” Carrick said. “So we began to think, ‘Well, how could this happen? Who did this? Why weren’t they even fined?’ … And what we ended up finding out … our theory is that, because they were all these small little fiefdoms out there … and they were kind of See “Nuclear” on Page 3