An email sent to four people in 2022 has raised enduring questions about Missouri Western State University’s leadership and whether the university in St. Joseph welcomes all students.
On Nov. 8, 2022, then-recruitment manager Peggy Payne passed along an order for university recruiters to stop doing visits or fairs at 23 urban and inner-suburb schools listed under the headings “Kansas City, MO” and “St. Louis, MO.”
The seven Kansas City schools were all in Kansas City Public Schools or the Hickman Mills C-1 School District.
“If you have any of these schools scheduled they need to be canceled immediately,” the email read. “When scheduling for next semester, please remember these. … I was told there will be no discussion regarding this.”
The Missouri Western Board of Governors condemns the email, board Chair Lee Tieman said, but it views the incident as closed.
The directive was in place for less than a year. An investigation found university President Elizabeth Kennedy wasn’t involved. Students from the named schools have since successfully applied to attend Missouri Western.
“We’re embarrassed that anybody connected with the university ever sent an email like this, but from the board’s standpoint, it has been thoroughly investigated,” Tieman said. “No one is (currently) employed with the university who had any role in … that email going out.”
But some state lawmakers and people with ties to the university aren’t satisfied. They highlight conflicting accounts about who ordered the email, missing information about what inspired it and lingering questions about how students of color can expect to be treated if they enroll.
“How can you rectify a situation of saying, ‘We don’t want your kids?’” asked Missouri state Rep. Tiffany Price, a Democrat from Kansas City. “Even if you say, ‘Oh, yeah, well, we do want them.’ So do you want them because we know about this email now? Or do you want them because you want to have a pity party with them? And does everybody feel like that?”
The origins of the email
There are conflicting accounts of what prompted the fall 2022 email blacklisting nearly two dozen schools.
A former admissions staff member heard from both Payne and then-Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Melissa Mace that the directive came from Kennedy.
According to the admissions staff member, the conversation with Payne happened shortly after the email. The conversation with Mace happened before she left for another job, which Mace’s LinkedIn page says was in May 2023.
The former admissions staff member asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships with university staff.
Mace reiterated the same story in an email she sent to then-board member Rick Ebersold in September 2023 to “memorialize our conversation.” The Beacon obtained the email in a records request.
“I was instructed verbally by Dr. Elizabeth Kennedy to eliminate certain schools in (the) Kansas City and St. Louis areas,” the email said. “This directive was a result of what I believe she thought to be a direct correlation between students from certain school districts and resident hall issues.”
Payne sent the email, but Mace and Payne “did not believe this to be the correct course of action,” Mace’s email said.
Mace did not respond to a message The Beacon sent to her LinkedIn page. The Beacon was not able to reach Payne.
The university asserts that Kennedy did not order the email and was not aware of it.
The Beacon asked the university’s media contact person to speak with Kennedy or another representative of the university and was directed to Tieman.
An emailed statement from Tama Wagner, chief assistant for strategic initiatives, said the directive was reversed in late summer 2023, and the Board of Governors ordered a third-party investigation in October 2023. Kennedy first learned of the directive through that investigation, she said.
Tieman said the independent investigator was a private attorney who had experience with similar work, but did not name the person.
To the former admission staff member’s knowledge, the board’s independent investigator did not contact any of the email’s recipients.
That investigator looked into claims that Kennedy directed the email but did not find them credible, Tieman said. He declined to name who the board believes did direct the email.
“What we believe from the report is that it was just a misguided interpretation by an employee who was having some performance problems at the time, and took it upon that employee’s initiative that this was a method — an unacceptable method, but a method — of trying to address other issues that were under that employee’s supervision,” he said.
Those issues were related to campus life and discipline, he said.
“If there were any claims that it was directed by Dr. Kennedy, there ended up being inconsistencies in any interviews for that,” Tieman said. “There was no credible evidence to support that it came from her.”
The board used even stronger language in an email to the “campus community” on Jan. 31, 2024, calling accusations against Kennedy a “misguided and reckless campaign,” “blatantly false” and “baseless and defamatory.”
The email said the initial whistleblower had “major credibility issues” and that the investigation “called into question the motives of those attempting to malign the University’s leadership.”
Former Missouri Western English professor Bill Church said he believes parts of the email, which refers to “falsehoods and distortions being publicized on social media,” are directed at him.
Church runs a Facebook page called The Truth About Missouri Western State University where he is often critical of the board and of Kennedy. He graduated from Missouri Western, taught there for 30 years until cuts to faculty prompted his retirement in 2020 and wrote a book about the university.
He learned about the email to recruiters, the whistleblower and the investigation after people reached out in response to his posts on related topics, Church said.
He helped make the existence of the email public and has been pushing for attention from the media and politicians, hoping the board will address the disconnects among conflicting claims from Kennedy, staff members and the board itself.
For example, he was confused by a board member’s statement during a Faculty Senate meeting on Feb. 1, 2024, that the board still didn’t know who had sent the email to recruiters or why it had been sent. That statement came after the board said a full and thorough investigation was complete and had exonerated Kennedy.
“One of my more aggressive posts was titled ‘Who is lying?’ because somebody had to be lying,” Church said. “Both stories cannot be true.”
The impact of the email
Price, the state representative from Kansas City, said when she saw the list, she thought it was targeting “our inner city schools, where most of our Black kids go.”
Among the schools listed in the email were Kansas City Public Schools’ four neighborhood high schools: East, Central, Northeast and Southeast. Manual Career and Technical Center and African-Centered College Preparatory Academy were also listed.
The most recent data listed on KCPS’ stats webpage shows almost 50% of its students are Black and more than 30% are Hispanic.
The directive barred recruitment visits to all of the district’s high schools except for two signature schools, Lincoln College Preparatory Academy and Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, which are selective about which students they admit.
The seventh Kansas City school was Ruskin High School in the Hickman Mills C-1 School District.
Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education data shows more than 60% of Hickman Mills students are Black and close to 20% are Hispanic. Ruskin is the district’s main high school.
Ten of the St. Louis-area schools were from St. Louis Public Schools, three were from the Ferguson-Florissant School District and one each were from the Normandy, Riverview Gardens and Jennings school districts.
Missouri state Rep. Kem Smith, a Democrat from Florissant in St. Louis County, said a theme emerges about the St. Louis schools too.
“‘Whoa, those are all Black schools!’ That’s probably the most obvious glaring theme that people say when they see the list,” she said. “I don’t want to say that it’s all racial discrimination, but it’s definitely location discrimination.”
The listed schools are all in St. Louis city or in northern parts of St. Louis County.
The existence of the directive wasn’t obvious to the Kansas City districts.
College access specialists “haven’t seen any decreases in students interested in, visiting, or attending Mo West,” KCPS public relations coordinator Shain Bergan said in an email. “We continue to have a healthy relationship with Missouri Western. They visit our schools, and our students visit them.”
Hickman Mills Communications Director Justin Robinson said no one in the district “has been informed of any directive from Missouri Western or any official communication indicating that we have been placed on a ‘do not visit’ list.”
Tieman said the university’s analysis also shows students from those schools listed in the email aren’t being shut out. In the recruiting cycle following the email, students from 17 of the schools enrolled, he said, and three others have had students enroll before and since.
Fewer Black students enrolled in fall 2023 compared to previous years, but that decline came amid an even steeper overall enrollment drop, Tieman said.
Data from a records request Smith shared with The Beacon shows combined admissions from the 23 schools spiked in fall 2022, right before the directive. The number dropped in 2023, but still remained above 2021 levels.
State law designates Missouri Western as an open-enrollment institution focused on applied learning.
The university has been looking for ways to increase enrollment amid an overall decline. A fall 2024 report from the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development found enrollment has dropped more than 30% since 2019.
Price, the representative from Kansas City, said the fact that students are still enrolling doesn’t necessarily assuage her concerns, because the email makes her doubt the university’s attitude toward those students.
“Just imagine that the students are going up there on a tour and visiting (a) school, but not knowing in their head that these people really don’t want me here anyway,” she said.
Tieman said students shouldn’t worry about facing prejudice from Missouri Western, which he said is proud to have one of the highest percentages of African American students among Missouri public universities.
“I would give my complete assurance to any prospective students of whatever ethnicity that they are completely and unconditionally welcomed at Missouri Western State University, and we will do everything we can to help all those students succeed,” he said.
What’s needed for the future
Tieman said the university initially didn’t reach out to the affected schools because “we had no reason to believe that anything had actually been done related to these directives.”
But now that the email is being discussed more widely, “we welcome the opportunity to show what Missouri Western State University is truly about and how we welcome all students,” he said.
Wagner said in an email that the university has reached out to schools that Smith contacted.
Price, the representative from Kansas City, said it would be hard for the university to immediately rebuild trust, though it would help if it fully admitted its mistake.
“I’m not even sure if anything can be done in the next five years,” she said. “Of course it’s forgivable, but it’s not forgettable.”
Smith, the St. Louis-area representative, said that Kennedy and the university haven’t explained to her satisfaction why the email was sent in the first place. Instead, they’ve emphasized that Kennedy wasn’t responsible and portrayed Church as leading a “witch hunt.”
“All of that could be true. All of that could be false. I don’t know,” she said. “What I want to know is, ‘Why are our schools on this list?’ And so she never really answered that.”
In late March, Smith put out a news release calling for Missouri Western to provide a more complete explanation of the events that led to the directive and make a public statement that the university works with all students.
If there truly was a pattern of students from certain schools behaving badly in the dorms or having other struggles, Smith said, she’d like to see the university troubleshoot with high schools.
“They’ve got to open communication,” she said. “You can’t let these things happen in the silo where we can’t come together and say, ‘What do we need to do different?’”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
