"This is journalism."

🪦 RIP Jewell Theatre Majors

If it can be said that journalism is writing what you know about, then I know this: William Jewell College was built, in part, by enslaved labor. And yet, its assets have remained in predominantly white hands—including Jewell Hall, one of the most valuable parcels of land in Clay County. And this formerly Baptist liberal arts college has struggled to find a consistent constituency or purpose or identity. I know that because I used to work there for almost a decade, and I know hundreds of people who have gone to school or worked there.

The reason why the current public financial situation at William Jewell College is presently relevant to me is that a person I know, who gave a lot of their adult life to the William Jewell College Theatre Company, was recently told that their position and Faculty Director of the Theatre Program is being reduced to a part-time role without benefits they are welcome to apply for. It was genuinely crushing news. This is a real human being I know, who is probably completely distraught and in "a professional suck-hole"—that moment when you thought you'd retire from a place but instead are suddenly forced to find a new job because some idiot who doesn't know you eliminated your position with very little notice. There are likely to be many more like him that I don't know.

I decided in 2019 that William Jewell College would take no more of my working life than it already had. Because my contract was irregularly withheld that year due to the college's failure to close on enough debate team scholarship prospects, I increasingly saw it as the kind of unstable employer that could fire anyone at any moment for any reason—an environment of engineered fear. That would be my personal Glassdoor review of William Jewell College: engineered fear. There wasn't a single year I worked at Jewell where my teaching contract wasn’t at least implicitly, if not explicitly, year-to-year based on enrollment. Every year felt like an abusive financial present—withheld until the last second for maximum panic effect.

I promised myself that when Jewell eventually let him down and wasn’t all he believed it to be, I’d stick up for him publicly, whether he liked it or not. In part, this is me doing that.

I think it's terrible that Jewell did this to him, I don't know how to they can righfully say they could continue any kind of theatre program without a theatre major. He is an incredible theatre educator. But this is about more than that—this is a call to current faculty, students, alumni, the Kansas City community, and anyone who's ever been proud of their association with William Jewell to reconsider what Jewell is becoming.

The current state of the institution seems unscrupulous—"The Critical Thinking College" now lacks a bona fide Theatre Arts program director and, apparently, a debate coach or program too. Somehow, this feels like such a symbolic dagger—one that’s all too late and doesn’t much matter.

But insofar as it does, the Theatre Company has historically challenged Jewell to engage with complex themes, moral dilemmas, and societal issues. I can’t even go into detail not would I be the right person—there’s too much history there. The unique combination of storytelling (literature), visual design (art), music (performance), and movement (dance) makes it a microcosm of the liberal arts, which defines Jewell. It's interdisciplinary. Its alumni are among my favorite Jewell people of all time. Theatrical performance relies on strong communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal. Theatre is inherently collaborative, requiring actors, directors, writers, and designers to work together to bring a production to life. This aligns with an emphasis on teamwork, adaptability, and creative problem-solving—hallmarks of a Jewell education.

The point was never that the Jewell Theatre Company produced world-class shows—it was that it pushed Jewell to be better and was a close company. It connected academically and proximally with the study of rhetoric, persuasion, and public speaking—fundamental elements of a liberal arts education. The full-time theatre director was part of the fabric of the Communication and Theatre Department. And this has been executed by the same people who casually named their debate team after Gina Lane just to functionally defund it.

But this is typical of an interim college president who spent their professional life spinning HR for Walmart. And frankly, it's been the move throughout the history of the college. Early in my career at Jewell, despite teaching a full faculty load, I was not considered a full-time employee—despite being on two separate 0.5 FTE contracts. No union representation whatsoever. I was told I wasn’t allowed to mention starting a union. The Jewell admin playbook was always predictable—maintain the façade of student services by replacing full-time faculty with lower-paid and less-qualified replacements. Strip down a department and roll it into another like Cold Stone mix-ins. A person whose entire life has been the William Jewell Theatre Company—gone overnight. No questions asked. The only answer necessary? Financial exigency.

A near-lifetime of commitment to Jewell. An incredible legacy of work extending the Jewell Theatre tradition built by two people I consider near-saints—Kim and Lois Anne Harris—shattered. Why? Because from 2016 to 2024, Elizabeth MacLeod Walls made Jewell appalling to a full generation of students and couldn't figure out how to just listen to them when they tried to say the campus was becoming increasingly cloistered and uninhabitable.

Expect more, give less.
That’s Jewell.

And now, it's being run by someone whose entire career ChatGPT can reduce to a big-box HR blunder. Someone who has previously pulled similar moves—converting full-time jobs into part-time ones—except on a scale that affected millions of Walmart employees instead of just a handful of people I know. I suppose what I’m trying to argue for is the soul and soil of a college. To whatever extent William Jewell College is a valuable social institution, I think Jewell has fully lost its way. If you're functionally firing Nathan Wyman—a person who has given his entire life to the place, no doubt one of your most loyal schmucks—and replacing him with an underpaid, non-benefits-eligible role in a quasi-theatre program, why are you even still in the theatre business? As an institution, why are you still granting any Theatre degrees?  Why not just fully start wind down plans? Why not just shut it down entirely? For people not familiar with this situation, and for some reason reading this, it’d be like if someone walked into the Notre Dame locker room and fired Rudy.

I guess my point is, if we’re really reimagining Jewell to the extent that there are no more Theatre faculty, why not imagine a world with no faculty at all? Why place any limitations at all? Why not imagine a world where the entire mission of the college changes—one where Jewell becomes a predominantly Black-serving institution with a predominantly Black faculty?

Theatre and debate taught me how to make that point.

To think it through.

To be careful.

I’ve never understood why lawyers and judges get so bent out of shape about hearsay—because that’s all being alive is. Hearing things and saying things. Listening or talking. Hearing or saying. My evidence is my experience, and it’s self-evident.

Live reporting.

Because theatre and debate are so essential to any well-rounded liberal arts education, a school that brands itself as "The Critical Thinking College" but fails to support those programs may as well concede that its words don’t matter at all. And if you’re straying this far from the college’s mission—eliminating core scholarship opportunity for students to study topics like rhetoric, public address, public deliberation, argumentation, performance, media studies, music, and other forms of expression—then why even call yourself a college anymore?

If you're a modern liberal arts college rebranding itself again, what are you going to do? Are you becoming an IT-intern farm? A technical school? A nursing school? A software engineering boot camp? Mustn’t it logically follow that you don’t actually want to right the historic wrongs of William Jewell’s enslavement record if you'll become anything just to avoid facing your past? That given the chance to totally reimagine the college, you still only narrow its future to a predominantly white one? 

These are just questions worth addressing.

And if we’re able to think in the esoteric, can we not dream of a world where Jewell shuts down the entire neo-colonial Baptist academic mission-to-civilize project and surrenders its land to the people who actually imbued it with real values—the descendants of those enslaved by its no-good founder, in the very county where I speak this legal possibility into existence, Clay County, Missouri. The current Board of Trustees could vote to do this thing and make this figment of my imagination real.