When Does a Student-Affairs Official Cross the Line?

Mark Schierbecker via AP

In the video clip that would imperil her job and upend her life, Janna Basler enters stage left in pearls and sunglasses, holding a cup of coffee.

Tim Tai, a student photojournalist, is trying to take pictures of a protest on the University of Missouri’s Carnahan Quad held by a group of activists who are protesting the campus racial climate under the name Concerned Student 1950. They are asking him to leave. Mr. Tai is arguing his right to stay.

Ms. Basler, who is white, slides between Mr. Tai and the other students. “Sir? I’m sorry, these are people, too,” she tells him. “You need to back off.”

Mr. Tai holds his ground. He tries to lean around Ms. Basler for a view of the encampment that protesters have set up on the quad. She moves with him like a basketball defender, her hands raised. Standing with their faces inches apart, they trade warnings about physical contact.

“What’s your name?” Mr. Tai asks.

Ms. Basler shakes her head and says nothing.

“You’re with the office of Greek life?”

“My name,” she says decisively, “is 1950.”

Ms. Basler was, in fact, senior associate director of student life at the university. But when another student posted online video of the confrontation, hundreds of thousands of people watched her disavow her affiliation to Mizzou’s embattled administration and side with the student activists.

The firestorm that ensued — much of it focused on Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communication who was eventually fired for her behavior during the protest — was exceptional. But Ms. Basler’s role in the confrontation last November 9 illustrates a tension familiar to many college officials who, like her, are in charge of supporting students outside the classroom.

Anger over structural racism on college campuses has put black students and their allies at odds with their institutions. The activists have demanded swift change and, in some cases, called for current leaders to resign. The protests have put officials who work in student affairs, like Ms. Basler, in the position of advocating for students who are purposely disrupting normal operations — to the chagrin of colleges’ other political constituencies, including many other students.

The question for student-affairs workers, then, is this: How does one support student activists while remaining responsible to the institution?

" ‘Walk the line’ is a perfect phrase,” says Shannon Ellis, vice president for student services at the University of Nevada at Reno. “And it is a very fine line.”

The location and the meaning of that line, of course, may change depending on whom you ask. But one thing is certain: With YouTube infamy a few keystrokes away, the consequences of getting caught on the wrong side can be significant.

Ms. Basler and her Mizzou colleagues know this firsthand. The fallout from her on-camera confrontation with Mr. Tai was swift and lasting. Officials there remain skittish about it even now, eight months later. Nearly everybody involved, including Ms. Basler and Mark Lucas, director of student life, either declined to be interviewed or did not respond to emails from The Chronicle. Catherine C. Scroggs, vice chancellor for student affairs, agreed to talk briefly but was not made available for a follow-up interview.

However, email messages obtained by The Chronicle in response to a public-records request, along with interviews done by a law firm hired by the university to investigate what happened on the quad that day, shed some light on what led to Ms. Basler’s fateful run-in with Mr. Tai, and how Mizzou officials scrambled to protect her in the aftermath.

“For us,” says Ms. Scroggs, “it was a whole different type of experience than we’d had before.”

On the day she became famous, Ms. Basler was awake before dawn.

At 2:27 a.m., she wrote a message to Lawrence Ross, author of a new book about racial politics on college campuses. He had written to her several days earlier, and his timing had been auspicious. At Mizzou, black students and their allies, frustrated by their experiences of racism on the campus and in the surrounding city of Columbia, were demanding a change in the university’s leadership and a new plan to increase diversity.

“Your book could not come at a more needed time at Mizzou,” Ms. Basler wrote to Mr. Ross.

What do students need? That is what student-affairs officials are supposed to figure out. That morning, Ms. Basler was thinking about the needs of Mizzou’s graduate assistants, who were helping undergraduates cope with the unrest and racial tension on the campus.

Before sunrise, she exchanged emails with Kelsey Kupferer, a graduate student in the public-affairs school. Ms. Kupferer, too, had hardly slept. She feared that if top administrators did not resign that day (“regardless of if that’s right or wrong”), or if Jonathan Butler, a student who was staging a hunger strike, became seriously ill, or if there was violence, then things could get out of hand.

“If there is any way we can get out in front of that,” wrote Ms. Kupferer, “by telling GAs what we can do to support and protect our kids before if things go crazy, before things go crazy, we should do that.” Ms. Basler agreed.

Around 10 a.m., news began to trickle out that Timothy M. Wolfe, the Missouri system’s president, had resigned. It was a victory for the protesters, but many were worried about their safety.

According to a summary of an interview she later gave to investigators from Bryan Cave, the law firm hired by Mizzou’s board, Ms. Basler then called Jonathan A. McElderry, coordinator of the Black Cultural Center. Mr. McElderry told her that students there and on the nearby Carnahan Quad felt they were in harm’s way. Several students later told investigators that they had felt hounded by people from the news media.

Ms. Basler and a colleague then walked to the quad, where students had formed a protective ring around the encampment.

That’s where she encountered Mr. Tai.

After their initial tense exchange, Ms. Basler and Mr. Tai fell into a stalemate. The activists standing behind her informed the student journalist that it was over: that he had lost this fight, and it was time to leave.

Soon after, the human wall behind Ms. Basler began to shuffle forward, and she and Mr. Tai found themselves face to face once more.

“You’re pushing me, you’re pushing me!” he said, raising his voice.

“I’m being pushed,” she shouted back, “I don’t have a choice!”

Student affairs is a profession that self-selects for empathy, says Gwendolyn Dungy, a former executive director of Naspa — Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. People get into the field, she says, because they are passionate about speaking up for college students, a group whose political expressions tend to be greeted with impatience and condescension by older adults. Many student-affairs workers were once student activists themselves.

But within that sense of solidarity, there are boundaries. If the job calls for someone like Ms. Basler to advocate for student activists, it also requires that she challenge them.

“I think they are stepping over a line,” says Ms. Dungy, referring to student-affairs workers, “if at any point they lose that sense of who they are as educators.”

That line can be hard to locate, says Kimberly Griffin, an associate professor of student affairs at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Ms. Griffin teaches in a graduate program for aspiring student-affairs professionals at Maryland’s College of Education. They deliberate over case studies and do role-playing exercises, in which the point is not necessarily to arrive at a “right answer” for any given scenario.

“What’s difficult about ‘best practices’ is that it speaks to an average situation,” she says, “and no situation is ever average.”

Some institutions encourage their student-affairs workers to subordinate their own politics to other considerations. Ms. Ellis, the student-services director at Reno, which is a public university, says that when she interviews job candidates, she looks for people who are willing to take a dispassionate approach when it comes to supporting students in their political action.

“You have to put your personal views aside, because you’ve got a job to do,” she says. “The state’s not paying you to go out and protest for them or against them.”

Student-affairs officials have hardly played a neutral role in campus politics over the years. Their duty to support the individual needs of students has often cast them as advocates of diversity and stewards of the various multicultural, women’s, and LGBT centers that come with it. They were instrumental in civil-rights movements on campuses in the 1960s and ’70s, and have long pushed their institutions to be more attentive to the voices of marginalized students.

Some have done so at their own peril. Back in the 1940s, Ruth O. McCarn, dean of women at Northwestern University, was accused by a fellow administrator of spreading “tolerance propaganda” for trying to help black female students get campus housing, according to research by Kathryn Nemeth Tuttle, a former assistant vice provost for student success at the University of Kansas. The university later fired Ms. McCarn for being, in her words, “interested in the welfare of all students.”

“When I was in student affairs,” says Ms. Dungy, “sometimes something would arise where I knew I was going to take a stand based on my own values and the philosophical foundations of student affairs that could have gotten me fired, and I would come home and ask my husband, ‘Can we live if I don’t have this job? Can we make it?’ "

“You have to have courage in that,” she continues. “And I think people who go into student affairs do, and that’s why that young woman in Greek life” — Ms. Basler — “was saying what she stood for.”

Maryland’s Ms. Griffin says she does not teach her graduate students in student affairs to disregard their own values when they conflict with those of their institutions. But she does advise them to learn where their institutions’ lines are, so they know the stakes when they take a stand on the other side.

When Ms. Basler confronted Mr. Tai on the Mizzou quad, she argued that he should yield to the student activists who were blocking him. “You’re infringing on what they need right now, which is to be alone,” she told him. She did not know, according to the investigators, that the student journalist had a legal right to stay and take photographs.

“Basler believed that she had official authority to order media from the area because the students did not want their photographs taken,” the law firm wrote in a report released in February. “However, she had not been trained in First Amendment issues.”

At around noon that day, Ms. Basler got a call from her boss, Mr. Lucas, the director of student life. He “told her that he had been contacted by the campus news bureau,” according to investigators, “and that she needed to calm down and watch herself.”

Ms. Basler did not seem worried. Two hours later she got an email from a photo editor at the Columbia Missourian, a local newspaper, asking her to confirm her identity in a photo that had been taken that day on the quad.

“Yes it is!!” Ms. Basler responded. “Gladly!!”

Back in the student-life office, Mr. Lucas was getting his team on message. He circulated a slate of talking points from Garnett S. Stokes, the provost:

The campus? “Quiet.” The events of the past week? “An opportunity for students to witness change as it happens in the real world.” Safety? “Our top priority.”

But Mizzou officials could do only so much to control the narrative of what was happening.

The video of Ms. Basler’s confrontation with Tim Tai was percolating on social media. That afternoon Ms. Scroggs, the vice chancellor for student affairs, told her that “some people were really upset” about what had happened, according to investigators, “but she had calmed them down.” (Ms. Scroggs told The Chronicle that she does not recall that conversation.)

The growing anger at Ms. Basler, however, could not be contained so easily.

Messages started arriving in her inbox. Some struck a respectful tone. “I don’t disagree with your position,” wrote Luke Miller, an alumnus, “but it certainly seems to me that you are advocating for one side when both sides cite the same right to freedom of speech.”

Other messages did not. She forwarded one racist, sexually explicit email to her bosses. “This is just one of hundreds of emails I am getting,” she told them. “Why would anyone subject themselves to this? How do those students deal with this every day?”

That evening Ms. Basler exchanged emails with Ms. Click, the communication professor, who was getting hate mail of her own. Investigators said Ms. Basler told them that she had been alarmed by Ms. Click’s conduct on the video. At the moment, however, they seemed to share a bond that comes with being under attack. They joked grimly about running away together.

“It’s going to blow over, right?” wrote Ms. Click.

“I really hope so,” replied Ms. Basler. “I am so thankful for you right now.”

She responded to Mr. Miller, the alumnus who had respectfully questioned her actions. Ms. Basler explained that she and a colleague had called the campus police, “but they didn’t come,” and that she didn’t want to see anything happen to her students.

“What you don’t see,” she wrote, “is the students who were protesting were getting scared.”

Now it was Ms. Basler who was feeling scared. The emails kept coming. She went to bed at around 3 a.m. and did not go into work the next morning.

Ms. Basler’s inbox was not the only one that was overflowing. The next day, November 10, Mr. Lucas and Ms. Scroggs were also slammed by emails from people who had been outraged by the video.

Not all of the messages could be dismissed as mere noise. Some writers identified themselves as alumni. Many called for Ms. Basler to be fired, or to resign, or at least to apologize. Several threatened to withhold donations to the university.

Jeff L. Hilbrenner, an alumnus of Mizzou’s law school who is partner in a local law firm, wrote to Mizzou’s student-affairs leaders to say that he had known Ms. Basler for a decade and had enjoyed their interactions but was “highly offended” by what he saw in the video, which he considered “bullying, demeaning, and criminal conduct.”

Karl Adrian, alumni-board president at the fraternity Delta Sigma Phi, wrote to Mr. Lucas, asking that “action be taken as an example to our young men and women that there are consequences fairly applied to all that break rules.” He said Ms. Basler should be fired.

“I plan to bring this video to the [Fraternity Alumni] Consortium to garner support if necessary,” said Mr. Adrian, “but I hope it’s not.”

The volume of incoming messages became overwhelming. Mr. Lucas asked that Ms. Basler’s email account block all messages from outside the university. By then the student-life office itself was under siege. In a cluster of offices in the student center, Mizzou staffers were forming a perimeter of their own.

“The number of voice messages that have come in to the Greek Life phone number and the main Student Life phone number are in the 4-5 dozen number and ever increasing,” wrote Mr. Lucas late that morning in a note to officials in Mizzou’s media-relations bureau.

He said they were trying to listen to all the messages and forwarding many to the campus police. “Several have threats of violence,” he said, “and we are concerned for Janna’s well-being.”

At 1:01 p.m., Angela E. Dahman, a marketing-and-communications manager, wrote a summary of how the staff was handling the deluge.

They were vigilant about all messages coming in and out of the office. The front-desk phone had been set to “do not disturb.” Front-desk staff members had been instructed to say they were “not at the liberty to discuss” anything having to do with Ms. Basler, except to confirm that she worked at Mizzou. Calls to her publicly listed extension were forwarded to the Greek-life office’s general number.

Passwords were reset, including those for the office’s voicemail and email, as well as “all social-media passwords.” Ms. Basler’s own social-media accounts were “locked down,” and two staffers were charged with monitoring and reporting any incoming “speech which infringes on university or other applicable laws/rules, individual rights, and laws.”

That afternoon, Mr. Lucas gave his student-life staff a pep talk. He reminded them that counseling services were available to them, too. “We all entered this profession, and we remain here, because we care deeply about students,” he wrote in a memorandum.

“I also care about each of you, and I know these past three semesters have weighed on many of us. Please remember to take time for self-care.”

It was a strange moment for the student advocates. With Mr. Wolfe’s resignation, the students who were conducting peaceful demonstrations against racism had won a significant victory against Mizzou’s top administrators. And yet the 24 hours since the president’s resignation seemed to mark a low point for the student-life office. The need to protect Ms. Basler from the digital onslaught compounded the existing challenge of making students feel safe. Meanwhile, rumors abounded that forces more sinister than stubborn journalists might soon descend on the quad.

“Our community is fractured,” Mr. Lucas wrote in his memo. “Our students are hurting. Our staff are now being threatened. This is devastating and is not the type of change we want to see.”

Not all the messages arriving in Ms. Basler’s university email account were negative.

“Keep your head up, and don’t let the bastards get you,” wrote Mr. Ross, author of the book on campus racial politics with whom she had corresponded the previous morning.

“Yes, the photographer should have been allowed to take pics,” he wrote, “but they’re going to blow this up to create a false equivalence. I got your back.”

Ms. Basler had champions at Mizzou as well.

“I wanted to tell you how much I admire your strength and courage to stand up and support our students,” wrote Sarah Garcia, a member of the university’s Title IX support staff. “I knew you were an open-minded and kind woman, but you showed steadfast compassion when it mattered the most, and I am inspired by your conviction.”

Ryan O’Connor, a student who had served as leader of a Mizzou fraternity, responded to a call for Ms. Basler’s termination with a sharp rebuke. “I don’t know you, but I do know Janna Basler,” he wrote. “She cares about every student and creates relationships that last.” Firing her, he said, would not help anyone on the campus. “The demands you’re making,” he wrote, “are just plain irrational if you truly care about this community.”

That evening Mr. McElderry, coordinator of the Black Cultural Center, told Mr. Lucas and other officials that while it might be “in the best interest” for Ms. Basler to issue an apology, he had reservations about the critique that the video had inspired.

“I believe we all stand behind Janna 100 percent, but I think the media and others are getting caught up in the fact that it is a ‘public outside space,’ " Mr. McElderry wrote. “No one has the context about the threats that came to the area earlier in the week or the stress of having media present.”

That evening the university issued an apology in Ms. Basler’s name. She drafted it, according to investigators, and university officials edited it.

“I allowed my emotions to get the better of me while trying to protect some of our students,” it read. “Instead of defusing an already tense situation, I contributed to its escalation.”

She apologized in person to Mr. Tai. The student photojournalist described her apology to investigators as “gracious, genuine, and sincere.” He was never comfortable with how the story of his run-in with Ms. Basler and the protesters had overtaken the story of the protest itself. “Maybe let’s focus some more reporting on systemic racism in higher ed institutions,” he tweeted the day after the confrontation.

Ms. Basler acknowledged in hindsight that she had failed to conjure adequate empathy for Mr. Tai. Had she “been aware of the shouting and yelling at Tai by Professor Click and others,” she reportedly told the investigators, “she would have understood his frustration and why the situation had escalated.”

She was not fired, but the university put her on administrative leave. She returned to work quietly last December and has avoided the spotlight since then. “What happened on Carnahan Quadrangle,” she wrote in her apology, “has been a lesson for me.”

To some observers, no apology is necessary.

Curtis M. Taylor watched the video from Nebraska, where he was in his first year as an assistant director of multicultural organizations and programming at Creighton University. He recognized Ms. Basler; at a professional conference she had interviewed him for a job at Mizzou. Mr. Taylor, who identifies as a gay person of color, eventually went to work at Creighton, a Roman Catholic institution that is 70 percent white, but he had liked Ms. Basler.

And so, on a day when Ms. Basler’s inbox was overflowing with angry messages, Mr. Taylor sent her a different sort of collegial note. “I personally applaud your efforts and advocacy for the students in this instance,” he wrote.

It’s fair to question how Ms. Basler had handled the situation, Mr. Taylor told The Chronicle, but when it comes to student-affairs work, a personal bias in favor of those who are underserved by the status quo is a better guiding light than a politically anodyne, all-rights-matter attitude.

If Ms. Basler did cross a line that day, he said, she still taught Mizzou’s student activists something:

“Even people who don’t look like me are here for me.”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.

Correction (7/11/2016, 11:50 a.m.): This article originally identified Curtis Taylor as black. He identifies as Middle Eastern. The article has been updated accordingly.