Unusual October heat, crowds of prospective students and some fluffy therapy dogs visited the St. Thomas campus as leaves began to change color and students prepared for midterms during the week of Oct. 18-22.
Although the average October high in Minneapolis is 58 degrees, temperatures neared 80 degrees at the beginning of the week and drew students and entire class sessions outside for studying and recreation.
The weather cooled off at the end of the week for Fall Tommie Days, a campus visit period for high school students and their families that included group campus tours and information sessions.
Indoors, St. Thomas students visited with energetic and approachable therapy dogs in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey library, an event that typically happens several times per school year.
Midterm break will offer students a long Halloween weekend of relief beginning Oct. 29 after an increased project and test load.
Mia Laube can be reached at mia.laube@stthomas.edu.
Does no one at TommieMedia find it embarrassing that, whenever a St. Thomas story goes big, TM is nowhere to be found, and the majority of students are left with no idea what’s going on?
Just this year, we’ve had:
* The head of the College Republicans indicted for human trafficking. TM, with privileged access to club members and advisors, provided us with absolutely no information not already given by outside newspapers.
* An allegation of white supremacist racist posters and stickers somewhere on North campus, leading to a rally against racism and some local coverage. I say “allegation” because at no point did TM demonstrate that these posters and stickers actually existed, much less tell us what they said, what group they’re associated with, or offer even factually-grounded speculation on who might have put them up. (Was the man a student? A local?) TM just dutifully reprinted the vague, cryptic, and PR-laden email from UST administrators and got some reaction quotes. This was nevertheless the best TM story of the year, because at least there was some limited evidence of *attempts* to do reporting.
* I still don’t have the slightest idea who the “uninvited individual” was in the story “University responds to uninvited individual” from October 11th. Was it the PETA people again? The Westboro Baptist Church? Nazis? Stalinists? After we got the cryptic, rear-end-covering university-wide email, I assumed that I would be able to click over to TM and find out the basic who, what, where, when, and why of that story. Obviously the University didn’t want “uninvited individual’s” side to get heard (whatever it was), but journalism is all about fairly presenting the story. Instead, we got a fawning article that dutifully insisted that the University’s perspective was the only one that even existed. I don’t like Nazis, but please at least tell me when there are Nazis at the gates, because that’s important information for me to know *and telling people important information is the only reason your profession exists*.
* Apparently a TikTok personality visited us on September 30th. Same dang thing. I haven’t the slightest idea what happened in that story; I just know what the Admin wanted me to believe and that TM had higher priorities than reporting the facts without fear or favor (or “pursuing stories that affect and interest our audience”).
* Now St. Thomas is embroiled in a *national* news controversy over the Provost’s “solidarity statement” project, and my social media feed is showing more (and more reliable) information about that story from Rod Dreher, a reactionary opinion writer in Louisiana, than from the ACTUAL CAMPUS NEWSPAPER.
Basically, is TommieMedia a training ground for dogged journalists with a nose for the truth and a good story, or does this site only exist to recycle university press releases? If you’re just here to lick boots, then okay, thank you for your honesty, but could you please update your About section to say so, so I can stop checking this site for good?