I spend a lot of time writing about the governing bodies in higher education. Thursday, I road-tripped to Rolla with another reporter to cover the first day of a meeting of the highest governing body we cover: the University of Missouri System Board of Curators.
We had written an advance the night before, so we knew this meeting would be mostly informational — and most of the information was subject to change. We braced ourselves for an abundance of “might,” “could” and “preliminary.” But I don’t think either of us was prepared for the extent of it.
We sat through hours of budget proposals, debt analysis reports and talks about relations among the UM System’s four campuses.
Our main story was the only action item, which was the vote to expand a stress-reducing program for employees in Columbia to all four institutions.
It was discussed for approximately four minutes. Dan, the other reporter, went after the director of Columbia’s program while I took notes on the remainder of the meeting and created some additional bullet points of information discussed.
The car ride and lunch were easily the most fun parts of the day, but I’m glad I got the experience of covering one of those meetings.
Also, I was relieved to see I was far from the only girl on the science and technology school’s campus, which was contrary to what I had been told. (There are even sororities!)