I wrote my column over the weekend, and had it production well ahead of the deadline. Matter of fact, it is in the final document as I write this-but I am going to delete it and replace it with this text…

Why-why would I delete a perfectly good column and then, a day past deadline, re-write my column and delete the original?

Well, there are many reasons.

First, the column would make some of my enemies-one in particular-hate me even more. I don’t mind that there are powerful people on campus that hate me, but numerous people have advised me that I will end up paying for it.

They are right, of course, and that brings up another reason why I am not running the original text-it may have appeared to you that I am just being combative: that I would be willing to suffer a great deal of personal damage to expose an administrator’s lack of ethics and integrity.

But I don’t want to expose the administrator’s lack of ethics and integrity just to cause that person damage. I want to expose lack of ethics and integrity to enable change. (But, given my experiences at UMB, change might not happen as a result of exposing it…)

Also, I have to deal with this particular administrator on many levels to carry out my duties, and angering that individual further, at this time, would harm this newspaper, as well as myself.

Which brings to mind the actual structure of this newspaper-that our pay goes through the university, that we are “supervised” by Student Life, and many other intricacies. How can we do our civic duty as serving as a watchdog of the administration when they can extract vengeance on many levels?

Employees have actually come to me and voiced concerns about writing certain articles, and the possible repercussions.

This is one of the reasons that I am attempting to re-structure our operations-but I need a bit of cooperation from those who we wish to secede from…

Can you imagine this “conversation” back in 1775…?

—

George Washington: “Hello, King George? We were wondering if you could send us lawyers, guns and money.”

King George: “What do you need those things for?”

George Washington: “Well, frankly King, we’re not happy being under your thumb. We want to establish our own rule, so we figured we would have, like, a revolution or something, you know, a war and all that.”

—

I don’t think that would have worked. So don’t tell the administration that we’re trying to figure out how The Mass Media can be even more independent, while actually drawing closer to the academic departments.

And I won’t mention the times I have had my civil rights violated by UMB, or the lack of integrity of certain individuals, or any of the numerous other troubles that I’ve had at UMB.

But, can you see why I have bottled up anger and may explode at any minute? I feel my duty is to expose corruption in order to promote change, but if I expose the actions of corrupt people then they stoop to any actions necessary to exact vengeance. And then I’m harmed.

And then I write about the vindictiveness of those individuals, and they stoop to any actions necessary to exact vengeance. And then I’m harmed.

And then I’ll die.

This doesn’t seem like a healthy cycle.

And those are the reasons I’m not publishing the column I wrote well before deadline.

Michael Rhys can be reached at [email protected]