Dear Santa Ono:
At the risk of putting everybody all up in our business, I am writing you this as a sincere favor — to help you by telling you some key things about yourself, your current station and ways you can redeem yourself and the University of Cincinnati.
For any of this to work, you’re gonna have to think back to all those times you were interim president playing your position, while the Board of Trustees picked other presidents all around you, only to circle back, finally calling you up to the majors.
Think: tenacity.
This involves two tips.
Still, I am a little anxious for you because, while you seem adept at raising money to build a stadium and stripping departments bare to help pay for that stadium, and you’re clearly a master tweeter and selfie-taker, you haven’t been too good at managing real, live people or taking responsibility for your (in)actions.
So, here goes.
Take this with the same love with which it’s being offered.
Like my daddy used to say before he beat my ass: This is gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna hurt you.
First, act more like a brotha.
Notice the ghettoized version and spelling of that word. I have dropped the “er” and replaced it with an “a” for good reason. I have a lot of brothers. Seven, in fact.
What I am telling you is you need to behave publicly more like all the brothas who stood around with you on the podium at last week’s uncomfortably itchy press conference wherein everyone absolved and congratulated themselves after Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters released Ray Tensing’s uniform camera footage of Samuel DuBose’s execution for not displaying a front license plate.
Did you notice how all those brothas were calm, air conditioned and properly prepared?
They were cool.
You, on the other hand, Santa Ono, were drenched in flop sweat, constantly mopping your face and brow; you moved so much from side to side switching feet while you read your prepared statement that the camera man nearly made me sea sick following you left and right.
And you looked down most of the time.
Running a raggedy campus requires publicity training.
Your voice was unsteady; uncomfortably so.
Maybe you were on the verge of tears thinking about all the boiling-hot water the University of Cincinnati is going to be in for years to come because you — or some bodies along with you — signed off on the idiotic idea of naming security guards “police,” then arming them with guns after they’d been trained mostly in classrooms.
Then y’all let them loose in the neighborhoods surrounding campus so they could behave more rogue and cowboy-like than Cincinnati Police 15 years ago.
What a mess, Santa Ono. What a mess.
Which brings me to my second point.
Start thinking of a big number.
A really big number.
Like, a number as big as the university’s entire annual operating budget — times 10, maybe.
Maybe, if you’re lucky.
If you’ve got any lucky bow ties, now would be the time to have them dry cleaned and laid out to wear.
This is the ballpark of what you and your trustees — some of them lawyers who should have known better than to allow security guards to be armed — will be paying Mr. DuBose’s family.
This does not include the free tuition, room and board for any and all of his children — and I heard he’s got a gang of ’em — who might want to risk their lives by getting free educations at UC.
You and UC have proven, by the disproportionate numbers of black drivers pulled over and ticketed by your guards, by the racial tensions that fester and acid-reflux up on campus and by the numbers of black students allowed to languish for years beyond their graduation shelf lives, that you do not closely consider black life on or around that campus.
Further, when you say the buzzwords “UC Community,” whom exactly are you speaking about?
You know you’ve got a brick-ton of work to do, Santa Ono.
So, here is what you can expect as the road rises to smack you in the head.
Expect drastically declining enrollment numbers of incoming students who already do not have on-campus housing because of wait lists and over-crowding. Parents will, rightfully, be re-thinking the University of Cincinnati as some place to send their children.
You know why.
There is an expectation of reasonable safety when folks send their kids off to school, even if they live in Hamilton County. So, if innocent, unarmed drivers are being pulled over on your watch under the auspices of “safety,” then what will happen to a kid living in a surrounding neighborhood who just does not look right to one of your guards?
Well, if he is a black kid, he might anticipate the tasing of his young life, maybe being fired upon or maybe just a quick hassle.
So, expect your numbers to suffer and for that, in turn, to cause not a ripple effect, but a tidal wave effect, because one of the most significant outcomes of this fatal shooting will be the people’s lack of trust in your leadership.
The bullet stops with you.
You can also expect to oversee a major dismantling of that force of security guards.
You will notice I have been calling them guards throughout. This is because they never should have been called “police” in the first place. It’s a horrible misnomer, one that has imbued them with a false sense of, well, security and bravado.
What’s so terribly ironic about them is I see more of them whipping around on Segues, parked and texting on their smart phones or flashing their lights at on-campus drivers going two miles above the speed limit.
So, UC, then, is like a sleepy little town, and these guards seem like they’re looking for some ish to get into.
Take it apart, Santa Ono.
Remove all guns, get them out of the neighborhoods and back on campus, put Cincinnati cops back on saturated patrols in hot spots around campus and work to help Cincinnati establish a special district solely for UC’s neighborhoods where your numbers show you the majority of your students live.
Easy-peasy.
All this will keep you from ever again releasing a false statement based on the uninvestigated, one-sided lie of one of your guards like you did the day after the shooting.
This will also keep you from sweating, like my granddaddy used to say, like a nigga on Election Day.
Warmest regards,
Kathy Y. Wilson
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2015.
