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Welcome to The 1909, the podcast that takes an in-depth look at The State News’ biggest stories of the week, while bringing in new perspectives from the reporters who wrote them.
It's Wednesday, April 23, and this is the 19 o nine, the state news weekly podcast featuring our reporters talking about the news. I'm your host, Alex Walters. Six hundred and seventeen, one hundred and twenty five, four, forty six, zero, sixteen. These are some of the numbers we will be discussing today. My guest is senior reporter Theo Scheer, and he spent months putting together what he calls a week at MSU by the numbers.
Alex:If you've ever wondered how many books are checked out of the library or how many oatmeal raisin cookies are delivered to the dining hall or how many students are screened for an SDI on any given week on this huge campus, Theo has you covered. Later on the show, we'll hear more about a student investigating a mysterious mummified creature found on campus. Maybe skip ahead or stick around if the numbers aren't your thing. But first, Theo, thanks for coming on.
Theo:Yeah, thanks guys. You worked
Alex:hard on this very impressive project. First of all, before we do more talk about numbers Sure. I'm curious you're a smart guy. There's lots you can be doing with your time. Why did you think it was important to put together what I think is the most comprehensive assessment to date of what happens here in food, in housing, in student conduct cases, academics?
Alex:Like every facet of MSU, you have tried to figure out how many of any given thing happens.
Theo:Yeah. You know, well, think personally as I walk around MSU as a student, as I go to classes, I, you know, eat at the dining halls, for example, you know, I think I often forget that I am one piece in just this larger, very hugeI mean, it's a huge system. I mean, are so many different departments and people that support, you know, everyday student life. And I think we sort of forget that, you know. It's often remarked that MSU is a little city, you know.
Theo:And just like a city, you wouldyou have so many different systems that are all working in tandem to make it happen. And I think it's really interesting to sort of get a view into that. I mean, it's sort of impossible to do that, I think, in any way. But just, you know, numbers, I think that really best conveys the magnitude of of the whole thing.
Alex:Well, you know, when I was reading your piece, think one of the things this is both from the execution that you've done a very good job on, and also just sort of like my own kind of like taking things for granted. There are lot of things that I read about that I I had never, you know, like I eat a bagel in the dining hall at least once a week.
Theo:Right.
Alex:I've never thought about that there's this entire culinary operation that bakes all of these hundreds of bagels and
Theo:breaks them
Alex:up and distributes them. Like, I don't know, give me a little sense of how, you know, all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes to let us walk around.
Theo:Yeah. And it's just a little, I think, a bit of community with it too. It's like, you know, you're eating a bagel, you don't really remember that, you know, there are thousands of bagels here that are eaten by thousands of students. You're one of of of very many, you know, doing this very same thing.
Alex:How did you, once you decided that you wanted to do this project, before we get into the data, how did youI mean did you walk around and count? How did you figure out all these numbers you're able to tell us Right.
Theo:Yeah. So from a combination of sources. So I talked to a lot of spokespeople through, I think, you know, like probably most of the spokespeople for the different departments that MSU has, to just to ask for different numbers. I looked at annual reports in different places published. I looked at our previous reporting.
Theo:And, you know, obviously it's a week at MSU. So a lot of these sources are coming from annual data. So I did have to kind of divide to get this weekly percentage. So they don't account for variations between fall and spring and summer semesters. But I do think it's a good look into it.
Alex:I see. So this isn't like one specific week. Right. But sort of like
Theo:an average. Yeah, Exactly.
Alex:I see. Yeah. Yeah. Take us through to tell us something.
Theo:Yeah. Well, know, Alex, I I thought it would be kind of funny. A fun sort of activity if if maybe I threw out a subject and you guessed. Yeah. Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions.
Theo:People don't know. Yeah. So it could be sort of a game Alright. Of sorts. Okay.
Theo:Well, guess for starters, how many pounds of fresh fruit do you think are delivered to the dining halls every day? Fresh fruit? Yeah. Fresh fruit.
Alex:Fresh fruit include like every day, there's like all the peaches and mandarin oranges.
Theo:Mhmm.
Alex:I'm guessing those come in like a can.
Theo:Yes, they're not canned. Canned is a different category, just fresh.
Alex:So it's just like the bananas and apples Yeah. Berries.
Theo:Mhmm. I should clarify. Fruit purchased each week for the dinosaurs.
Alex:Yeah. 3,000 pounds of fruit a week.
Theo:Alex, come on. No. Twenty five thousand three hundred and eighty Twenty five thousand pounds? Yeah. 25, yeah.
Alex:Do you have a breakdown of like what kind of fruit they're buying?
Theo:I don't have that specific, no. I do have a breakdown, I think this is going to be interesting, of different pastries. I got some really specific data from MSU bakers on that because as you know, you go into a dining hall and you see all these baked goods. Those are all made on campus typically at least by the MSU How
Alex:many are they making?
Theo:Yes. I mean, so for bagels, you want to guess how many bagels are delivered?
Alex:So all the dining halls every day? Yeah. Well, there's like 10 dining halls, right? Yeah. And I don't know, maybe like like a thousand, like a hundred per dining hall
Theo:a day? Oh, so this is gonna be weekly, but it's Oh, weekly. Yeah. Like 7,000. Seven.
Theo:Yes. Yeah. It's 6,456 total bagels.
Alex:Look at that.
Theo:But it's interesting because, know, we can kind of separate this into the specific yeah. Yeah. So most popular is a plain bagel. So 35% are are plain. And then following that is an everything bagel.
Theo:After that is olive oil cheddar. Have you ever had one of those? No. No. Mean, don't think I have either.
Theo:Popular? Apparently.
Alex:Now were I meeting?
Theo:Yeah. One of the least popular though I I thought was kind of interesting is garlic dill. I I've never seen this. I've
Alex:never heard I noticed this in your because how many do they make of the garlic dill?
Theo:Very few. It's 1% of the total. Yeah. I don't have the specific number
Alex:up because I've never seen this. Yeah. It sounds wonderful. And I don't know why it's it's like one of those things that really fascinated me about the story. Mhmm.
Alex:Like why they would be making so few
Theo:Right.
Alex:Of this like special varietal of bagel. It almost suggests that it's kind of like a, you know, a coveted trying to, you know, create some scarcity around it.
Theo:I think I wonder if it's maybe they're going to the administration's parties if there's some, I don't know, trustee or or
Alex:It gotta be a pretty big deal to get a garlic bagels.
Theo:Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure.
Alex:Because ever since your story come out, know, I I maybe once a week, I'll like have like a breakfast in in Case Dining Hall. And I've looked every single time and I've never found one of these garlic dill bagels.
Theo:They're out there. Apparently they're out there. But it's interesting, you know, we're eating all this food and what happens to it? We produce a lot of waste on campus and that's kind of the next part of the story. You know, guess how about this one?
Theo:Guess how many pounds of waste are disposed every week at a landfill?
Alex:Like total waste? Yes. Oh, I don't know. I feel like whatever the number is, it's gonna make me sad.
Theo:Mhmm. Yeah.
Alex:Is it like millions?
Theo:Close. It's 248,000.
Alex:Oh, okay.
Theo:So it's it's quite a bit and that's just waste you would find in a landfill.
Alex:There's What
Theo:about recycling? Yeah. Recycling, that's a good one.
Alex:Do they actually recycle? I've heard recycling is in some places, it's not real.
Theo:Yeah. You know, think there's questions about the actual efficacy of of recycling. Recycling. But here, there's 109,000 pounds of material that are recycled. That includes paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, tubs, jugs, metal and glass bottles.
Alex:Is that the total input of what people are just putting in recycling bins or is that actually what they process?
Theo:That's what they process.
Alex:Oh, that's pretty good. Mean, that's like 200,000 in a landfill, 100,000 recycled? And
Theo:there's also, I mean, it comes to organic waste, there's a lot of different recycling or waste management things that we do here that are sort of unique. So we have, I think, two anaerobic digesters on campus.
Alex:Is that where you put the old food in it and then the gas?
Theo:And it breaks it down with the gas, yeah, intoI think it's methane
Alex:water. How much goes in there every week?
Theo:140,000 gallons of waste. And we also have something really unique called vermicomposting. We had a really good story about that, about the worm wizard at MSU.
Alex:Is that where they put put worms on the thing?
Theo:Yeah. It's over I think a million species of of wait. What is it? No. I think not a over a million worms.
Theo:Yeah. That that transform dining hall waste into this premium compost. And they process nearly 4,000 pounds of organic material each week. Interesting.
Alex:Yeah. What about tell me about the safety section of your story. I thought this part was really interesting. And this is where you get know, we've had a lot of fun talking about food and waste. Right.
Alex:You get a little more serious and like, you know, as you read this, you start to, I don't know, get more thoughtful. Tell me about this public safety Yeah.
Theo:Absolutely. So well, I guess a quick shout out because it's a constant source of discussion. But parking tickets is kind of part of the safety of the police operations. There are sixteen thirty six parking tickets issued each week and around $40,000 are collected by those parking fines. But with the more serious side of safety, we seelet's see here.
Theo:And you've done some great reporting on this about the Office of Civil Rights and theirhow they handle complaints of violations of the anti discrimination policy or the relationship violence and sexual misconduct policy. So yeah, I found out that eight reports on average come in every week that describe potential violations of the anti discrimination policy, while 15 reports are sent in that describe violations of RVSM. And four come in that are a blend of both. So I'm wondering, these things, they take an average of one hundred and sixty days for OCR to complete these investigations. Typically, the respondent in the case, so kind of like who the complaint is filed against, is an MSU employee.
Theo:That's 56% of the time they're an employee. 37% of the time they're a student and 7% of the time they are neither a student or an employee. Yeah. So it takes one hundred and seventy six days for that to get resolved, for them to kind of issue this final decision. And once that happens, there's 25% chance of that being appealed.
Theo:So basically, someone says, you know, we disagree with your decision, here's why. Guess what the percent chance is that that appeal will actually work, that'll actually overturn the decision?
Alex:That like if I get a decision and I take issue with it Mhmm. That they will go the other way?
Theo:Right. Yeah. That they'll change their mind in some way.
Alex:I would guess it's a very I've never seen that
Theo:Yeah. In cases I've written about. It's 0% in the the data that I was working off of that. Was I think yearly.
Alex:So if you appeal your case, 0% chance, at least based on what's happened before
Theo:Yeah. Yeah.
Alex:That there will be a different result.
Theo:Yeah. In recent history, that's what the numbers say.
Alex:Is interesting though. You said it's a hundred and sixty some days to finish a case?
Theo:Yeah. A hundred and seventy six days.
Alex:I mean, that is impressive. When I started writing about this Yeah. A couple years ago, I think Cousin O'Connor, the auditor at the time, was saying that it it took over a year on average for MSU to finish one of these cases.
Theo:Yeah. They've improved. Yeah.
Alex:Pretty big improvement in terms of actually finishing up these cases. Well, Theo, going to move on to another story you wrote. Yeah. Course. Thank you.
Alex:Those listening who are just, ah, can't get enough of these numbers. You should check out the whole story on the site. Theo found a lot of great data and some of our great illustrations people put together kind of like a very cool visual presentation might be more interesting than the guessing game we put together. Yes. But Theo, you're not done yet.
Alex:Tell me about, I love saying this to people, The Mummy on The Yeah. Who wrote about a mummy? Before we get into this whole interesting profile, just tell me where did they find the mummy and why and how.
Theo:Okay. So it's 2018. Yeah. And they're doing construction on Cook Hall. It's one of the older buildings on campus and it's, you know, direly in need of renovations.
Theo:They're, you know, they're redoing the ceiling, etcetera. And in the ceilingwell, some say the attic, others say the ceilingthey look up there and there's a creature. There's a mummified animal of some sort. And it's a little scary. Its mouth is agape and it's got this really dry sort of graying brown skin.
Theo:What is the creature? It's foot long. Yeah.
Alex:I see.
Theo:And it starts this sort of mystery. So what happens when the construction team finds like some sort of artifact on campus is what they do is they send it typically to the campus archaeology program. This is a program on campus. They actually made national news recently because they excavated a century old observatory on MSU. Thought to be lost to history.
Theo:But I found it and they kind of worked in partnership with IPF to, you know, just get different artifacts that might be uncovered.
Alex:So these are archaeologists that aren't Indiana Jones. They're not out Right. Studying other stuff. They're archaeologists who study the archaeology of MSU.
Theo:Yeah. Of campus. They're just dedicated I see.
Alex:So So they get this mummy.
Theo:They get this mummy. And there's no one really knows what it is. I think the best guess at the time was opossum because it's kind of that size and and some of the people involved were, you know, believed that that was the case. Potentially
Alex:running around in the vents in MSU. Possum Right. To me rings a bell. The photos, it looks a little more dog like.
Theo:Exactly. Yeah. That's the thing. So it sat there for for six years or and only now a student with the campus archaeology program is investigating it. And she was she just figured, okay, it's an opossum.
Theo:I'll investigate it and he'll confirm that to be true. But what she found while comparing it to different skulls of different creatures was that it didn't match an opossum skull. What's more realistic was either a raccoon, which would make sense again getting into a building, ceiling somewhere, or a dog that it kind of looked like the same slope of of a dog's forehead and and teeth and everything.
Alex:The face with like the ears and the eyes for the you're just like desperately curious, you can see these photos on statenews.com Right. Is remarkably dog like.
Theo:Yeah. It would be a small dog. I mean, is only a foot long. Maybe it's someone's little poodle or something. I don't know.
Theo:Yeah. The student who was investigating this made a blog post about it on their website and so I saw it, reached out to her and I actually got to witness kind of the next step in this sort of detective process that they're doing to uncover what the creature is. So I went there into their lab. I witnessed some x rays. And I can report back that it does not appear to be a dog.
Theo:Going closer look of the skull, it's not a dog's skull. It's not the same size. Realistically, it wouldn't really make if that would be the case. The most realistic option is raccoon.
Alex:How are they gonna narrow it further to figure out if it's a raccoon?
Theo:Yeah. So the researcher is going to compare it to some skulls, get some real raccoon skulls and also other animals as well, just a dog, also a possum, just to check all the bases just to make sure and compare the X-ray images to those. But on preliminary review of them, it appears to be a raccoon.
Alex:Where do you get a raccoon skull?
Theo:She has one. Kirial Kartalis, she's the researcher and she's very much into bones and and and you know, she studied roadkill when she was growing up. She would put in her family garden and and watch it decompose and so she has a reckons call of her own that she's gonna be
Alex:Well, that's very handy.
Theo:Yeah.
Alex:You'll have to give us an update when they figure out what this thing actually is.
Theo:Yeah,
Alex:of course. Well, that's all for now. In fact, that is actually all for this year. But I believe we will be back in the fall with more 1909, more fresh reporting from the great minds here at the State News. Until then, though, the wonderful stories written by Theo that we talked about and plenty more are available at statenues.com.
Alex:Our staff still works and writes stories all summer. You just won't be hearing the podcast. So, yeah, well, thank you, Theo, coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you to our podcast coordinator, Taylor.
Alex:And most of all, thank you for listening. For The nineteen o nine, I'm Alex Walters.