Southeast's rumor mill provides feedback for the curious on campus

In past years at Southeast Missouri State University many rumors have circulated around campus ranging from "Dobbins dressing up like Santa and passing out presents to students" to talk of Southeast importing squirrels to beautify the campus.

What students might not have known is there is a website connected to Southeast's home page that can bring light to all of these so called "rumors." It's called the rumor mill.

"It's a website that's out on the university's website and it's a page where anybody -- students, faculty, staff, anyone in the community, can submit a rumor about something that they've heard circulating on campus," Southeast News Bureau director Ann Hayes said. "We then research the issue and then provide an answer the best that we know to whatever that rumor is."

According to Hayes, the website got its start at the beginning of president Kenneth W. Dobbins' tenure at the university.

"He had this idea," Hayes said. "I believe he went to a conference and maybe saw something that wasn't exactly like this but maybe similar, and he thought that this would be a good way of facilitating communication between the administration and all of our faculty, staff, students and the community about issues on our campus and that's really how it got its start."

In collaboration with Diane Sides, assistant to the president and assistant secretary to the Board of Regents, Hayes works to research the rumor posted on the website and tries to make a timely and accurate response.

Hayes also stressed that the site is completely anonymous but an accurate email address is needed to submit a question, so that if they have any questions about what the rumor refers to * they can actually communicate and get back to the poster as soon as possible.

According to Hayes, submissions to the website have waned over time. Her guess is that is due to the boom of social media.

"I can say this much," Hayes said. "Probably in some of the earlier years in the president's tenure we had a lot of submissions to the rumor mill. Over the years, especially in the last two or three, the number of those submissions had really waned. I feel like that's because social media has become so popular with student and faculty and everyone. I think that people are using Facebook and Twitter and some of these other platforms to communicate and get answers to those questions more so than submitting to the rumor mill."

In the past years, the rumor mill has received and answered hundreds of questions from the campus community but Hayes makes it clear that the rumor mill is strictly there to facilitate rumors and nothing else.

"We do caution people," Hayes said. "And some of these rules are out there if you actually visit the page that the rumor mill is not for people who just want to vent or gripe or complain about how a certain service is provided at the university. A lot of people of course have complaints about the availability of parking or maybe it's an issue in the residence hall or maybe it's an issue with dining services, and it's really not for those kinds of things. If students have questions for how those units operate, they're more than welcome to email, call or visit those offices and ask about those issues, but the rumor mill is truly for rumors."

Hayes said that she's always more than happy to answer any of the questions that come in in the future.

If anyone is interested in posting a rumor onto the website they can go to www6.semo.edu/news/rumorMill/.