A breakdown of the four new Big 12 teams

In-person undergraduate enrollment: 29,583 (2022)

Known for: Science, engineering and business programs

Famous alumni: Robert Redford, Chauncey Billups and Chris Fowler

National titles: 29

Football history: Joined the Pac-12 in 2011 after being in the Big 12 from 1996–2010; 1990 National Champions; 26 conference titles in 2011 after being in the MWC from 1999–2010; zero national titles; 26 conference titles

Last season’s football results: 10-4 (7-2), Pac-12 Champions

Rival: BYU

What Utah brings to the Big 12: The Holy War rivalry with BYU will be pivotal moving forward, especially considering the loss of the Red River Rivalry and Bedlam.

Rival: Arizona State

What Arizona brings to the Big 12: Like Utah-BYU, Arizona-Arizona State is yet another rivalry that can become a conference staple

Arizona State

Mascot: Sun Devils

Location: Tempe, Arizona

In-person undergraduate enrollment: 80,065 (2022)

For the second time in two years, the Big 12 is adding four new schools to the conference.

Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State will officially join the conference in the 2024–25 season, adding three more states to the ever-growing market that Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark has created.

Each school has a decorated history in collegiate athletics and brings something to the Big 12 that can help grow its brand.

Colorado

Mascot: Buffaloes

Location: Boulder, Colorado

Last football season’s results: 1-11 (1-8)

Rival: Nebraska

What Colorado brings to the Big 12: Deion Sanders and a ginormous hype train behind him.

Utah

Mascot: Utes

Location: Salt Lake City, Utah

In-person undergraduate enrollment: 26,355 (2022)

Known for: Being a premier research institution

Famous alumni: Bill Marriot, Alex Smith and Steve Smith Sr.

National titles: 33

Football history: Joined the Pac-12

Arizona Mascot: Wildcats

Location: Tuscon, Arizona

In-person undergraduate enrollment: 40,407 (2022)

Known for: High-caliber academic and research programs

Famous alumni: Steve Kerr, Kourtney Kardashian and Rob Gronkowski

National titles:19

Football history: Joined the Pac-10 in 1978, became a member of the Pac-12 in 2011, zero national titles, six conference titles Last season’s football results: 5-7 (3-6)

Known for: Research programs and being a party school

Famous alumni: Jimmy Kimmel, Barry Bonds and Phil Mickelson

National titles: 24

Football history: Joined the Pac-10 in 1978, became a member of the Pac-12 in 2011, zero national titles, 17 conference titles

Last season’s football results: 3-9 (2-7)

Rival: Arizona

What Arizona State brings to the Big 12: See above: “What Arizona brings to the Big 12” sports.ed@ocolly.com

Why are North Texas churches being targeted by violence? Experts weigh in

Joy Ashford

The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — Nelson

Smith cares for his church and its people as much as he cares for his own home and family, he said. So when he got the call last August that it was vandalized for the second time in two months, he drove there straightaway.

Someone had graffitied Nazi swastikas on Stonebridge United Methodist Church in McKinney alongside the words “skin king,” a reference to the white supremacist skinhead movement, and the threat “not my best work yet...”

Smith, Stonebridge’s facility coordinator and a church member for over 24 years, worked with several other parishioners to clean the building as fast as possible before the Sunday morning service.

“It’s tough sitting there with a pressure washer, trying to get rid of hateful messages so other people can’t see it, and knowing this is your house. This is your home,” Smith recalled. While working, he said, the group “prayed together for the person who did this, as well as just the hate in the world.” Smith’s church isn’t the only one in North Texas that has recently suffered violence or vandalism. On July 23, Plano’s Community Unitarian Universalist Church was attacked by a firebomb that left the building’s front doors and foyer damaged. A few weeks earlier, the LGBTQ-affirming church had been trolled by anti-LGBTQ YouTubers who pretended to be gay and mocked the church’s beliefs.

Plano police were investigating the case.

On July 15, Fort Worth police arrested a man who allegedly threatened to “shoot up” First Pilgrim Valley Baptist Church. At least two other churches in Fort Worth reported acts of vandalism over the past few years.

Nationally, leaders of several Christian denominations have been raising the alarm about rising violence and vandalism against churches.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warned of a “disturbing trend” of vandalism against Catholic churches in 2022 and has reported 270 acts of vandalism and destruction since May 2020. Black churches around the country have been victims of arson, “suspicious” fires and tens of thousands of dollars in property damage in recent years.

A rise in hate crimes

The FBI releases national hate crime statistics annually and its most recent data from 2021 reported 10,840 hate crimes, the highest number in more than two decades, according to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights antisemitism and hate crimes. Of those 10,840 crimes, 1,590 were related to religion, the FBI said.

Jake Kurz, director of communications for the central division of the Anti-Defamation League, said the spike in crimes against religious groups in the U.S. is linked to a rise in polarization.

“If we’re more polarized, then we are more extreme in our views, and we are acting out in a way that is detrimental to people who are outside of our group,” he said. ”People are reacting to communities that are different than their own… Places of worship are just one way that people express themselves.”

Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director for research, reporting and analysis at the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center, pointed out that the U.S. has a long history of churches involved with the Civil Rights movement being targeted.

Racist violence against churches “is something people of the younger generation aren’t used to, but it is not new,” she said.

Carroll Rivas cited the recent court case that found far-right extremist group the

Proud Boys liable for $1 million for destruction of property including a Black Lives Matter sign at the predominantly Black Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.

Unlike in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Black churches were more often targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, Carroll Rivas says in recent years her organization is seeing white supremacist groups pivot to lone wolf violence in an attempt to avoid institutional accountability

“Let’s have a bunch of lone wolves do the work for us,” she said, summarizing the strategy. Terms like “skin king,” which was graffitied on the McKinney church, signal that a person is part of white supremacist communities and listening to their messaging, she said, even if a formal tie isn’t established. Carroll Rivas said her organization is also seeing a spike in violence toward churches that support the LGBTQ community, including this year’s firebombing of an Ohio church that planned to host a drag queen story hour.

“These particular churches who have been open and affirming churches for LGBTQ people, particularly Unitarian Universalist churches, have really been targeted for their openness.”

‘Lack of respect for religion’ The Family Research Council, a conservative evangelical group, published a report last December on what it called “acts of hostility” against churches with data from 2018-2022 and updated its findings with a supplemental report in April. The group concluded that “acts of hostility,” which ranged from arson to graffiti to protests during services, had increased significantly from January 2018 to September 2022, totaling 420 incidents.

Study author Arielle Del Turco said “it’s more thinkable now than it used to be a few decades ago for people to lash out at churches.”

Even if not every act of vandalism is motivated by “a specifically anti-religious intent… the fact that they’re targeting churches in the first place shows an underlying lack of respect for religion overall,” she added.

Del Turco cited “increasing secularization” and the growth of “nones,” or those who do not identify with a religion, as reasons for the increase in violence.

David Campbell, a Notre Dame professor who studies secularization and secular people, questioned Del Turco’s conclusion.

“The vast majority of Americans who are secularists are not hostile to religion. In fact, we find that they score very high on measures of what we might call religious tolerance,” Campbell said, citing large studies of secular people he conducted for a book he coauthored called Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics. “They are very accepting of the free exercise of religion.”

Instead, conflicts among believers may be contributing to anti-church violence, Campbell said. “There has been violence directed against places of worship over the long arc of American history, and often it’s people of one faith who are at- tacking those of another faith.” Disputes within Christianity could be part of the problem, Carroll Rivas said.

“There is a current movement by a very small, narrow faction of the Christian community to define who is Christian and who’s not… Some people are talking about this as a white Christian nationalist movement.”

‘Don’t back down’ Violence against a house of worship can have a profound impact on the congregation, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the AntiDefamation League Center on Extremism.

“When you target a religious institution — be it a church, a synagogue, or a mosque — you’re not simply affecting the people who may run that institution, and you’re not just affecting the congregation, either. You’re going to be affecting anybody of that faith who learns about this and then becomes afraid.”

The Rev. John Allen, lead pastor of the McKinney church that was vandalized last year, said he isn’t afraid. He joined the church in July.

“They can come after me all day,” he said. “I’m not going to let anybody threaten me or intimidate me from the work that we’re called to do.”

He shared words of advice for churches that may be worried they could be next. “Take the steps to keep people safe,” he said, emphasizing security cameras and other safety measures. “But don’t back down.”

“Somebody has to be the voice of love and peace in our society.” news.ed@ocolly.com

Showcase...

make it to graduate school and beyond.” fish swimming in really big waves, but with all the guidance I’ve had, it has made the transition and the experience seamless.”

After pursuing her research project through the summer program, Cannon had a different outlook from her initial hesitation. She was worried she would not be good at it, but she proved herself wrong. Her project consisted of research on relationships, stress and how they impact well-being.

“I want to go to graduate school and honestly, it didn’t seem feasible to me,” Cannon said. “I didn’t know the process of how to get where I wanted to get to. As I talked with leaders of [the OSU Undergraduate research program] they assured me that this would equip me with what I needed to be able to

“Research is not as scary as I thought it was,” Cannon said. “In my head, I was thinking about it without guidance. I was imagining I was like a in this hall right now,” said Dr. Kenneth Sewell, vice president for research. “I mean that in every sense of the word, the diversity of topics, the diversity of thought, the diversity of people. This is about enriching their lives and enriching the lives of our state.”

Multiple schools and majors are showcased with research in various areas, from computer science to pharmaceuticals. OSU works to help students develop skills, intellect and creativity by creating these kinds of programs to prepare students for real-world challenges.

Continued from 1 news.ed@ocolly.com

“If you want to know what diversity should look like at a university, it’s

To learn more about OSU’s undergraduate research opportunities, visit https://universitycollege.okstate. edu/scholars/undergraduate_research_ primary/undergraduate_research.html.

The Stillwater Short Play Festival is a labor of love for its organizers and performers. The festival’s producer, Deborah Sutton, sends out a call for scripts each year, and after the submission period is closed, Town & Gown readers begin the task of selecting eight plays for performance. This year saw well over 200 plays submitted from a long list of distinguished playwrights from all over the United States and as far away as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The festival functions each year as both a showcase for a wonderful storytelling medium and an outreach to the Stillwater community. As in all previous years, a local nonprofit charity will receive 100% of the proceeds from each performance as well as all the proceeds from the “Stuff the Shorts” voting. The Early Childhood Coalition of Stillwater was chosen as this year’s recipient. The ECC is dedicated to the support of children in the critical years from birth to age 5. As Laura Shellhammer, Child Development Specialist with the ECC, explains, “The Early Childhood Coalition is honored to be the recipient of the proceeds from the Town and Gown 2023 Short Play Festival. ECC is a local non-profit whose mission is to foster communities’ efforts in promoting healthy growth and development in young children.”

Its primary program, HealthySteps, serves over 2,000 families each year and provides funding for staff, children’s books, and more.

The ECC also collaborates with other community organizations, including partnering with the Stillwater library on their Storywalks and parent education programs and bringing the Babymobile to Stillwater, which provides formula and diapers for families. The Coalition works to unite the community by bringing together area agencies, physicians, schools, non-profits, businesses, and individuals to make Stillwater a truly familyfriendly community.

HealthySteps is based in a pediatrician’s office and works with doctors and staff to help families identify, understand, and manage parenting challenges related to feeding, behavior, sleep, development, and adapting to life with a young child. The HealthySteps Specialist joins the family in the exam room to discuss typical development and behaviors and common stressors, and to explore strategies to address the family’s and child’s needs. This team approach empowers parents to use the most helpful information, tools, and services during this crucial time in their child’s brain development.

In addition, the ECC administers its Better Brain Campaign, specifically designed to improve developmental out-