Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 17, 2025
Story by Thomas Kane, PhD ’14
Kinder Institute Director of Undergraduate Studies
When construction crews were renovating the fourth floor of Jesse Hall almost a decade ago, we pleaded with them to keep the original wood floors, creaks and all. One unexpected consequence of this is that I’ve come to know people by their style and gait. Former student Hope Davis’ vintage saddle shoes announced her long before she came into view. To this day, Jeff Pasley’s professorial shuffle inimitably precedes him.
Fun parlor trick, but what I like is the metaphor twined up in it. When the Kinder Institute first started, we were five people scattered among three buildings on campus. We found ways to prioritize the form of communal learning that’s so central to our mission, as it is to any meaningful intellectual inquiry. Yet the structural limitation of being without headquarters — a democracy without a nation — was real.
That all changed in August 2016, when the doors to our offices in Jesse Hall opened. We held the closing morning of our annual Society of Fellows undergraduate conference in our new classroom on the fourth floor that year, and when the final session ended, the students just kind of stuck around. They immediately took to the fact that they had somewhere to keep the conversation going.
When the school year kicked off a few days later, back they came, spreading out across every flat surface we had to study and debate and laugh. Soon, our students who were out in D.C. for June and July started showing up to join them, and before long, undergraduates who just happened to be taking a seminar in Jesse 410 were hanging out after class. The coffee was free. The discovery of a space for discussing big ideas without the dulling pressure of grades was intoxicating. The wild rumpus had begun.
And when you looked around, it was everywhere. Historians and political scientists were camped out in each other’s offices, cats and dogs living together in a personification of the interdisciplinarity that, from the beginning, we hoped to spark. Community members were turning out in droves to our “Pursuit of Happiness Hour” Friday afternoon lecture series. High school seniors visiting Mizzou found their way to us and asked about the books on our shelves and whether they could major in the Kinder Institute (they couldn’t then, but they can now). Even the bats started to drop in every once in a while when they tired of the maw of the Jesse Hall dome.
The transformation of an ex-gymnasium/art studio/radio station/administrative building/ghost town into a living thing was as organic as it was immediate. It’s been that way ever since. The fall and spring at Kinder are delightful cacophonies of scholarly activity, the summers sometimes unnervingly lonesome. When you step back, it really is a little bit like Cheers, just transported to the heartland and bizarrely recast with academics of all ages and interests. Everybody actually does know everybody’s name. The floorboards give all of us away.
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