The way some people view it, the University of Missouri is Negative University. The latest was a story in The New York Times that the university said “key aspects” were omitted.One of the key points that you rarely hear or read about was that during the riots in 2015 classes were held and staff and faculty members worked. The education, research and business of the university continued.In a statement released after The New York Times story was published, the university president, Mun Y. Choi, said this: “We are learning from our past while serving as a model for a new engaged university to the nation. That’s not the story you read on Monday, but it’s one you will hear often from the Missouri family. Their tremendous pride in University of Missouri motivates and sustains us to take on the difficult challenges head-on and to become a stronger and more resilient university. Consider these accomplishments.” The statement lists a long list of positive aspects of the university. We can’t list all of them. The list is too long. We will mention a few.The University of Missouri has a high safe campus ranking; it’s a Best Buy university and provides hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid; recent high ratings from Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s rank Mizzou among an elite group of institutions; it’s estimated that MU contributes more than $3.5 billion in economic benefits through its research, education and outreach programs; Mizzou is one of the largest land grant universities with an operating budget of $2.2 billion, 32,000 students, 13,000 faculty members and staff, and 304,000 alumni.It is true that some journalists only look for the negatives and omit the positives in writing stories. Those journalists falsely believe that only the negatives are news. That’s a false assumption. The positives, even though expected, can be important stories.At Mizzou, it’s not even a race — the positives outdistance the negatives by a moon shot.