On the night of December 4, 2004, a Texas Southern University (TSU) student named Ashley Sloan was gunned down near campus, struck in the temple by a bullet after leaving a party with her friends. The murder prompted an outpouring of accusations concerning poor campus security. For many Houstonians, the shooting raised old fears of the violence-plagued TSU of the 1990s, which many thought had since been cleaned up by then-president Dr. Priscilla Slade. As it turned out, the shooting would set in motion a series of events that not only called into question Slade's multimillion dollar "academic renaissance," but revealed a campus administration entrenched in scandal. This article describes Slade's reforms at TSU, the scandal that emerged after the shooting, and the actions of a group of students who uncovered the problems lurking beneath the university's shiny new surface.