Mississippi Today
Delta State’s future depends on $11 million, multi-year budget cut, president says
About a decade of “emergency-style budgeting” at Delta State University has all but maxed out its credit and created an $11 million hole that is poised to be an unavoidable existential threat.
Fixing the budget won’t be easy, Daniel Ennis, the new president, warned the campus during a town hall on Thursday. It must happen within five years and will require across-the-board cuts, including to salaries and positions, in part because the regional college’s single-best source of revenue — enrollment — has cratered by 48% in the last 16 years.
“Delta State has to exist,” Ennis said. “It must — for the Delta, for the region and for the state.”
The grim update comes a week after Ennis spoke to the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees during its annual retreat, which was held this year at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. Unlike most IHL board meetings, the retreats are not live-streamed.
“If I’m giving this information to the IHL, I should give it to you and then give you the opportunity to ask questions,” Ennis told the campus.
Though he presented roughly the same information at both events, Ennis expanded on the situation in Biloxi, telling trustees that he likely won’t be able to reduce the university’s budget from $51 million to $40 million without becoming the “most unpopular president in Delta State’s history.”
“I don’t care as long as there is another president at Delta State,” he said.
Al Rankins, the IHL commissioner, was also forthright about the stakes: “There’s nothing, nothing, nothing more important than the financial health” of Delta State.
“You have my support,” Rankins added, “because … any friends you have, you’re going to lose them.”
Delta State isn’t alone in some of the issues it faces — colleges across the country are struggling with declining enrollment and its resulting financial woes.
Much of that is outside Delta State’s control. The downturn in undergraduate students correlates “almost perfectly” with population loss in the Mississippi Delta, Ennis said at the town hall. In 2006, when the university had 3,298 undergraduate students, about 70% were from the Mississippi Delta — a percentage that has dropped to just over half of the 1,708 undergraduate students this year.
But, Ennis added, the university’s budget problems are largely self-inflicted. The budget is around $51 million when it should be more like $40 million.
In his first four months in office, Ennis said he found inadequate spending controls and contracted but unbudgeted expenses, such as an employee on payroll who had been hired with pandemic relief funds that had run out. The university repeatedly overestimated its revenue from facilities, merchandise and other non-tuition sources.
“The running of deficits year after year has eaten into our reserves,” he said.
And there were a number of “unexpected” and costly legal and personnel issues, which Ennis said weren’t clear to him when he applied for the job. Among those issues was a lawsuit from a former Iranian art professor who alleged he was discriminated against by the Turkish department chair. In late July, the university decided to settle after a federal court decided the case could go to trial.
“Every university and every large organization has legal and personnel issues,” Ennis said. “There was just, I thought, an unusual number for the size of the institution.”
In his first month of the job, Ennis said he had to find $1 million so the university could meet its statutory obligation to balance the books.
“I had one night of sleep and then the next day we’re in a new fiscal year with a new deficit already in place,” he said. “So, a challenge. Not what I expected, but that’s where we are.”
Though enrollment appears to be on the slight uptick — mainly due to an increase in graduate students — the university won’t clear its financial hurdles through better recruitment alone.
Delta State’s location in Cleveland puts it in a kind of double-bind: It exists to serve the Delta, but there are increasingly less people in the Delta.
“You should be really proud of the fact that you work at a place that cares about a disadvantaged group of people in a part of America that many folks write off or don’t even think about,” Ennis said. “The challenge is, if your investment is in recruiting students from the Delta, and the Delta writ-large is losing population at an alarming rate — for reasons that have nothing to do with Delta State and everything to do with social economic opportunity in other parts of the United States, then you can see we have declined.”
There has to be more fundraising, Ennis said. Delta State should be receiving more federal funding. He also committed to doubling the university’s capital campaign to $100 million. Though unorthodox, Ennis said this is his only chance to increase the endowment.
There will also be cuts that Ennis said will be decided through a budget committee composed of administrators, faculty and staff.
But individual sacrifices will have to be made, Ennis said. He tried to encourage everyone to not turn against each other — or against him — when it comes time for budget cuts.
“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything,” he said. “Personnel, money, equipment and opportunities because we have to right-size the budget. And there’ll be all kinds of temptation to start thinking about my area, my budget, my place, my stakes.”
When Ennis took questions, Don Allan Mitchell, an English professor, said he understood that “everything is on the table” but wanted to know specifically if Ennis will also consider cuts from the presidential and vice presidential level. Ennis said yes.
Jamie Dahman, a professor who joined the music department in 2016, thanked Ennis for his seeming honesty and transparency.
“That’s something that’s been missing from Delta State leadership since I’ve been here,” he said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.”
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’”
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.
“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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