Mississippi Today
A USM student spoke out about a candidate for provost. Then they got an email from one of the school’s biggest donors.
A USM student spoke out about a candidate for provost. Then they got an email from one of the school’s biggest donors.
The unsolicited email arrived in Emily Goldsmith’s inbox shortly before 6 p.m. on April 12 with a subject line that was short and to-the-point: “provost protest.”
Goldsmith, a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi, had recently been critical in the student newspaper about a growing controversy on campus: One of the finalists for provost — an administrator and finance professor named Lance Nail — had a checkered past at a former employer, Texas Tech University. A Title IX investigation found Nail reportedly mishandled a report of sexual misconduct and “failed in his responsibility as the Dean of the College.”
The news touched a nerve on campus where students had called on the university to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault a year and a half ago. More than 750 students, faculty and alumni signed a petition protesting Nail’s possible hiring. Goldsmith, whose pronouns are they/them, just so happened to be the only student quoted in the student newspaper. Still, they knew they were speaking for many when they said that hiring Nail “would communicate that all the university’s claims about diversity, inclusion, and equity were meaningless platitudes.” And, they began helping to plan a protest.
Days later, the email came through.
“You do not know me but my name is Chuck Scianna and I am the guy that Scianna Hall is named after,” it began.
Goldsmith knew of Scianna. The 93,000-foot building that bears his name in gleaming gold font faces U.S. Highway 49, a major thoroughfare in Hattiesburg. Scianna, an alumnus and co-founder of a major distributor of oil pipeline products, also happens to be one of USM’s largest individual donors along with his wife, Rita, having given more than $10 million. He is also “lifelong friends” with USM’s new president, Joe Paul.
But Goldsmith didn’t know why Scianna cared about their protest.
In the email obtained by Mississippi Today, Scianna wrote that he knew Goldsmith was planning to protest but asked them to consider that USM had hired a search firm, created a search committee and instituted a “process” to vet the candidates for provost and still, Nail had become a finalist.
“If you are going to protest the interviewing of Dr. Nail, should you not protest Dr. Paul and the search committee, the search firm and everyone else involved in the selection process,” Scianna wrote. “Should we just turn the university over to you and your group to hire the provost and run the university?”
In his 48 years of business, Scianna wrote, he had been accused of “many things that were not even close to the truth.” He suggested there was more behind the news articles about Nail, who he noted he had worked with “in the past.”
“I am not advocating that you should not have a voice, but it should be peaceful and armed with the facts, not just a google search,” he wrote, adding “I believe that if you have a conversation with him before you rely only on a google search you might have a different opinion.”
“You are completing a PhD,” he concluded. “Don’t you have to have an open mind to get the best out of an education? Does your program allow you to get all of your research facts from one source? I am only asking that you go into this with an unbiased opinion of Dr. Nail and let the process pick the best candidate.”
USM did not return a comment by press time, but Scianna’s email offers a look at how university donors in Mississippi, who have extraordinary access to powerful administrators, view the role of community feedback in the largely confidential search-and-selection process of key university hires. It also speaks to whose voices get results from university administration.
Goldsmith felt shaken and intimidated by Scianna’s email.
“I do think it’s troublesome to discount the students who are saying they have feelings about this,” Goldsmith said. “This is their campus. Even if we’re going to say ‘majority rules,’ nobody has made a petition to say that we should hire Lance Nail, so it’s not like there’s this loud opposite voice.”
Goldsmith didn’t reply to Scianna and forwarded the email to their dissertation advisor — their immediate superior — who then sent it up the chain. Scianna’s email soon started circulating among faculty before it ultimately made its way to Chris Winstead, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Troubled by the message, Winstead texted and called Paul about it, according to another email shared with Mississippi Today.
“I do think that there is a power dynamic at play,” Goldsmith said. “Perhaps it would not have been unusual if I had had prior overlap (with Scianna) or conversations or a personal connection or even perhaps if I was in the College of Business.”
Scianna told Mississippi Today that he was just trying to offer Goldsmith some advice — not telling them not to protest. “Read the email. It’s very clear. There’s no threat,” he said.
“The higher up you get in any organization, you’re more susceptible to people finding fault with what you do, finding fault with your decisions and then the narrative gets misconstrued — a lot of times by the media, to be honest, because they don’t go out and get all the facts or look at both sides,” he said.
The controversy started earlier this month after USM announced that Nail was one of four finalists for provost, the university’s chief academic officer. Students at USM promptly dug into his history — and had concerns about what they found.
Nail became dean of Texas Tech’s business college in 2012, after spending four years at USM’s College of Business. In 2015, Nail let go of a business school professor, reportedly a friend of his, who had been accused of sexual misconduct, according to KCBD. But the Title IX investigation, which Nail said had “inaccuracies,” found that he still invited the former business professor to a university trip to Chile, where the professor harassed a female student.
Later that year, Nail resigned from Texas Tech after the university determined he had broken its grading policies.
Nail, who was visiting the USM Gulf Park campus on Monday, didn’t return an inquiry from Mississippi Today before press time. In a comment to SM2, the student newspaper, Nail wrote that “the many Southern Miss colleagues I worked with” could attest to his character, particularly his former students and “those who served on the Business Advisory Council who supported my mission to graduate ethical business leaders from Southern Miss.”
Scianna told Mississippi Today that he is one of those colleagues who served on USM’s Business Advisory Council, which advises the dean of the business college. He said he worked closely with Nail, reviewing the college’s curriculum to see how it “would be beneficial to my company” and recruiting students for internships or non-profit projects that he declined to share more details about.
But perhaps the biggest project Scianna and Nail collaborated on was the construction of Scianna Hall, a more than $30-million project. At the time, Scianna’s $6-million donation was the USM Foundation’s largest one-time gift from an alumnus.
As dean, Nail had a key hand in stewarding the campaign to build the business school. He lists the project as one of his significant professional accomplishments on the first page of his resume.
“He didn’t just walk in one day and say ‘Will you write a check?’” Scianna said.
After Nail left USM, Scianna said the two stayed “acquaintances.” He said he didn’t recommend Nail for the position or express a preference for Nail to anyone on the search committee.
“I’m not impartial,” he said. “I want the very best candidate, but I want the process to work out. My email to Emily has nothing to do with Lance Nail. It’s with the way that it’s being approached. … Don’t make your decision based on Google searches.”
Scianna has served on search committees for key hirings at USM before, most recently last year when he was on the committee convened by the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees to select the university’s next president. When it comes to the hiring process, he said that unlike the majority of students, faculty and alumni, the search committee has access “to all the facts.”
“Shouldn’t their decision weigh more?” he said. “I mean, we don’t like chocolate ice cream. Let’s have a protest. Should we ban chocolate ice cream? Should we have the facts? And that’s all I’m saying.”
He said he wasn’t sure what a protest — no matter how large — could accomplish when the university ultimately makes a hiring decision based on the help of the search committee and the headhunting firm.
“What if a thousand people got together and said your newspaper was dishonest, didn’t report the truth?” he said. “Should there be an investigation? You know, I don’t know. That’s, that’s, I’m just not smart enough, I guess, to figure that out.”
USM’s provost 13-person search committee does include two student voices — the SGA presidents of the Hattiesburg and Gulf Park campuses — but Goldsmith said the process should be more transparent so that all students can be heard. They suggested the university share the steps that were taken to vet Nail before he became a finalist.
And while they don’t plan to ask Nail any questions when he visits campus Tuesday, they will attend the protest they helped organize in USM’s designated free speech zone in the middle of campus.
“I do think generally that undergrad and graduate students should be made more aware of administrative hiring,” they said. “There isn’t always a ton of transparency in higher education. Sometimes students don’t even know to look at this stuff … but I have learned through this process that many undergrad students do care. They’re not thoughtless, they’re not uninvolved. They are thinking, they are thoughtful, they are involved.”
Scianna, who is back in his office in Waller, Texas, after visiting Hattiesburg this weekend, doesn’t plan to see the protest for himself because his philanthropy shows his dedication to USM.
“I don’t have to be part of this,” he said. “They can do what they want to do. I mean, talk, beat your drum, do whatever. But let your actions speak for yourself.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
IHL deletes the word ‘diversity’ from its policies
The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities voted Thursday to delete the word “diversity” from several policies, including a requirement that the board evaluate university presidents on campus diversity outcomes.
Though the Legislature has not passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the changes “in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law,” according to the board book.
The move comes on the heels of the re-election of former President Donald Trump and after several universities in Mississippi have renamed their diversity offices. Earlier this year, the IHL board approved changes to the University of Southern Mississippi’s mission and vision statements that removed the words “diverse” and “inclusiveness.”
In an email, John Sewell, IHL’s communications director, did not respond to several questions about the policy changes but wrote that the board’s goal was to “reinforce our commitment to ensuring students have access to the best education possible, supported by world-class faculty and staff.”
“The end goal is to support all students, and to make sure they graduate fully prepared to enter the workforce, hopefully in Mississippi,” Sewell added.
On Thursday, trustees approved the changes without discussion after a first reading by Harold Pizzetta, the associate commissioner for legal affairs and risk management. But Sewell wrote in an email that the board discussed the policy amendments in open session two months ago during its retreat in Meridian, more than an hour away from the board’s normal meeting location in Jackson.
IHL often uses these retreats, which unlike its regular board meetings aren’t livestreamed and are rarely attended by members of the public outside of the occasional reporter, to discuss potentially controversial policy changes.
Last year, the board had a spirited discussion about a policy change that would have increased its oversight of off-campus programs during its retreat at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. In 2022, during a retreat that also took place in Meridian, trustees discussed changing the board’s tenure policies. At both retreats, a Mississippi Today reporter was the only member of the public to witness the discussions.
The changes to IHL’s diversity policy echo a shift, particularly at colleges and universities in conservative states, from concepts like diversity in favor of “access” and “opportunity.” In higher education, the term “diversity, equity and inclusion” has traditionally referred to a range of efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among minority populations.
But in recent years, conservative politicians have contended that DEI programs are wasteful spending and racist. A bill to ban state funding for DEI in Mississippi died earlier this year, but at least 10 other states have passed laws seeking to end or restrict such initiatives at state agencies, including publicly funded universities, according to ABC News.
In Mississippi, the word “diversity” first appeared in IHL’s policies in 1998. The diversity statement was adopted in 2005 and amended in 2013.
The board’s vote on Thursday turned the diversity statement, which was deleted in its entirety, into a “statement on higher education access and success” according to the board book.
“One of the strengths of Mississippi is the diversity of its people,” the diversity statement read. “This diversity enriches higher education and contributes to the capacity that our students develop for living in a multicultural and interdependent world.”
Significantly, the diversity statement required the IHL board to evaluate the university presidents and the higher learning commissioner on diversity outcomes.
The statement also included system-wide goals — some of which it is unclear if the board has achieved — to increase the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, employ more underrepresented faculty, staff and administrators, and increase the use of minority-owned contractors and vendors.
Sewell did not respond to questions about if IHL has met those goals or if the board will continue to evaluate presidents on diversity outcomes.
In the new policy, those requirements were replaced with two paragraphs about the importance of respectful dialogue on campus and access to higher education for all Mississippians.
“We encourage all members of the academic community to engage in respectful, meaningful discourse with the aim of promoting critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the development of character,” the new policy reads. “All students should be supported in their educational journey through programming and services designed to have a positive effect on their individual academic performance, retention, and graduation.”
Also excised was a policy that listed common characteristics of universities in Mississippi, including “a commitment to ethnic and gender diversity,” among others. Another policy on institutional scholarships was also edited to remove a clause that required such programs to “promote diversity.”
“IHL is committed to higher education access and success among all populations to assist the state of Mississippi in meeting its enrollment and degree completion goals, as well as building a highly-skilled workforce,” the institutional scholarship policy now reads.
The board also approved a change that requires the universities to review their institutional mission statements on an annual basis.
A policy on “planning principles” will continue to include the word “diverse,” and a policy that states the presidential search advisory committees will “be representative in terms of diversity” was left unchanged.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Closed St. Dominic’s mental health beds to reopen in December under new management
The shuttered St. Dominic’s mental health unit will reopen under the management of a for-profit, Texas-based company next month.
Oceans Behavioral Hospital Jackson, a 77-bed facility, will provide inpatient behavioral health services to adults and seniors and add intensive outpatient treatment services next year.
“Jackson continuously ranks as one of the cities for our company that shows one of the greatest needs in terms of behavioral health,” Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer told Mississippi Today at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its location on St. Dominic’s campus Thursday. “…There’s been an outcry for high quality care.”
St. Dominic’s 83-bed mental health unit closed suddenly in June 2023, citing “substantial financial challenges.”
Merit Health Central, which operates a 71-bed psychiatric health hospital unit in Jackson, sued Oceans in March, arguing that the new hospital violated the law by using a workaround to avoid a State Health Department requirement that the hospital spend at least 17% of its gross patient revenue on indigent and charity care.
Without a required threshold for this care, Merit Health Central will shoulder the burden of treating more non-paying patients, the hospital in South Jackson argued.
The suit, which also names St. Dominic’s Hospital and the Mississippi Department of Health as defendants, awaits a ruling from Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Tametrice Hodges-Linzey next year.
The complaint does not bar Oceans from moving forward with its plans to reopen, said Archer.
Oceans operates two other mental health facilities in Mississippi and over 30 other locations in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
“Oceans is very important to the Coast, to Tupelo, and it’s important right here in this building. It’s part of the state of Mississippi’s response to making sure people receive adequate mental health care in Mississippi,” said Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann at the Nov. 21 ribbon cutting.
Some community leaders have been critical of the facility.
“Oceans plans to duplicate existing services available to insured patients while ignoring the underserved and indigent population in need,” wrote Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones in an Oct. 1 letter provided to Mississippi Today by Merit Health.
Massachusetts-based Webster Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with a number of investments in health care, bought Oceans in 2022. St. Dominic’s is owned by Louisiana-based Catholic nonprofit Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.
Oceans first filed a “certificate of need” application to reopen the St. Dominic’s mental health unit in October 2023.
Mississippi’s certificate of need law requires medical facilities to receive approval from the state before opening a new health care center to demonstrate there is a need for its services.
The Department of Health approved the application under the condition that the hospital spend at least 17% of its patient revenue on free or low-cost medical care for low-income individuals – far more than the two percent it proposed.
Oceans projected in its application that the hospital’s profit would equal $2.6 million in its third year, and it would spend $341,103 on charity care.
Merit Health contested the conditional approval, arguing that because its mental health unit provides 22% charity care, Oceans providing less would have a “significant adverse effect” on Merit by diverting more patients without insurance or unable to pay for care to its beds.
Oceans and St. Dominic’s also opposed the state’s charity care condition, arguing that 17% was an unreasonable figure.
But before a public hearing could be held on the matter, Oceans and St. Dominic’s filed for a “change of ownership,” bypassing the certificate of need process entirely. The state approved the application 11 days later.
Merit Health Central then sued Oceans, St. Dominic and the State Department of Health, seeking to nullify the change of ownership.
“The (change of ownership) filing and DOH approval … are nothing more than an ‘end run’ around CON law,” wrote Merit Health in the complaint.
Oceans, St. Dominic’s and the Mississippi Department of Health have filed motions to dismiss the case.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
How Mississippi’s Supreme Court Runoff Election Could Impact Criminal Cases
Mississippi voters have dealt defeat to one conservative state Supreme Court justice and forced a moderate justice into a Nov. 26 runoff, with the final outcome possibly making the court more open to considering the rights of criminal defendants.
The nine-member court is largely conservative but justices have recently split in high-profile decisions that sharply affected state politics, including a ruling that shut down citizen-led ballot initiatives in Mississippi and allowed some state control over local criminal cases in its majority-Black capital. The court has also rendered rulings that have made the state increasingly unfavorable to defendants appealing their cases.
“The ability of death row inmates in particular, and inmates in general, to access the courts has been recently curtailed significantly,” Matthew Steffey, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law, told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts following the Nov. 5 election.
Justice Dawn H. Beam joined the majority in those decisions, acquiring a reputation of being hostile to appeals by criminal defendants, and she ran for reelection this fall as the Republican Party’s favored candidate. However, she lost in the state’s 2nd District on Nov. 5 to David P. Sullivan, a defense attorney who has worked as a public defender.
Judicial races in Mississippi are nonpartisan and Sullivan has given few explicit signals about his judicial outlook. He has supported at least some criminal justice reforms and would be the third justice with experience as a defense attorney on this court. Some reformers nationwide have pushed for more professional diversity on the bench.
Even if Sullivan turns out to be more centrist or independent than Beam on criminal law, any overall shift in power on the court depends on the outcome of a runoff election next week.
Two-term Justice Jim Kitchens and challenger Jenifer B. Branning will face each other in the Nov. 26 runoff election after neither won more than 50% of the vote on Nov. 5. The runoff will take place across the 22 counties that make up the Supreme Court’s central district, including Hinds County, home to Jackson. Throughout the campaign, the state GOP targeted Kitchens with attacks, while Branning, a Republican state senator with a conservative voting record, is endorsed by the party.
Kitchens is one of two reliably moderate-to-liberal high court justices. Justices from among an additional group of four sometimes veer away from the majority, as well, but can be more unpredictable, and this group does not vote as a bloc.
Quinn Yeargain, a Michigan State University law professor who closely watches state courts, recently analyzed the court’s voting patterns and found Beam was consistently more conservative than Kitchens in recent cases. Yeargain told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts that conservative and liberal voters often have few signals about how to select a candidate in judicial races. “It’s very hard to label the justices,” they said.
Sullivan — whose father was a Mississippi Supreme Court justice from 1984 to 2000 — called himself a “conservative” throughout his campaign. But he has also touted the value of judicial independence and criticized Beam for campaigning on her endorsement by the state Republican Party.
“I think that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” Sullivan told the Sun Herald newspaper, speaking of Beam’s use of the endorsement. “Judicial races are nonpartisan for a reason. A judge’s impartiality could be called into question.”
Sullivan has broad legal experience, but much of his career has focused on private criminal defense while also doing some public defense work. He told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today that he supported a new administrative rule handed down in 2023 by the state Supreme Court to require continuous legal representation for poor criminal defendants from the beginning of their cases. An investigation by The Marshall Project, ProPublica and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal last year found, however, that many courts were unready at the time to implement the new representation rules.
During the campaign, Sullivan told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today that more work is needed to improve public defense.
Kitchens has also advocated for public defense reforms during his two terms on the court. He told a committee of legislators last year that the “playing field is far from level” between prosecutors and poor defendants.
On other criminal justice issues, he has sometimes dissented from opinions upholding death sentences. His decisions have scrutinized prosecutorial conduct and inadequate legal representation.
Branning, the Republican senator, has a voting record on criminal justice issues that suggests a harsher approach toward criminal defendants. She has supported higher mandatory minimum sentences and reclassifying misdemeanors as felonies, has opposed expansion of parole and was among only a few lawmakers who voted against legalizing medical marijuana.
She also supported increasing the jurisdiction of a controversial, state-run police force inside the majority-Black city of Jackson as well as increasing state control over many felony cases in Jackson. The Supreme Court unanimously curtailed much state power over these felony cases, but a majority left some control intact, with Kitchens and another judge dissenting.
Branning did not respond to questions from The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today during the Nov. 5 campaign about her possible judicial outlook.
Kitchens was a prosecutor and then in private practice before joining the bench. Branning is a practicing attorney who typically handles civil cases.
The winner of the Nov. 26 runoff will join Sullivan on a court that in recent years has been restricting the ability of people who say the legal system has wronged them to seek relief, legal experts told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts this month.
Krissy Nobile, director of the state’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said it’s become “increasingly more difficult to correct a wrongful conviction.” Her office provides legal counsel for indigent people on death row.
She said a number of recent cases showed the barriers the high court has erected for criminal defendants appealing their convictions, and demonstrated indifference to civil rights violations. Kitchens disagreed with the majority, in full or in part, in all but one of the appeals, which the court unanimously denied.
In a case earlier this year, the Court ruled to monetarily fine an incarcerated person for filing any future post-conviction relief petitions that lacked merit. Kitchens joined a dissenting opinion condemning the fine. In another, the court denied a man who argued that his lawyers were ineffective and that they did not challenge prosecutorial misconduct or false forensic evidence presented by a medical examiner with a checkered past. The court’s majority denied the motion, and in the process, overturned a precedent that allowed ineffective counsel as an adequate reason to give a case another look in some types of appeals. Kitchens dissented, along with two other justices.
“For decades in Mississippi, the Court held that it would correct errors if there was a violation (of) a person’s fundamental rights,” Nobile said. But she added this has changed considerably. Now, if you land a terrible lawyer who rushes your case, “You are out of luck,” she said, “even if your core constitutional rights have been clearly violated.”
For the court’s majority, Nobile added, “The legal technicalities now trump a person’s constitutional rights.”
The runoff is the nation’s final supreme court race of the year. Thirty-two states held elections for their high courts earlier this year, resulting in a muddled picture, with liberals and conservatives each gaining ground in different places, Bolts reports.
Mississippi’s runoff outcome will heavily depend on turnout and the composition of the electorate. In the Supreme Court’s central district, voters split narrowly between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election on Nov. 5, but the runoff is just two days before Thanksgiving and will likely see a large dropoff in turnout. Branning received 42% of the vote in the first round, and Kitchens received 36%, with three other candidates making up the rest.
There will also be a runoff the same day in the Gulf Coast area between Amy Lassiter St. Pé and Jennifer Schloegel for an open seat on the state Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals hears both criminal and civil cases that have been appealed from lower courts. The Mississippi Supreme Court can hear cases directly on appeal or can assign cases to the Court of Appeals.
Observers agreed that against the national legal backdrop, neither a Kitchens victory nor a Branning victory would lead to a seismic change since neither outcome would flip the court’s conservative lean. Still, a modest shift could impact some of the most controversial cases, such as a rare 5-4 decision that upheld the death sentence in Willie Manning’s case.
A Kitchens win, coupled with Sullivan’s upset earlier this month, would deal the Republican Party rare setbacks in a state where it has been dominant and could put moderate forces in a position to grow their numbers further in future elections.
“You might end up with a normal conservative court,” law professor Yeargain said, “instead of one of the most conservative courts in the country.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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