Mississippi Today

Delta State president gauges band students’ response to interim director’s anti-LGBTQ+ podcast rhetoric

Published

2 years ago

July 28, 2023

Delta State University President Daniel Ennis met Thursday with the school’s marching band students in the wake of revelations that the recently hired band director had mocked trans people and agreed pro-LGBTQ+ religious leaders should be stoned on his now-deleted podcast.

During the 45-minute meeting, Ennis told students via Zoom from a conference in California that the comments in Steven Hugley’s podcast “Always Right” prompted several alumni and parents of students to reach out to him, but not any students. So he said he wanted to know what the roughly 30 students in the band who joined the call thought before taking an action that might affect them.

Ennis invited students to share any information with him that would help him “as an outsider” better understand the situation. He started as president of the regional college in Cleveland, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, earlier this summer after spending two decades at a university in South Carolina. (In a text to a Mississippi Today reporter after the meeting, Ennis said he was “fine” letting his comments speak in the Zoom meeting for themselves.)

“Certainly, I have to be clear, all decisions on a college campus are eventually the responsibility of the president,” Ennis said in the meeting. “It is my place to make sure that we’re doing the things we should be for our students.”

The Zoom seems to be just one step Ennis is taking to address the situation. Earlier this week, he personally sent a reminder asking administrators to refer media inquiries to the communications department to “support the university’s ability to speak with one voice regarding personnel and legal matters.”

The interim chair of the music department, Kent Wessinger, had spoken to Mississippi Today last week about Hugley’s hiring.

But the university has not publicly addressed the comments Hugley made on his podcast, which include gagging at a photo of a trans woman, repeatedly misgendering notable trans people and calling for transitioning — the process of changing one’s physical appearance to align with their gender identity — to be made illegal for trans adults. In Mississippi, lawmakers earlier this year banned gender-affirming care that results in trans minors medically transitioning.

“If you do, not only are we gonna lock you up, we’re also gonna lock up the doctor,” Hugley said in reference to parents who seek gender-affirming care for trans kids, “and then we take it the next step.”

Many students thought the Zoom, which was billed to them as a meeting “to discuss plans for the upcoming year,” would involve Ennis announcing some form of action. It did not. He said he first wanted to hear from students and talk to faculty in the music department when he got back to Cleveland.

Some wanted to know if the university was going to issue a comment, whether Hugley had been placed on administrative leave or what, if anything, the administration was going to do to make LGBTQ+ students feel comfortable participating in band. Others wanted to know if Ennis felt that Hugley would be able to keep his personal views out of the classroom.

When Ennis said he would not be answering questions like those during the meeting, some students were disappointed.

Delta State University’s new president Dr. Daniel J. Ennis, speaks with students and staff at E.R. Jobe Hall on Delta State’s campus, where he was introduced to students and faculty, Thursday, April 6, 2023. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

“I’ve called this session not to make any announcements,” he said. “I’ve called this session to get more information from you, so I will learn from you, your perspectives and thoughts on this, and when I get back to campus, I’ll have conversations with the leadership involved. But this will not be a session where you get news, announcements or anything like that regarding the marching band.”

“I believe there was a miscommunication in the email then,” Matthew Brewton, a senior music education major, replied in the comments.

Ennis also told the music students that he had not been able to watch or listen to Hugley’s podcast because the YouTube channel had been taken down. Hugley, the interim band director as of June 30, removed the videos after a Mississippi Today reporter contacted him last week.

“The item preexisted this individual’s hiring at Delta State so in other words, it was up before he was hired here, and now it’s down, so that’s different than if he put it up this week after he was appointed interim,” Ennis said.

“I don’t know if anybody here has seen it because it was pulled down really quickly as I understand it,” he added.

Multiple students replied in the Zoom comments that a Google Drive of the podcast’s YouTube videos had been widely circulated on campus, and Ennis responded by cautioning students who hadn’t heard the podcast not to listen if they thought it might upset them.

“Out of concern for you, given what we’ve just heard, there may be something hurtful in that link,” he said.

At that, one student commented it “speaks for itself” that Ennis felt the need to issue a content warning.

“I was making a cautionary comment,” Ennis said. “But anyway, I think that’s a good point. The fact that I had to think about how you would react is probably something — that’s why we’re having this conversation.”

Some students said they wanted to give Hugley a chance. They had met him and he was nice to them. They thought it would be okay for Hugley to remain interim band director so long as he didn’t discuss his political views during practice. They noted they were more concerned about the band having a director who could revitalize its statewide reputation, which, they said, is currently poor.

Not every student has “the same beliefs as the LGBTQ community,” said one student, who did not give their name on Zoom. They student added that “we need to be professionals, because we are going to grow up and be around other people in work business that do not agree with our lifestyles and how we live, but at the end of the day, the only thing that we can do is just move on.”

“If we need to be professional then why is Steven Hugley an exception? I do not think that his comments were very professional,” Brewton replied in a comment.

Ennis also suggested that he knew issues with the music department and the marching band went beyond Hugley’s hiring.

The door for Hugley’s hiring was opened earlier this year when Wessinger, the interim chair, removed the former longtime director of the band. Wessinger came to the department after the beloved former chair, Karen Fosheim, was killed. The Bolivar County Sheriff’s department charged Fosheims’ 14-year-old stepson with the crime.

Some students said they didn’t like how the former band director treated them, which heightened their worries about Hugley, because they had hoped the band would become more enjoyable with him. Participating in the band is required for some music majors at Delta State.

But there was one thing on which nearly every student who spoke up agreed. When Ennis asked if they were excited for the fall semester, almost everyone said “no.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

Published

3 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 3, 2025

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

Published

23 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

Published

23 hours ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.