Mississippi Today
JSU Development Foundation under scrutiny for alleged ‘unintended’ use of restricted dollars as presidential selection looms

Concerns about poor recordkeeping, inadequate accountability and the possible “unintended” use of restricted dollars led a member of the Jackson State University Development Foundation board to quietly resign earlier this year.
In his June 23 resignation letter, Brian Johnson, a 2009 Jackson State graduate who had served on the board for six years, wrote that he was stepping down after the board failed to pass his motion for a forensic audit.
Johnson was alarmed by internal presentations that he wrote showed the cash-strapped foundation using donor-restricted dollars to pay for its general obligations. But the foundation’s recent annual audits, Johnson wrote, had no discussion of the potentially improper spending.
“As a business professional in the financial services industry, I can’t seem to comprehend how the JSUDF Board of Directors received two financial reports over the last two years from two different JSU Division of Institutional Advancement comptrollers indicating the unintended use of restricted/designated funds, but the Foundation’s CPA audited financial statements have no note or mention of this information,” he wrote.
When contacted by Mississippi Today, Johnson would not comment for this story.
Johnson’s resignation letter is part of a cache of internal foundation documents that was obtained by Mississippi Today as Jackson State is poised to receive a new president. Last week, the Institutions of Higher Learning governing board for Mississippi’s public universities held a special-called meeting to discuss the imminent hire for just 16 minutes.
Taken together, the documents raise questions at the core of the foundation’s fiscal health. One document showed the foundation lacking about $7.6 million in “cash on hand to cover fund balances” and its operating budget, on average, bleeding at least $100,000 every year since 2012. Another, an internal audit that Jackson State completed in late September, determined the foundation was commingling in one account its operating and donor-restricted dollars for alumni, athletics and annual scholarships.
Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University accounting professor who reviewed the documents for Mississippi Today, said it wasn’t clear how the foundation has enough liquidity, or cash-on-hand, to meet its obligations, including scholarships and financial support for university athletics.
“There’s this consistent nagging issue which is that a substantial amount of their assets are restricted, though the exact amount is somewhat unclear,” he said.
But Mittendorf said he was only able to reach that conclusion — one of the concerns that led Johnson to resign — after reading “between the lines” of the foundation’s audit. He didn’t understand why the foundation’s audits are not drawing attention to the existential financial situation it appears to be facing.
“Somewhat surprisingly, they aren’t shouting about that from the rooftops in the financial statement,” Mittendorf said.
In an email, an IHL spokesperson wrote that “IHL does not govern the JSU Development Foundation, so questions about the foundation’s assets should be addressed to the foundation.” But IHL’s bylaws do permit the board to exercise a certain amount of oversight over the university-affiliated foundations, such as giving prior approval if a president wishes to sever ties with the foundation.
The foundation chair, Guyna “Gee” Johnson, a managing director of global fund ratings at S&P who has led the foundation since 2021, asked Mississippi Today to email her questions for this article but did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time.
In a sit-down interview with JSUTV earlier this year, Gee said that “one of the things the board would like to do is to bring more attention to what we’re doing so people feel safe and they trust that we are being good stewards over their money so that they can continue to help our students grow.”
$7 million cash on-hand deficit?
The development foundation was founded in the 1960s to financially support Jackson State. It has been in hot water in recent years after an independent audit that IHL called for found tens of thousands of dollars in questionable credit card spending in 2014, leading the foundation to cancel its credit cards.
Johnson got on the board in 2017, a year after that independent audit was made public by the Clarion Ledger. But internally, the foundation was facing even more challenges than Johnson knew, he wrote in his resignation letter.
“It was then I learned the Foundation was behind on 990’s, facing legal issues due to past Foundation ventures/contracts and not having completed audited financial statements for the two prior years,” he wrote.
The board proceeded to work together to resolve the issues, Johnson wrote. In 2019, a resolution was introduced to acknowledge that the board had borrowed funds from temporarily restricted accounts, as well as its permanently restricted endowment, due to “having insufficient unrestricted operating dollars.”
The foundation, according to the resolution, intended to repay the “interfund debt,” which at the time totaled about $1.8 million. It’s unclear from the document Mississippi Today received if the foundation adopted the resolution.
And last year, the foundation finally executed the sale of One University Place, a mixed-use apartment complex across the street from Jackson State’s campus that was draining the foundation’s bank accounts, to the university for $6.9 million.
But it appears the sale wasn’t enough to get the foundation in the clear, according to the foundation’s 2021 audit and two internal PowerPoints presented earlier this year by Keilani Vanish and Sophia Williams, comptrollers for the foundation.
As of May 18, the date of the most recent presentation, the foundation’s restricted fund balances, which cover its designated accounts, totaled $11.6 million. But the foundation had just under $4 million in its operating accounts, leaving a roughly $7 million deficit in “cash on hand to cover fund balances.” A presentation in February showed a similar situation.
That’s when Johnson, who served on the finance committee, began to wonder why that information wasn’t included in the foundation’s audited financial statements, according to his letter.
The foundation should be communicating the difference between those documents to board members, Mittendorf said.
“The concerning part is if someone on a board is unaware of why those things deviate,” he said.
Mittendorf reviewed the internal presentations and the foundation’s 2021 audit, the most recent publicly available. Both documents, he said, were confusing for him to follow.
David Ewing, the accountant who oversaw the audit, said he couldn’t answer any questions about the foundation, because the university is “pretty strict” about the information it gives out and he didn’t want to lose a client.
Though Mittendorf didn’t go so far as to question whether the 2021 audit was accurate, he noted that it appeared to contradict itself. On page 3, the audit shows the foundation has about $33 million net assets “with donor restrictions, but on page 22, in a section titled “liquidity and availability,” the audit claims that the foundation has “no donor restricted net assets.”
That same section, Mittendorf pointed out, claims the foundation has access to about $35 million in “financial assets available to meet cash needs for general expenditures within one year.” But that doesn’t add up, he said, considering the audit also states the foundation has just under $42 million in total financial assets at year-end, with over $37 million of that in the restricted endowment.
Meanwhile, the foundation is holding a substantial amount of debt. In 2021, the foundation extended its credit line with Merrill Lynch from $2 million to $6.9 million, “secured with certain investments accounts held by Merrill Lynch in the name of the Foundation.” The balance was $5.9 million, according to the May comptroller presentation.
At BankPlus, the foundation has a $3 million credit line but the most recent balance is unclear.
A one-page internal audit
Johnson wasn’t the only one with questions. On June 1, an ex-officio board member emailed Gee and the board because there were rumors in the community about the presentation that allegedly showed the foundation spending restricted dollars.
When Gee replied-all on June 9, she wrote that if the community had access to that presentation, which was prepared for “various internal management or other analytical purposes” and was not an official financial position, then an “extremely serious breach of confidentiality” had occurred.
“The matters you mention in your email have been things that JSUDF boards, University Presidents and University CFOs have been aware of for at least 15+ years, and we have been addressing directly through corrective measures,” Gee wrote. “As we have University turnover, the board chair’s transition policy is to immediately request a meeting to properly provide an official financial update, provide and (sic) overview of the Foundation and align our goals with the new administration’s strategic plan.”
A week later, a similar concern about the “potential misuse of donated funds” led Jackson State to start conducting an internal audit of the foundation that was finalized in September, according to a copy.
It was only one page.

Though the university’s internal auditor, Christopher Thomas, wrote in an email that IHL Commissioner Alfred Rankins requested the internal audit, an IHL spokesperson wrote in an email that Elayne Hayes-Anthony called for it.
Hayes-Anthony has been the university’s temporary acting president since Thomas Hudson resigned earlier this year for reasons that remain unclear. She holds one of seven ex-officio spots on the board, the one reserved for the university president.
“Commissioner Rankins did not call for an internal audit of the foundation,” Kim Gallaspy, IHL’s interim communications director, wrote in an email to Mississippi Today. “Dr. Elayne Hayes-Anthony initiated the process by expressing concerns to the Board of Trustees about the use of JSU Development Foundation funds. Dr. Anthony was advised to exercise her authority to have her concerns investigated by utilizing the university’s internal audit staff to review any Foundation books, records or accounts needed to monitor and verify proper use of donated funds.”
Thomas wrote that he did not find any “current evidence” of misused donor funds, but that the foundation’s bank accounts only had $4.4 million as of Aug. 31 while the “designated accounts” totaled $11.8 million, a finding that correlates with the internal presentations.
“While the Development Foundation liquid funds are not adequate to cover the Designed Accounts, this does not represent the financial position of the Development Foundation,” he wrote. “The Foundation holds a multitude of assets that can be utilized to meet its financial obligation to the University.”
Though Thomas did not specify what those assets are, he did identify six areas where the foundation could improve its internal controls. Specifically, he recommended the foundation should monitor its budgets “based on actual revenue throughout the fiscal year to reduce overspending.”
He also recommended the foundation establish “separate bank accounts” for the operating budget — called “the Excellence Fund” — and the donor gifts, which were commingled.
Mittendorf said foundations should keep records in a way that prevents concerns about funds getting mixed up.
“When you have donor designed and donor restricted gifts, you want impeccable record keeping that segregates the funds,” he said.
It’s unclear if the foundation has done that.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Derrick Simmons: Monday’s Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians
Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Each year, in a handful of states, public offices close, flags are lowered and official ceremonies commemorate “Confederate Memorial Day.”
Mississippi is among those handful of states that on Monday will celebrate the holiday intended to honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But let me be clear: celebrating Confederate Memorial Day is not only racist but is bad policy, bad governance and a deep stain on the values we claim to uphold today.
First, there is no separating the Confederacy from the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The Confederacy was not about “states’ rights” in the abstract; it was about the right to own human beings. Confederate leaders themselves made that clear.
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” No amount of revisionist history can erase the fact that the Confederacy’s cause was fundamentally rooted in preserving racial subjugation.
To honor that cause with a state holiday is to glorify a rebellion against the United States fought to defend the indefensible. It is an insult to every citizen who believes in equality and freedom, and it is a cruel slap in the face to Black Americans, whose ancestors endured the horrors of slavery and generations of systemic discrimination that followed.
Beyond its moral bankruptcy, Confederate Memorial Day is simply bad public policy. Holidays are public statements of our values. They are moments when a state, through official sanction, tells its citizens: “This is what we believe is worthy of honor.” Keeping Confederate Memorial Day on the calendar sends a message that a government once committed to denying basic human rights should be celebrated.
That message is not just outdated — it is dangerous. It nurtures the roots of racism, fuels division and legitimizes extremist ideologies that threaten our democracy today.
Moreover, there are real economic and administrative costs to shutting down government offices for this purpose. In a time when states face budget constraints, workforce shortages and urgent civic challenges, it is absurd to prioritize paid time off to commemorate a failed and racist insurrection. Our taxpayer dollars should be used to advance justice, education, infrastructure and economic development — not to prop up a lost cause of hate.
If we truly believe in moving forward together as one people, we must stop clinging to symbols that represent treason, brutality and white supremacy. There is a legislative record that supports this move in a veto-proof majority changing the state Confederate flag in 2020. Taking Confederate Memorial Day off our official state holiday calendar is another necessary step toward a more inclusive and just society.
Mississippi had the largest population of enslaved individuals in 1865 and today has the highest percentage of Black residents in the United States. We should not honor the Confederacy or Confederate Memorial Day. We should replace it.
Replacing a racist holiday with one that celebrates emancipation underscores the state’s rich African American history and promotes a more inclusive understanding of its past. It would also align the state’s observances with national efforts to commemorate the end of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of equality.
I will continue my legislative efforts to replace Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday with Juneteenth, which commemorates the freedom for America’s enslaved people.
It’s time to end Confederate Memorial Day once and for all.
Derrick T. Simmons, D-Greensville, serves as the minority leader in the state Senate. He represents Bolivar, Coahoma and Washington counties in the Mississippi Senate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The post Derrick Simmons: Monday's Confederate Memorial Day recognition is awful for Mississippians appeared first on mississippitoday.org
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article argues against the celebration of Confederate Memorial Day, stating it glorifies a racist and failed rebellion that is harmful to societal values. It critiques the holiday as a symbol of white supremacy and advocates for replacing it with Juneteenth to honor emancipation. The language used, such as referring to the Confederate cause as “moral bankruptcy,” and the call to replace the holiday reflects a progressive stance on social justice and racial equality, common in left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, the writer urges action for inclusivity and justice, positioning the argument within modern liberal values.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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