Mississippi Today

JSU years away from solving housing needs but working on it

Published

2 years ago

September 13, 2023

It will likely be years before Jackson State University secures enough funding to fix its housing shortage as efforts are underway to seek legislative support in the absence of a deep-welled endowment.

The university is estimated to lack 1,600 beds, according to the new director of campus operations.

Jackson State’s funding needs, which appears to be the largest bond request any university submitted to the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, totals more than $136 million for water infrastructure improvements, renovation of a dorm that’s been offline for two years, and the construction of a new residence hall, according to budget documents.

Some of that money has already been granted to Jackson State, but it’s unclear how much. Last year, the university got $15 million in legislative funding mainly for repairs and renovations.

The total amount of state support that Jackson State has received in the last 10 years is a little more than $56 million, according to the university.

There are manifold reasons for this gap between Jackson State’s financial need and the amount of money the historically Black university can realistically expect to receive in state funding, according to lawmakers and university officials.

Those include but are not limited to the continuation of historical underfunding, an anti-Jackson bias, the university’s recent presidential turnover and the relative lack of Jackson State alums at the Capitol who can independently advocate for the university outside the system-wide lobbying efforts undertaken by IHL.

“Anything that had the word ‘Jackson’ leading into a request was looked at with askance,” said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson. “Unfortunately I think the university may have been victimized by association.”

Some feel the university has made clear that its infrastructure needs help are beginning to negatively impact its enrollment. After the Jackson water crisis last fall left students living on campus without air conditioning or functioning bathrooms, the university’s enrollment fell by 1%. JSU’s fall enrollment was 6,906 students, according to IHL.

“It’s all on the Senate, IHL and everybody else,” said Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson.

IHL maintains its four-year funding bond process, which is based on historical state support, helps like-sized universities receive equitable funding. Still, the state’s three largest predominantly white institutions — University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University and the University of Southern Mississippi — come out on top.

As a system, a spokesperson wrote via email, IHL lobbies for all eight institutions each session.

“As the state’s urban research university located in the Capital City, Jackson State has a unique mission and a rich history of academic excellence and community engagement,” wrote Kim Gallaspy, assistant commissioner for government relations at IHL. “The additional state support we have received in the past few sessions is evidence that Legislators recognize the value of the university system, including JSU.”

For HBCUs across the country, underfunding persists on a systemic level, not because of any one university president or government agency, said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro whose research focuses on race and structural inequality.

“These issues are long standing and durable, and they will require durable movements in response,” Perry said. “It’s not gonna be one piece of legislation or you know, a savior or a football coach that brings funding to Jackson State. It will be a sustained movement because the movement to deny black institutions is such.”

Jackson State’s new executive director of campus operations, Vance Siggers, has a different perspective. He said the university needed to take ownership of projects that were in its control and make sure lawmakers were receiving a clear message about the importance of student housing vis-a-vis a new stadium.

Housing “is the biggest priority,” he said. “Not ‘one of’ — ‘the.’ And that’s not the message that was received (by lawmakers).”

Siggers said he has been working to change that. Last month, he took lawmakers on a tour of the campus facilities. This is done every year, but Siggers said he conducted the largest tour in a decade, inviting faculty and staff.

“There is a new breeze blowing on campus,” he said.

One of the stops included McAllister Whiteside, a female dormitory that has been offline since 2021 due to mechanical, electrical and utility failures and equipment that needs to be repaired. The university is hoping to revamp it into a suite-style apartments with $20 million in state funding, some of which it has already received.

“The way your campus looks is your front porch,” he said. “When you see a house with a neat front porch, you see a house that is welcoming. Nine times out of 10 you say that’s probably a pretty good house to visit. If the yard is out of control and you have weeds and all that time of stuff — I don’t know what the situation is at that house but a lot of times you’d say they need to do some tuning in there.”

Jackson State is also seeking funding to build new dorms on land the university recently acquired from its development foundation, a sale that has been in the works for years. The new housing would significantly reduce the university’s backlog, Siggers said.

But the plan is reminiscent of a failed 2014 plan to build a $47 million dorm complex on campus.

Put on hold by the IHL board after Carolyn Meyers resigned in 2016 amid the university’s plummeting finances, the project is one of several campus upgrades that have been proposed, only to hit some kind of roadblock. The university and some supportive lawmakers considered pursuing a public-private partnership, but that did not materialize.

So what’s different about this time? The leadership, Siggers said.

“(Elayne) Hayes-Anthony is Jackson State,” he said. “She’s done so much for the state of Mississippi. She’s done so much for this nation. And there are a lot of people out there cheering.”

It’s not clear yet if Hayes-Anthony will become the university’s next permanent president. Last month, the only JSU alumnus on the board voted against allowing her to apply for the role.

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

Did you miss our previous article…
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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1873, La. courthouse scene of racial carnage

Published

1 day ago

April 13, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-13 07:00:00

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
April 13, 2025

April 13, 1873

On Easter Sunday, after Reconstruction Republicans won the Louisiana governor’s race, a group of white Democrats vowed to “take back” the Grant Parish Courthouse from Republican leaders.

A group of more than 150 white men, including members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, attacked the courthouse with a cannon and rifles. The courthouse was defended by an all-Black state militia.

The death toll was staggering: Only three members of the White League died, but up to 150 Black men were killed. Of those, nearly half were killed in cold blood after they surrendered.

Historian Eric Foner called the Colfax Massacre “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era,” demonstrating “the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority.”

Congress castigated the violence as “deliberate, barbarous, cold-blooded murder.”

Although 97 members of the mob were accused, only nine went to trial. Federal prosecutors won convictions against three of the mob members, but the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the convictions, helping to spell the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana.

A state historical marker said the event “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South,” and until recent years, the only local monument to the tragedy, a 12-foot tall obelisk, honored the three white men who died “fighting for white supremacy.”

In 2023, Colfax leaders unveiled a black granite memorial that listed the 57 men confirmed killed and the 35 confirmed wounded, with the actual death toll presumed much higher.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mississippi Today

Lawmakers used to fail passing a budget over policy disagreement. This year, they failed over childish bickering.

Published

1 day ago

April 13, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-13 06:00:00

by Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today
April 13, 2025

It is tough to determine the exact reason the Mississippi Legislature adjourned the 2025 session without a budget to fund state government, which will force lawmakers to return in special session to adopt a spending plan before the new fiscal year begins July 1.

In a nutshell, the breakdown seemed to have occurred when members of the Senate got angry at their House counterparts because they were not being nice to them. Or maybe vice versa.

Trying to suss this reasoning out is too difficult. The whole breakdown is confusing. It’s adolescent.

Perhaps there’s no point in trying to determine a reason. After all, when preteen children get mad at each other on the playground and start bickering, does it serve any purpose to ascertain who is right?

During a brief time early in the 2000s, when the state had the semblance of a true two-party system, the Legislature often had to extend the session or be called back in special session to finish work on the budget.

During those days, though, the Democrat-led House, the Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican governor were arguing about policy issues. There were often significant disagreements then over, say, how much money would be appropriated to the public schools or how Medicaid would be funded.

Now, with Republicans holding supermajorities over both the House and the Senate and a Republican in the Governor’s Mansion, the disagreements do not seem to rise to such legitimate policy levels.

It appears the necessity of a special session this summer is the result of House leaders not wanting to work on a weekend. And actually, that seemed like a reasonable request. It has always been a mystery why the Legislature could not impose earlier budget deadlines keeping lawmakers from having to work every year on a weekend near the end of the session.

But there were rumblings that if the House members did not want to work on the weekend, they should have been willing to begin budget negotiations with senators earlier in the session.

In fairness and to dig deeper, there also was speculation that the budget negotiations stalled because senators were angry that the House leadership was unwilling to work with them to fix mistakes in the Senate income tax bill. Instead of working to fix those mistakes in the landmark legislation, the House opted to send the error-riddled bill to the governor to be signed into law — because after all, the mistakes in the bill made it closer to the liking of the House leadership and Gov. Tate Reeves.

In addition, there was talk that House leaders were slowing budget negotiations by trying to leverage the Senate to pass a litany of bills ranging from allowing sports betting outside of casinos to increasing school vouchers to passing a traditional pet projects or “Christmas tree” bill.

The theory was that the House was mad that the Senate was balking on agreeing to pass the annual projects bill that spends state funds for a litany of local projects. For many legislators, particularly House members, their top priority each year is to bring funds home to their district for local projects, and not having a bill to do so was a dealbreaker for those rank-and-file House members.

To go another step further, some claimed senators were balking on the projects bill because of anger over the aforementioned tax bill. Another theory was that the Senate was fed up with House Ways and Means Chair Trey Lamar sneaking an inordinate number of projects in the massive bill for his home county of Tate.

But as stated earlier, does the reason for the legislative impasse really matter? The bottom line is that it appears that the reason for legislators not agreeing on a budget had nothing to do with the budget itself or disagreement over how much money to appropriate for vital state services.

House and Senate budget negotiators apparently did not even meet at the end of the session to fulfill the one task the Mississippi Constitution mandates the Legislature to fulfill: fund state government.

As a result, lawmakers will have to return to Jackson this summer in a costly special session not because of big policy issues, such as how to fund health care or how much money to plow into the public schools, but because “somebody done somebody wrong.”

Those big fights of previous years are less likely today because of the Republican Party grip on state government. The governor, the speaker and the lieutenant governor agree philosophically on most issues.

But in the democratic process, people who are like-minded can still have major disagreements that derail the legislative train — even if those disagreements are over something as simple as whether members are going to work during a weekend.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.