Mississippi Today
Lawmaker behind bill to close three universities says its has ‘slim’ chance to pass
A lawmaker behind a controversial bill to close three public universities in Mississippi says its chances of becoming law this session are “slim.”
Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, told Mississippi Today that he just wanted to start a conversation when he filed Senate Bill 2726, which would require the governing board of Mississippi’s eight public universities to shutter three by 2028.
“It’s pretty out there,” Polk said.
Start a conversation, Polk did. Social media was a flurry the weekend after the bill dropped. By Wednesday, an online petition opposing the bill had gained more than 7,500 signatures. A local newspaper serving Columbus, the northeastern city home to Mississippi University for Women, published an op-ed warning the bill would devastate the local economy.
And alumni of the state‘s three historically black universities and colleges decried the bill as a do-over of former Gov. Haley Barbour’s plan to merge those schools.
That isn’t his intention, Polk said. Any of the eight universities could be closed under his bill. And among the most vulnerable based on enrollment are three of the state’s regional colleges: MUW in Columbus, Delta State University in Cleveland and Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black university in Itta Bena.
“If I were trying to close an HBCU, I would’ve put that in the bill,” Polk said.
The bill will likely die in the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee due to politics, Polk said, and the emotional ties that Mississippians have to their colleges. His bill is not on the committee’s agenda for Thursday.
Still, it comes at an inauspicious time for higher education in Mississippi as university officials are scrambling to contend with a dwindling number of high school graduates going to college, a trend that will hit the regional colleges the hardest. It also comes on the heels of a failed push this session to rename MUW, part of an effort to boost the college’s declining enrollment.
“You can see how changing the name of the W causes such angst,” Polk said. “This bill will cause much more, and I know that.”
A number of solutions have been offered to this problem. Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, the chair of the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee, has introduced a bill that would create a legislative taskforce to study how the “enrollment cliff” will impact the state’s higher education system.
But Polk’s bill is the first to propose the state close universities instead of coming to their rescue.
“Sometimes you just have to pull the Band-Aid off the wound,” Polk said. “Until I introduced this bill, no one was talking about that.”
Polk said the bill was his idea and that he did not consult the 12-member Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees before filing it. An IHL spokesperson said the board does not comment on pending legislation.
If passed, IHL would be required to decide which three schools to close after conducting statewide listening sessions and evaluate criteria such as enrollment data; tuition rates; economic impact; additional services such as medical, agricultural, engineering or research; and “any other special factors that the board believes the institution offers that cannot be easily replaced or replicated.”
Involving IHL, Polk said, seemed like a way to make this process less political than if the Legislature decided which three to close. But many universities in Mississippi have felt overlooked by the board at various points in their history. Nine of the 12 trustees are graduates of Mississippi’s three largest research universities. Some are high-dollar donors to Gov. Tate Reeves, and all are gubernatorial appointees.
“IHL has the best interest of the education of students in higher education settings in Mississippi, and they’re the ones that can make the best decision for all of Mississippi,” Polk said.
Though Polk says his bill will save taxpayer dollars, he does not envision it reducing the annual funding IHL receives. He referred to an IHL handout showing the appropriations each school received last year.
If IHL closed the three schools with the smallest enrollments — Delta State, Valley State and MUW — the state could save $85 million, Polk said, money he sees as better off distributed among the remaining five.
“If they didn’t choose the three I just mentioned, the savings to the state would be better,” Polk said.
What would happen to the towns around these smaller colleges, like Itta Bena, Cleveland and Columbus? Polk said that’s not why the state universities exist.
But he noted his bill would not permit the closed campuses to become branches of the remaining five. The buildings would have to be sold or repurposed, he said.
“Our universities have a mission,” Polk said. “We forget sometimes their mission is to educate in a higher form than K-12. It is not economic development.”
If the University of Southern Mississippi closed, Polk said he would say he’s sorry, “but that’s what IHL thinks is best for the state of Mississippi.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1875
Nov. 2, 1875
The first Mississippi Plan, which included violence against Black Americans to keep them from voting, resulted in huge victories for white Democrats across the state.
A year earlier, the Republican Party had carried a majority of the votes, and many Black Mississippians had been elected to office. In the wake of those victories, white leagues arose to challenge Republican rule and began to use widespread violence and fraud to recapture control of the state.
Over several days in September 1875, about 50 Black Mississippians were killed along with white supporters, including a school teacher who worked with the Black community in Clinton.
The governor asked President Ulysses Grant to intervene, but he decided against intervening, and the violence and fraud continued. Other Southern states soon copied the Mississippi plan.
John R. Lynch, the last Black congressman for Mississippi until the 1986 election of Mike Espy, wrote: “It was a well-known fact that in 1875 nearly every Democratic club in the State was converted into an armed military company.”
A federal grand jury concluded: “Fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated at the last election is without a parallel in the annals of history.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
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We’ll examine what’s at stake if local newsrooms lose press freedoms and will discuss how you, as members of the public, can help protect it. This event is open to Mississippi Today and Verite News members as a special thank-you for supporting local journalism and standing with us in this mission. Donate today to RSVP!
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This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Hinds County loses fight over control of jail
The Hinds County sheriff and Board of Supervisors have lost an appeal to prevent control of its jail by a court-appointed receiver and an injunction that orders the county to address unconstitutional conditions in the facility.
Two members from a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with decisions by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves to appoint a receiver to oversee day-to-day jail operations and keep parts of a previous consent decree in place to fix constitutional violations, including a failure to protect detainees from harm.
However, the appeals court called the new injunction “overly broad” in one area and is asking Reeves to reevaluate the scope of the receivership.
The injunction retained provisions relating to sexual assault, but the appeals court found the provisions were tied to general risk of violence at the jail, rather than specific concerns about the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The court reversed those points of the injunction and remanded them to the district court so the provisions can be removed.
The court also found that the receiver should not have authority over budgeting and staff salaries for the Raymond Detention Center, which could be seen as “federal intrusion into RDC’s budget” – especially if the receivership has no end date.
Hinds County Board of Supervisors President Robert Graham was not immediately available for comment Friday. Sheriff Tyree Jones declined to comment because he has not yet read the entire court opinion.
In 2016, the Department of Justice sued Hinds County alleging a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conditions in four of its detention facilities. The county and DOJ entered a consent decree with stipulated changes to make for the jail system, which holds people facing trial.
“But the decree did not resolve the dispute; to the contrary, a yearslong battle ensued in the district court as to whether and to what extent the County was complying with the consent decree,” the appeals court wrote.
This prompted Reeves to hold the county in contempt of court twice in 2022.
The county argued it was doing its best to comply with the consent decree and spending millions to fix the jail. One of the solutions they offered was building a new jail, which is now under construction in Jackson.
The county had a chance to further prove itself during three weeks of hearings held in February 2022. Focuses included the death of seven detainees in 2021 from assaults and suicide and issues with staffing, contraband, old infrastructure and use of force.
Seeing partial compliance by the county, in April 2022 Reeves dismissed the consent decree and issued a new, shorter injunction focused on the jail and removed some provisions from the decree.
But Reeves didn’t see improvement from there. In July 2022, he ordered receivership and wrote that it was needed because of an ongoing risk of unconstitutional harm to jail detainees and staff.
The county pushed back against federal oversight and filed an appeal, arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to show that there are current and ongoing constitutional violations at the jail and that the county has acted with deliberate indifference.
Days before the appointed receiver was set to take control of the jail at the beginning of 2023, the 5th Circuit Court ordered a stay to halt that receiver’s work. The new injunction ordered by Reeves was also stayed, and a three-person jail monitoring team that had been in place for years also was ordered to stop work.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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