Mississippi Today
New academic freedom policy at Delta State is likely its first, emails show

Delta State University appears to have never had a policy on academic freedom, a core tenet of higher education that ensures faculty will not be disciplined for conducting research that could be considered controversial.
The lack of such a policy, which free speech experts called “very unusual,” was discovered over the summer by a faculty member who realized the oversight could have imperiled the university’s upcoming reaccreditation, according to emails obtained by Mississippi Today.
The faculty senate president immediately started drafting a new policy at the request of an administrator overseeing accreditation.
But over the summer, discussions hit a hitch on a clause that said free speech cannot disrupt the university’s functioning. The faculty senate wanted to include an exception for civil disobedience, given the Mississippi Delta’s storied legacy of civil rights protests, and the provost, who stepped down last month, did not.
That exception did not make it into the final version of the policy, which was released to the campus today.
The policy development comes as Delta State faculty are working to start the university’s first-ever chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The advocacy organization’s famous 1940 statement on academic freedom forms the basis of many academic freedom policies at colleges nationwide.
Academic freedom in higher education is a hot-button issue across the country and at Delta State where there was public outcry earlier this year over the appointment of an interim band director who made transphobic comments on a now-deleted podcast.
But the real reason for these policies, experts say, isn’t the flashy moments when faculty members express far-right or far-left political opinions in the classroom or off-campus. It’s to ensure research that challenges powerful or corporate interests, like gender-affirming care or the risks of pesticides, is protected.
“When faculty don’t have those academic rights, we can’t have that marketplace of ideas, that free inquiry that advances our whole society,” said Laura Beltz, a policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which studies free-speech policies in higher education.
Delta State administrators who worked on the new policy recognized this, emails show.
“As you know, teaching “difficult” topics is not the main reason to have an Academic Freedom policy,” Josie Welsh, an associate provost overseeing reaccreditation, wrote to Christopher Jurgenson, the faculty senate president, on June 22. “The primary purpose of such a policy is to protect faculty whose research findings challenge fundamental teachings (e.g. Earth revolving around the sun and not the sun revolving around Earth).”
Welsh and Jurgenson did not respond to inquiries from Mississippi Today.
Still, Welsh wrote she had checked the two previous reports the university had submitted to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges — a regional accreditor that upholds educational standards — and there was no mention of such a policy.
This is significant because without accreditation, Delta State students likely wouldn’t be eligible for federal financial aid or use their degree to go into certain professions.
“Long story short, for decades now we have been cobbling together bits and pieces of other policies to argue that we have a policy on Academic Freedom,” she wrote. “Why we did that instead of just adopting a standard policy on Academic Freedom I do not know. Let’s fix that.”
The discovery meant that Delta State was likely the only public university in Mississippi without such a policy. The state’s seven other public universities all have academic freedom policies online or in faculty handbooks, Mississippi Today found.
Though the university had been working to create an academic freedom policy in the spring, a looming accreditation deadline in the fall meant it was vital to write one immediately, Welsh added.
Artificial intelligence, she mused, could help.
“This immediate need highlights the ways that AI technology can be used in a positive manner,” she wrote. “We certainly don’t want to adopt the first CHATGPT-generated Academic Freedom policy; however, AI tools could be very useful in generating a policy appropriate for Delta State.”
Jurgenson got to work right away. He had a draft the next week.
A month later, the sticking point arose shortly after news broke about the university hiring Steven Hugley, the interim band director, despite disparaging comments he’d made about trans people and women on a podcast.
Jurgenson had added an exception for civil disobedience, after the faculty senate, an elected group of professors who represent their departments, spent 45 minutes discussing the issue.
Civil disobedience is the act of peaceful, but unlawful, political protest. It has played a significant role in the history of Delta State, most notably in 1969, when dozens of the first Black students at the predominantly white institution were arrested and sent to Parchman after they held a sit-in outside the president’s office.
It was a unique request. Beltz told Mississippi Today she had never heard of faculty asking an exception for civil disobedience.
Andy Novobilski, the provost, took issue with this inclusion.
“The term ‘Civil Disobedience’ describes a non-violent action by a person or group of persons who knowingly break rules with the willingness to suffer the consequences of their actions to bring about a greater good,” he wrote on July 26. “Somewhere along the way, the concept has forgotten the consequences portion.”
The disagreement seemed to stem from two views of the role of higher education in Mississippi. The faculty senate was calling back to a largely bygone era when institutions like the private, historically Black Tougaloo College were nodes of political activism in the state. Novobilski was reminding them of the hard reality that universities are also nonprofit entities with rules and regulations.
That same day, Jurgenson replied that the goal was simply to ensure faculty would still have a job if, hypothetically, they were arrested at an unlawful protest, adding that “given Mississippi’s history with civil rights, telling the faculty they cannot exercise academic freedom in the form of civil disobedience will be met with resistance.”
Novobilski doubled down.
“Delta State does not condone the breaking of laws and certainly won’t change that by writing it into policy,” he wrote back. “The statement condoning civil disobedience is not appropriate.”
That night, Jurgenson conceded, agreeing it was a “bad look” for the university to endorse illegal behavior.
It would have been tricky for Delta State to create a civil-disobedience exception to the free speech policy that did not implicitly pick-and-choose which rules are allowed to be broken and in what way, said Kristen Shahverdian, a program coordinator with PEN America, a nonprofit that promotes free expression.
“It’s really hard for a university to say, this thing that happened that clearly broke XYZ rule, we’re gonna say that that is okay, but this other thing that also broke the same rule is not okay,” she said. “These policies need to be instituted in a viewpoint neutral way.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
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.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
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
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.
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