Mississippi Today

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

Published

1 year ago

September 1, 2023

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.

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Mississippi Today

Jearld Baylis, dead at 62, was a nightmare for USM opponents

Published

15 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Rick Cleveland – 2025-01-09 14:19:00

Jearld Baylis was a tackling machine at Southern Miss. He died recently at age 62. (Southern Miss Athletics)

They called him The Space Ghost. Jearld Baylis — Jearld, not Jerald or Gerald — was the best defensive football player I ever saw at Southern Miss, and I’ve seen them all since the early 1960s.

Baylis, who died recently at the age of 62, played nose tackle with the emphasis on “tackle.” He made about a jillion tackles, many behind the scrimmage line, in his four years (1980-83) as a starter at USM after three years as a starter and star at Jackson Callaway.

When Southern Miss ended Bear Bryant’s 59-game home winning streak at Alabama in 1982, Baylis led the defensive charge with 18 tackles. The remarkable Reggie Collier, the quarterback, got most of the headlines during those golden years of USM football, but Baylis was every bit as important to the Golden Eagles’ success.

The truth is, despite the lavish praise of opposing coaches such as Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Pat Dye at Auburn and Emory Bellard at Mississippi State, Baylis never got the credit he deserved.

There are so many stories. Here’s one from the late, great Kent Hull, the Mississippi State center who became one of the best NFL players at his position and helped the Buffalo Bills to four Super Bowls:

It was at one of those Super Bowls — the 1992 game in Minneapolis — when Hull and I talked about his three head-to-head battles with Baylis when they were both in college. Hull, you should know, was always brutally honest, which endeared him to sports writers and sportscasters everywhere.

Hull said Baylis was the best he ever went against. “Block him?” Hull said rhetorically at one point. “Hell, most times I couldn’t touch him. He was just so quick. You had to double-team him, and sometimes that didn’t work either.”

John Bond was the quarterback of those fantastic Mississippi State teams who won so many games but could never beat Southern Miss. He remembers Jearld Baylis the way most of us remember our worst nightmares.

“He was a stud,” Bond said upon learning of Baylis’s death. “He was their best dude on that side of the ball, a relentless badass.”

In many ways Baylis was a football unicorn. Most nose tackles are monsters, whose job it is to occupy the center and guards and keep them from blocking the linebackers. Not Baylis. He was undersized, 6-feet tall and 230 pounds tops, and he didn’t just clear the way for linebackers. He did it himself.

“Jearld was just so fast, so quick, so strong,” said Steve Carmody, USM’s center back then and a Jackson lawyer now. Carmody, son of then-USM head coach Jim Carmody, went against Baylis most days in practice and says he never faced a better player on game day.

“Jearld could run with the halfbacks and wide receivers. I don’t know what his 40-time was but he was really, really fast. His first step was as quick as anybody at any position,” Steve Carmody said.

No, Carmody said, he has no idea where Baylis got his nickname, The Space Ghost, but he said, “It could have been because trying to block him was like trying to block a ghost. Poof! He was gone, already past you.”

Reggie Collier, who now works as a banker in Hattiesburg, was a year ahead of Baylis at USM.

Jearld Baylis was often past the blocker before he was touched as was the case with the BC Lions in Canada.

“Jearld was the first of those really big name players that everybody wanted that came to Southern,” Collier said. “He wasn’t a project or a diamond in the rough like I was. He was the man. He was the best high school player in the state when we signed him. Everybody knew who he was when he got here, the No. 1 recruit in Mississippi.”

Collier remembers an early season practice when he was a sophomore and Baylis had just arrived on campus. “We’re scrimmaging, and I am running the option going to my right just turning up the field,” Collier said. “Then, somebody latches onto me from behind, and I am thinking who the hell is that. People didn’t usually get me from behind. Of course, it was Jearld. From day one, he was special.

“I tell people this all the time. We won a whole lot of games back then, beat a lot of really great teams that nobody but us thought we could beat. I always get a lot of credit for that, but Gearld deserves as much credit as anyone. He was as important as anyone. He was the anchor of that defense and, man, we played great defense.”

Because of his size, NFL teams passed on Baylis. He played first in the USFL, then went to Canada and became one of the great defensive players in the history of the Canadian Football League. He was All-Canadian Football League four times, the defensive player of the year on a championship team once.

For whatever reason, Baylis rarely returned to Mississippi, living in Canada, in Baltimore, in Washington state and Oregon in his later years. Details of his death are sketchy, but he had suffered from bouts with pneumonia preceding his death.

Said Don Horn, his teammate at both Callaway and Southern Miss, “Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Jearld, but I’ll never forget him. I promise you this, those of us who played with him — or against him — will never forget Jearld Baylis.”

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

Mississippi Today

Data center company plans to invest $10 billion in Meridian

Published

19 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Michael Goldberg – 2025-01-09 10:33:00

A Dallas-based data center developer will locate its next campus in Meridian, a $10 billion investment in the area, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Thursday.

The company, Compass Datacenters, will build eight data centers in the Meridian area over eight years, Reeves said. The governor said the data centers would support local businesses and jobs in a fast-growing industry that Mississippi has tried to attract.

“Through our pro-business policies and favorable business environment, we continue to establish our state as an ideal location for high-tech developments by providing the resources needed for innovation and growth,” Reeves said.

The Mississippi Development Authority will certify the company as a data center operator, allowing the company to benefit from several tax exemptions. Compass Datacenters will receive a 10-year state income and franchise tax exemption and a sales and use tax exemption on construction materials and other equipment.

In 2024, Amazon Web Services’ committed to spend $10 billion to construct two data centers in Madison County. Lawmakers agreed to put up $44 million in taxpayer dollars for the project, make a loan of $215 million, and provide numerous tax breaks.

Mississippi Power will supply approximately 500 megawatts of power to the Meridian facility, Reeves said. Data centers house computer servers that power numerous digital services, including online shopping, entertainment streaming and file storage.

Republican Sen. Jeff Tate, who represents Lauderdale County, said the investment was a long time coming for the east Mississippi city of Meridian.

“For far too long, Meridian has been the bride’s maid when it came to economic development,” Tate said. “I’m proud that our political, business, and community leaders were able to work together to help welcome this incredible investment.”

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

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1967

Published

23 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-01-09 07:00:00

Jan. 9, 1967

Julian Bond with John Lewis, congressman from Georgia, at the Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2014. Credit: Photo by Lauren Gerson/Wikipedia

Civil rights leader Julian Bond was finally seated in the Georgia House.

He had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while a student at Morehouse College along with future Congressman John Lewis. The pair helped institute nonviolence as a deep principle throughout all of the SNCC protests and actions.

Following Bond’s election in 1965, the Georgia House refused to seat him after he had criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was required to seat him.

“The truth may hurt,” he said, “but it’s the truth.”

He went on to serve two decades in the Georgia Legislature and even hosted “Saturday Night Live.” In 1971, he became president of the just-formed Southern Poverty Law Center and later served a dozen years as chairman of the national NAACP.

“The civil rights movement didn’t begin in Montgomery, and it didn’t end in the 1960s,” he said. “It continues on to this very minute.”

Over two decades at the University of Virginia, he taught more than 5,000 students and led alumni on civil rights journeys to the South. In 2015, he died from complications of vascular disease.

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