Mississippi Today
‘Stop hiring your friends’: JSU community speaks up in listening session for next president
‘Stop hiring your friends’: JSU community speaks up in listening session for next president
Students, faculty and staff made it clear at the listening session that the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees held on Jackson State University’s campus Wednesday: Hire a permanent president whose tenure won’t end in resignation like the last three.
In 2016, Carolyn Meyers resigned amid cratering finances. In 2020, William Bynum, Jr., resigned after he was arrested in a prostitution sting at a Clinton hotel.
And though nobody spoke former president Thomas Hudson’s name, his resignation — for which the board still has not provided a detailed explanation — cast a shadow over the listening sessions, with many community members accusing the board of not doing its due diligence in his hiring.
Only one person mentioned he’d like to see Elayne Hayes-Anthony, JSU’s temporary acting president, elevated to a permanent spot, though trustees did ask speakers not to name potential candidates as the board isn’t yet at that point in the search.
Steven Cunningham, the trustee who is leading the search and the only JSU alumnus on the board, emphasized that he wants to hire a good president too.
“I’m not just here as an arbitrary member of the board,” he said during the student session. “This place means a lot to me.”
The board plans to do a national search. The listening sessions, which trustees will use to write a candidate profile, are the first step in that process. There’s also a survey on IHL’s website that will remain open until midnight on April 26.
Faculty and staff
The first listening session began on a low note. Etta Morgan, an associate professor in the criminal justice and sociology department, kicked it off: Morale among faculty is at an “all-time low” she said, even under the temporary administration.
“We are losing extremely good people,” she said. “Students have gotten to the point where they’re cursing you out in the classroom. You write them up, nothing gets done … It’s like we’re being destroyed from the inside out.”
It’s not just faculty at JSU who are turning over, speakers noted — so are the presidents. But not everyone at the faculty and staff session seemed to agree that presidential turnover has necessarily meant bad leadership. When Robert Luckett, the director of the Margaret Walker Center suggested that was the case, there was vocal disagreement from the audience.
“This is a level of instability that is deeply problematic for this institution.” Luckett said, adding that he had experienced “disastrous leadership” during his time at JSU.
“I wouldn’t say that,” an audience member said. “That’s your opinion!”
The next president needs to understand JSU is a special place in Mississippi, many faculty told trustees. Others said they felt like JSU no longer has the magic it once did.
LaKeisha Crye, an instructor and 2004 graduate, teared up as she told trustees that she didn’t want to send her daughters to JSU. Even though faculty receive a tuition discount, and JSU has programs that her kids are interested in, Crye said she would spend more money at university with a safer campus.
Concerns about safety at JSU have become more frequent since the fall, when news made the rounds that a student was shot and killed on campus.
At times, faculty and staff chastised the board members. During a lull in speakers, Cunningham tried to encourage more people to go to the mic because the next president would “potentially be here for 15-20 years.”
Latoya Reed, a director in the division of student affairs, said if faculty and staff weren’t talking, it was likely due to exhaustion and frustration with the board and its processes, not fear.
“I would like to charge the board first and foremost to not let this be routine, not let this be an average run of show,” she said.
Sophia Leggett, a faculty member who said she knew Cunningham when he was a student, called out IHL Commissioner Al Rankins.
“Be sincere, be intentional,” she said. “It’s time out for games.”
Students
Multiple students talked about issues they’d like to see the next president improve, like campus safety, transparency from administration, and the ailing state of the buildings. There’s mold across campus, students reported, tiles are falling off the wall in one classroom, and only two working stalls in liberal arts building bathroom.
“It’s been broken for a couple months now, and it still hasn’t been repaired, even if you scan the QR code and ask for repairs,” said Christi Madison Fortson, a senior psychology major.
Fortson also touched on a topic many students dodged, garnering some chuckles from the audience.
“In regards to the president,” she said, “I was hoping for some possibility of an extensive background check, just to make sure we get a president of the right mindset.”
The next administration needs to be more stable, many students said. Some noted they had experienced two, even three, presidents in their time at JSU. They said if the president sets the right tone, then their professors will be more inclined to stay longer.
Another big theme is students want a president who understands the culture of HBCUs.
Elijah Karriem, a senior and the secretary of JSU’s NAACP chapter, noted that during the town halls — a fixture of student life during the water crises over the last few years — it felt like Hudson’s administration was responding with prepared statements.
“We’re all humans,” he said. “Don’t read off the paper.”
Alumni and community
The alumni session was the longest and most critical of trustees.
Carrine Bishop, a faculty member whose family has deep roots at JSU, put it the most bluntly: “Stop hiring your friends,” she said to claps. “ We need to vet every individual.”
Several alumni warily asked the board to include them in the search process. Some referenced the 2017 search when IHL hired Bynum even though he did not receive a favorable review from the search committee.
“The only thing that we really ask is you give us a slate of candidates, not put someone in front of us and tell us that’s who is going to lead our university,” said Patrease Edwards, the president of the alumni association.
Many alumni said they felt the board, and its presidents, have held JSU back from its true potential. Sen. Hillman Frazier, a Democrat who represents parts of Jackson, said lawmakers cite JSU’s turbulent leadership as reasons not to provide more funding to the university.
The president of the neighborhood association near JSU said that he grew up seeing his neighbors sharecrop to afford to send their kids to JSU, but it doesn’t seem like IHL gives back to them. He cited the dilapidated buildings that surround campus.
“My problem is this, the gatekeepers of this university will not allow the community to come in,” he said.
Donna Antoine-LaVigne, an alumnus, said she was tired of hearing news about scandals on the ninth floor, but that she wanted people to know that JSU was more than its president.
“The man or the woman does not make Jackson State,” she said. “Jackson state is Jackson State. It has a history in this community. It has done things for Black folk that nobody has thought about doing or has done.”
She called on Cunningham and Rankins to hire a president with vision.
“We have Black leadership with the board now — exercise it,” she said. “I’m not saying do anything special. Just do the right thing.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Gov. Reeves announces $110 million in economic development efforts
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday announced that state agencies are disbursing over $110 million toward economic development, infrastructure upgrades and workforce development around the state.
The funding for the projects is coming from the state Legislature, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Delta Regional Authority, the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission and the federal government.
“We’ve secured billions in new private-sector investment and created thousands of jobs across the state,” Reeves said. “The funding we announced today will go a long way toward continuing Mississippi’s economic momentum and will help create more high-paying job opportunities for Mississippians across the state.”
The bulk of the spending will go toward developing and improving industrial sites, which are often used to entice manufacturing companies to locate or expand operations in the state. If these sites have adequate infrastructure near them, companies are more likely to locate there.
Despite new investment in the state, Mississippi continues to grapple with one of the lowest rates in the nation of people who are actively seeking work or employed, at 53.9%.
State Economist Corey Miller said at a legislative hearing last week that one of the reasons Mississippi is also experiencing a relatively low unemployment rate of 2.8% is because people have stopped looking for jobs.
Reeves said on Wednesday that Mississippi may have a low percentage of people looking for jobs because the state has a relatively low cost of living and some families can afford to have only one income.
“If an individual doesn’t want a job, the government ain’t going to force them to get a job,” Reeves said. “And that’s just a reality.”
Still, the governor believes Mississippi can improve its labor force participation rate by improving education and providing people with better work skills.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Groups seek a new hearing on a Mississippi mail-in ballot lawsuit
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A federal appeals court panel incorrectly interpreted federal and state laws when it ruled that Mississippi cannot count mail-in ballots that are cast and postmarked by Election Day but arrive a few days later, two groups argue as they seek a new hearing.
Attorneys for Vet Voice Foundation and Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans are asking the entire 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the ruling that a portion of the court issued Oct. 25.
The ruling did not affect the counting of ballots for the Nov. 5 election because the three-judge panel noted that federal court precedents discourage court actions that change established procedures shortly before an election.
However, the case could affect voting across the U.S. if the Supreme Court ultimately issues a ruling.
The attorneys for Vet Voice Foundation and the Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans argue in court papers filed Friday that the panel of judges “incorrectly suggested that post-election day ballot receipt deadlines are a recent invention.”
“In fact, the practice of counting ballots cast by election day but received afterward goes back to the Civil War, when many states permitted soldiers to vote in the field before sending their ballots to soldiers’ home precincts,” attorneys for the two groups wrote.
Many states have laws that allow counting of ballots that are cast by Election Day but received later, the attorneys wrote.
“Far from making any attempt to preempt these laws, Congress has acknowledged and approved of them for more than five decades,” they wrote.
The three-judge panel of the conservative appeals court reversed a July decision by U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr., who had dismissed challenges to Mississippi’s election law by the Republican National Committee, the Libertarian Party of Mississippi and others.
Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, wrote on his election law blog that the ruling by the appeals court panel was a “bonkers opinion” and noted that “every other court to face these cases has rejected this argument.”
Republicans filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied.
The list of states that allow mailed ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day includes swing states such as Nevada and states such as Colorado, Oregon and Utah that rely heavily on mail voting.
In July, a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit over counting mailed ballots in Nevada. The Republican National Committee has asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to revive that case.
Guirola wrote that Mississippi’s law does not conflict with federal election laws. The suit challenging the Mississippi law argued that the state improperly extends the federal election and that, as a result, “timely, valid ballots are diluted by untimely, invalid ballots.”
Guirola disagreed, writing that “no ‘final selection’ is made after the federal election day under Mississippi’s law. All that occurs after election day is the delivery and counting of ballots cast on or before election day.”
Although the Mississippi challenge was led by Republicans and Libertarians, there is bipartisan support for the state’s practice. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch is defending the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Michael Watson, in the lawsuit. Both are Republicans.
Associated Press reporters Kevin McGill in New Orleans and Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Surely, Shorty Mac would have an opinion on the LSU tiger controversy
There’s been quite the controversy next door in Louisiana where, at Gov. Jeff Landry’s insistence, a live tiger was on display in Tiger Stadium last Saturday night at an LSU football game for the first time in eight years.
Tiger or not, Alabama pummeled LSU 42-13. Since then, Landry has defended the renting a tiger named Omar Bradley from a Florida exotic zoo to put on display at the game.
Mike the Tiger — actually, this was was Mike VI — died in 2016, and LSU decided to end the practice of having a live tiger present at football game. It was part of the lore of Tiger Stadium and it could be intimidating for opposing players: a huge, growling Tiger parked right outside the visitor’s locker room. Usually, there was a microphone in the cage.
Take the case of the late, great Thomas “Shorty” McWilliams, Mississippi State superstar of the mid-1940s, who played as an 18-year-old freshman for the first time at Tiger Stadium on Oct. 21, 1944. Old as I am, I am too young to have ever seen McWilliams play, but I wish I had. My daddy told me he was the best player he ever saw, and he saw thousands in a life of following football. I know this: The man they called “Shorty Mac” was the only four-time All-SEC player in league history, and it’s difficult to imagine in today’s college football landscape there’ll ever be another one.
What follows is the story, told firsthand by Shorty Mac, when he was interviewed in 1995 by the good folks at Communications Arts who were putting together exhibits for the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Museum. To set the stage, McWilliams was punting out of the end zone, near the visitor’s locker room at Tiger Stadium, in pregame warm-ups.
We’ll let Shorty Mac take it from there: “Unbeknownst to me, they rolled up Mike the Tiger in that cage right behind me. I didn’t know he was there and that 500-pound tiger roared. Oh, he roared at the top of his lungs. It scared me so bad. It scared the (bleep) out of me. I ruined myself. I had to play the whole game in those pants.”
You can watch and listen to McWilliams tell that and other stories on the football kiosk at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Museum. Now then, here’s the rest of the story from that night in Baton Rouge. Shorty Mac apparently recovered nicely from that pregame scare. He scored both touchdowns in a 13-6 Mississippi State victory over Coach Bernie Moore’s Tigers, who included a young quarterback named Y.A. Tittle, later one of the great NFL stars of the 20th century. Afterward, Moore told reporters the only way to stop McWilliams “is to not schedule Mississippi State. He killed our defense.”
McWilliams was the game’s leading rusher and passer. Indeed, he led the SEC in scoring with 84 points as a freshman. McWilliams played the 1945 season at Army, then returned to State to play his final three seasons of college football.
Back to the present: Gov. Landry, speaking Monday night, said he regretted that the live tiger was the only tiger who showed up for the Alabama game, which was every bit as one-sided as the final score indicates. As reported in The Athletic, Landry said, “I had more people come up to me saying they remembered Mike the Tiger more than some of the great plays in Tiger Stadium… It’s about tradition. At the end of the day, the woke people have tried to take tradition out of this country. It’s tradition that built this country.”
I won’t take a side in that controversy, but I sure would love to here what Shorty Mac would say.
Two more Shorty Mac vignettes before we close:
- The late Dick Smith, a sports writer and later a newspaper owner, told me about one of Shorty’s games at Meridian High in 1943. “Meridian was playing Tupelo for the Big Eight Conference championship,” Smith said. “The first seven times Shorty touched the ball, he scored. Short runs, long runs, kick returns, didn’t matter. Every time he got the ball he scored. The eighth time he touched it, he ran 70 yards until he pulled his hamstring and went down on the two-yard line. By then, Meridian was so far ahead, they didn’t need him.”
- The late Edward “Cookie” Epperson told me this one at Shorty Mac’s funeral in January 1997. Epperson was Shorty’s roommate at State and one of his best pals. Said Epperson: “Shorty was enjoying a hot shower after practice when a couple of players sneaked an opossum into the shower with him. That possum hissed and Shorty flew out of there. He didn’t bother to get his clothes or even a towel. He ran past the secretary and on outside. He never ran faster.”
Shorty Mac wasn’t afraid of the biggest, baddest linebackers, but he apparently did fear critters whether they roared or hissed.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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