Mississippi Today
Universities closure bill expected to die, but will proposed ‘efficiency’ task force keep issue on the table?

A bill to close three public universities in Mississippi will die as expected after inspiring a weeklong ruckus that some lawmakers blamed on misleading news articles.
But another bill that advanced in the Senate Universities and Colleges Committee on Monday has raised questions abouts its potential to yield similar results. The sponsor said that isn’t the intention.
The author of controversial Senate Bill 2726, Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, seemed relieved his bill’s death was official. It would have required the governing board of Mississippi’s eight public universities to shutter three by 2028 after analyzing criteria such as enrollment, economic impact or any other “special factors.”
“Please, everyone, get that message out: The chair has killed my bill,” Polk said during the Senate Colleges and Universities Committee meeting. “And that way I can sleep at night.”
Senate Bill 2725, by Committee Chair Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, would require a similar analysis of factors. The legislation, Boyd explained, was inspired by a hearing earlier this session on the impending decline in high school graduates going to college that is poised to hurt the bottom-lines of Mississippi’s tuition-dependent universities.
If her bill becomes law, a 10-member task force — a mix of lawmakers and appointees representing the regional colleges, HBCUs and research institutions — would review IHL’s funding formula, the system’s physical plant, enrollment and graduation rates, and any existing plans to tackle the enrollment cliff.
Then the task force would make recommendations to the Legislature with an eye to increasing efficiency and the number of Mississippians with college degrees.
“This bill looks at really what is going on at our colleges and universities as they are right now, what we need to do in regard to that enrollment cliff that we see is coming,” Boyd told committee members. “We need to be proactive in helping our universities and colleges manage this.”
Sen. Sollie Norwood, D-Jackson, asked if Boyd anticipated the task force making a recommendation to address the building deficiencies at the HBCUs which, despite a decades-long settlement, many alumni say continue to be underfunded. At Alcorn State, students have complained of mold in the dorms, and Jackson State has sought to upgrade its water system since the water crisis in 2022.
Boyd replied that she could not say what the task force’s findings would be and added that all of the universities struggle with deteriorating infrastructure.
After the meeting, Boyd told Mississippi Today that she can’t say closing universities is off the table for the task force, but that it is not her intention with the bill. She said the goal is to ensure tax dollars are meeting the universities’ needs.
“Everybody is trying to look at how we can make our IHL system the most efficient and effective to get a strong Mississippi workforce,” she said.
Polk’s bill would have put the decision on closures in the hands of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees.
More than 14,000 people had signed an online petition calling for the bill’s death. The local newspaper in Columbus, home to Mississippi University for Women, published an op-ed against it. And alumni of Mississippi’s historically Black public universities decried the bill, with some saying they didn’t trust the IHL board, which is mostly comprised of graduates of the state’s three largest predominantely white institutions, to make a fair decision.
“We urge you, as elected representatives of the people of Mississippi, to recognize the profound value of all our state’s institutions by opposing this bill and working together to shift the focus from closure to investing to further strengthen these vital institutions,” read a letter from the alumni association presidents of Alcorn State University, Jackson State University and Mississippi Valley State University.
Though the bill was depicted by some news articles as targeting the three HBCUs, Polk and other lawmakers had suggested that more likely in its crosshairs were on the three smallest universities by enrollment: MVSU, Delta State University and Mississippi University for Women.
After Boyd confirmed she was not bringing Polk’s bill before the committee, she apologized to him for what she called misinformation.
“It’s a little bit ironic to me that this bill and this legislation has been so misquoted,” she said. “Clearly we might have some literacy issues that we need to look at, because … what his legislation said and what it was purported to say were entirely two different things.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A win for press freedom: Judge dismisses Gov. Phil Bryant’s lawsuit against Mississippi Today
Madison County Circuit Court Judge Bradley Mills dismissed former Gov. Phil Bryant’s defamation lawsuit against Mississippi Today on Friday, ending a nearly two-year case that became a beacon in the fight for American press freedom.
For the past 22 months, we’ve vigorously defended our Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting and our characterizations of Bryant’s role in the Mississippi welfare scandal. We are grateful today that the court, after careful deliberation, dismissed the case.
The reporting speaks for itself. The truth speaks for itself.
This judgment is so much more than vindication for Mississippi Today — it’s a monumental victory for every single Mississippian. Journalism is a public good that all of us deserve and need. Too seldom does our state’s power structure offer taxpayers true government accountability, and Mississippians routinely learn about the actions of their public officials only because of journalism like ours. This reality is precisely why we launched our newsroom nine years ago, and it’s why we devoted so much energy and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending ourselves against this lawsuit. It was an existential threat to our organization that took time and resources away from our primary responsibilities — which is often the goal of these kinds of legal actions. But our fight was never just about us; it was about preserving the public’s sacred, constitutional right to critical information that journalists provide, just as our nation’s Founding Fathers intended.
Mississippi Today remains as committed as ever to deep investigative journalism and working to provide government accountability. We will never be afraid to reveal the actions of powerful leaders, even in the face of intimidation or the threat of litigation. And we will always stand up for Mississippians who deserve to know the truth, and our journalists will continue working to catalyze justice for people in this state who are otherwise cheated, overlooked, or ignored.
We appreciate your support, and we are honored to serve you with the high quality, public service journalism you’ve come to expect from Mississippi Today.
READ MORE: Judge Bradley Mills’ order dismissing the case
READ MORE: Mississippi Today’s brief in support of motion to dismiss
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate
In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”
She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.
And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”
Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.
If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.
Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.
She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.
Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”
Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.
She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.
“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”
Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”
Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”
She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.
Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care.
In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”
Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.
At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”
No, I said, I did not.
“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.
Of course.
“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.
“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 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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