The University of Mississippi was founded in 1848, and admitted James Meredith, its first African American student after a night of rioting and murder on 1 October 1962.
Prmonunet alumni include Meredith, Archie and Eli Manning, and many Mississippi Governors and political leaders.
From the University's website: (
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"History
When it chartered the University of Mississippi on February 24, 1844, the Mississippi Legislature laid the foundation for public higher education in the state. The university opened its doors to 80 students four years later and for 23 years was Mississippi's only public institution of higher learning. For 110 years, it was the state's only comprehensive university.
UM established the fourth state-supported law school in the nation (1854) and was one of the first in the nation to offer engineering education (1854). It was one of the first in the South to admit women (1882) and the first to hire a female faculty member (1885).
Ole Miss also established the state's first College of Liberal Arts; schools of Law, Engineering, Education and Nursing; accredited School of Business Administration; Graduate School; and accredited bachelor's and master's accountancy programs. It has the only schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, Dentistry and Health Related Professions in Mississippi.
From its first class of 80 students, Ole Miss has grown to a doctoral degree-granting university with 15 academic divisions and more than 21,500 students. Located on its main campus in Oxford are the College of Liberal Arts; the schools of Accountancy, Applied Sciences, Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Journalism and New Media, Pharmacy, and Law; and the Graduate School. The Medical Center in Jackson trains professionals in its schools of Medicine, Nursing, Health Related Professions, Dentistry and Graduate Studies. Ole Miss continues to expand academic courses and degree offerings on its regional campuses in Southaven, Tupelo, Grenada and Booneville.
In all, more than 100 programs of study offer superior academic experiences that provide each graduate with the background necessary for a lifetime of scholastic, social and professional growth. Strengthening and expanding the academic experience are the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, Croft Institute for International Studies and Lott Leadership Institute.
Recognizing UM's outstanding academic programs, Phi Beta Kappa selected the university in 2001 to shelter a chapter of what is recognized as the nation's oldest and most prestigious undergraduate honor society. UM was the first—and remains the only—public institution of higher education in Mississippi chosen for this honor.
Also reflecting the quality education Ole Miss provides, its students regularly are chosen for prestigious scholarships. UM's 25th Rhodes Scholar was named in 2008, and since the Honors College opened in 1998, the university has produced seven Truman, 10 Goldwater and 10 Fulbright scholars, as well as one Marshall, one Gates Cambridge and two Udall scholars.
The university admitted its first African-American student, James Meredith, in October 1962 and has worked since to promote inclusiveness in all its endeavors. More than 20 percent of UM students are minorities, and Ole Miss students come from more than 70 countries. The university observed the 50th anniversary of its integration in 2012-2013 with a series of lectures, films, public forums and other events. Learn more about these activities and the university's commitment to diversity. The university is also home to the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, which helps build more inclusive communities worldwide by promoting diversity and citizenship and by supporting projects that help communities solve local challenges.
UM's research enterprise—including programs in acoustics, atmospheric physics, health care, remote sensing, Southern studies, space law and pharmaceutical sciences—is renowned internationally. The university holds more than 40 patents for inventions including a fire ant trap, an algal herbicide, novel drug-delivery systems, a thermoacoustic refrigeration device, immune system stimulators and possible treatments for cancer, malaria, pain and infections. This work takes place across the university, which is home to more than 20 major research centers. In addition, the university is a center for Faulkner studies, offering one of the finest collections of the Nobel Prize-winner's work and maintaining his Rowan Oak home as a literary shrine.
At the UM Medical Center in Jackson, surgeons performed the world's first human lung (1963) and heart (1964) transplants. Physiologists at the health sciences campus defined the role of the kidneys in controlling blood pressure. The Medical Center is collaborating with Tougaloo College and Jackson State University on the Jackson Heart Study, the world's largest study of cardiovascular risk factors in African-Americans.
Four specialized hospitals on the Jackson campus include the only children's hospital in Mississippi, a women and infants' hospital, and a critical care hospital. UMHC offers the state's only level one trauma center, only level three neonatal intensive care nursery and only organ transplant programs.
ENROLLMENT
Total enrollment on all University of Mississippi campuses, including the UM Medical Center, was 24,250 for the 2016-2017 academic year. Nearly 60 percent of the student body is from Mississippi, and 22.9 percent of students are minorities."
"Ole Miss" is seen as the bastion of Southern history and culture, but is changing - slowly - with the times.
From the New York Times: (
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"Ole Miss Edges Out of Its Confederate Shadow, Gingerly
By STEPHANIE SAUL
AUG. 9, 2017
OXFORD, Miss. — Other than William Faulkner and the father and son quarterbacks Archie and Eli Manning, few figures in this town’s history are better known locally than Lucius Q. C. Lamar.
A professor at Ole Miss before and after the Civil War, he served in both chambers of Congress and as a Supreme Court justice.
Oxford’s main thoroughfare, lined with stately homes and towering oaks, is named Lamar Avenue. His home, restored as a museum, is on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1977, Ole Miss dedicated a major building as Lamar Hall.
That building will soon get a plaque more fully describing Lamar’s legacy.
Lamar drafted the state’s orders of secession, funded his own Confederate regiment and held 31 slaves. After the war, he remained a divisive figure, delivering speeches that riled up whites in a violent 1875 election that he said “involved the supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race,” according to one newspaper account of the day.
Across the country, universities are trying to reckon with their ties to slavery and its champions. Georgetown recently apologized for its ownership and sale, in 1838, of 272 slaves. Yale said it would rename a building honoring an alumnus, John C. Calhoun, a fervent supporter of slavery. Harvard erected a plaque memorializing four slaves owned by Harvard presidents during the 1700s.
But perhaps no college has had to handle the effort as gingerly as Ole Miss. Though the Confederate flag was banished from the campus two decades ago and “Dixie” is no longer played at football games, the ghosts of the Old South still roam the magnolia-scented campus, and many alumni hold fast to traditions.
The Lamar Hall plaque is one of five new ones to be installed to honestly describe the offensive history associated with campus landmarks and acknowledge the contributions of slaves. The university announced the moves last month following the recommendation of a committee that included faculty and alumni with a range of views.
The committee recommended the renaming of one building — Vardaman Hall, named for Gov. James K. Vardaman, who openly advocated lynching.
The moves put the University of Mississippi, as the college is formally known, near the forefront of a movement called contextualization. “Our whole framework is predicated on the principle that it’s better to educate and contextualize rather than remove or move or erase,” said the school’s chancellor, Dr. Jeffrey Vitter.
But at Ole Miss, even that middle ground can be excruciatingly slow and painful to reach. One plaque, placed at the monument to a Confederate soldier, was thrown out and redone last year. Both the campus NAACP and some history professors objected to its original wording because it failed to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
And on the other side, members of the student senate pushed through a resolution to try to “pause” the committee process.
Hovering over deliberations was the fact that descendants of some of the historical figures remain in Mississippi. Don Barrett, a lawyer from Lexington, Miss., who called himself the representative of conservative alumni on the committee, described a series of compromises and called his fellow committee members, some of them faculty, “liberal as hell.”
“We struggled for months,” he said.
Ole Miss’s identity is intertwined with slavery and the Jim Crow era, partly because of the state’s history, but also because the school vigorously embraced Confederate symbols.
It was partly the university’s difficulty in recruiting top black athletes that led to the removal of the most offensive symbol. Two decades ago, the chancellor at the time, Robert Khayat, received death threats after he decided to eliminate the Confederate flag.
By 1979, the mascot had been changed from a student dressed in a gray Confederate uniform to a friendly-looking Disneyesque character named Colonel Reb. Eventually he, too, was replaced by Rebel Black Bear, a reference to a short story by Faulkner. “Dixie” was played less frequently, then banned in 2016.
“It’s called gradualism,” said Greg Stewart, heritage defense director of the state’s Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Mr. Stewart, whose group sued the school in an attempt to block the plaque at the Confederate statute, argues that the university is defiling historic objects. “They just kind of do a little bit here, a little bit there, and maybe you’ll forget about it,” he said.
Despite the school’s progress, including the election of several black student body presidents, the negative baggage remains, said Tony Gray, a freshman offensive lineman from Loganville, Ga. Mr. Gray said he chose Ole Miss despite warnings from friends.
“People around the neighborhood said it’s racist,” Mr. Gray said.
Other black students said they were warned, too, but ultimately had positive experiences on campus, where about 13 percent of undergraduates are black. Yet they wondered why some Confederate symbols remain.
“The Confederate soldier is mind-baffling,” said Jaquann King, a marketing major from Port Gibson, Miss., referring to the statue on campus. “Why is that needed? You have students here who are offended by it.”
Other traditions are tied to the Confederacy, often in esoteric ways. As prospective students toured the campus one day last month, a guide explained why Ole Miss fans wear church clothes to football games.
The football team, he said, represents the troops heading off to battle, harking back to 1861 when students enlisted en masse in the Confederate Army. Their families, the tradition goes, saw them off wearing their Sunday best.
Even the nickname Ole Miss may be an ode to the way things were; some historians think it comes from the name that slaves called the plantation owner’s wife. A consultant in 2014 advised the university to consider the name’s implications, a move the alumni probably would never entertain.
Nor would they change the team’s name, Rebels. Instead, the school is trying to reframe it.
“We’re not Rebels in the old sense,” Dr. Vitter said. “We’re Rebels in a very positive sense. We will always continue using that brand because it’s one of the most positive images nationally among all colleges.”
Efforts at contextualization gathered steam after a campus disturbance in November 2012 in which students protested President Barack Obama’s re-election, some yelling racial epithets.
Besides the dispute over the statue, the biggest argument involved George Hall, named after James Zachariah George, a United States senator who historians say helped lay the foundation for Jim Crow by placing a clause in the State Constitution requiring that voters be able to read or understand it. The rule disenfranchised thousands of Mississippi blacks for decades, and spread to other Southern states.
“The more you learn how ugly it is, the more you wonder, is this someone we need to honor?” said Dr. Jeffrey Jackson, a professor of sociology who served on the committee.
Several members wanted George Hall renamed, even though George is an ancestor of a popular retired vice chancellor, Gloria Kellum, who has worked to restore his home, Cotesworth.
One committee member suggested that Dr. Kellum’s kinship was a factor in the decision not to rename the building.
Dr. Kellum, who said she had not been involved in the deliberations, acknowledged that “George is a name that’s associated with a lot of history that’s disturbing to people.” She said that she supported the contextualization because “I think it’s important for people to understand.”
Paul B. Johnson III, a lawyer in Hattiesburg, Miss., got a call before the name of Paul B. Johnson Commons was tweaked, according to Mr. Barrett, the committee member.
As lieutenant governor in 1962, Paul B. Johnson Jr. physically blocked James Meredith as he sought, ultimately successfully, to enroll as the school’s first black student.
Paul B. Johnson Jr. parlayed his defiance into a victory in a campaign for governor in 1963, running on the slogan “Stand Tall With Paul.” Some students wondered why the university would honor him.
In reality, the building was named after Johnson’s father, himself a former governor. Rather than being contextualized, a “Sr.” will be added to the building’s name, the committee decided.
“Paul Johnson III is a dear friend of mine,” Mr. Barrett said. “He laughed and was good-natured about it. He said his father made it very clear during his lifetime that the building was named for his father.”
The renaming of Vardaman Hall requires approval of the state’s college board. Vardaman’s open advocacy of lynching was deemed “exceptional” by the committee — meaning that his behavior was beyond the norm even for his day.
As for Lamar Hall, its plaque will mention Lamar’s slaveholding, adding that “his prominence obscured the active role he played in dismantling Reconstruction in Mississippi to the detriment of the state’s African-American citizens.”
Mr. Barrett said: “I think L.Q.C. Lamar was one of the greatest statesmen Mississippi has ever produced and I don’t like the plaque, but it was a compromise.””