Editorial Roundup: Mississippi
Greenwood Commonwealth. January 9, 2024.
Editorial: Bipartisan Talk From New Speaker
Mississippi’s new speaker of the House, Jason White, has sent some encouraging signs that he is not only willing to listen to others’ suggestions but perhaps incorporate them into legislation the Republican majority is considering.
There is a leap from saying something to actually doing it, but the fact that White has sounded these tones of bipartisanship several times leading up to and since his installation as House speaker makes one think that he means it.
Let’s hope so.
Mississippi, as with much of the nation, has gotten too polarized in recent times, with much of the leadership in both major political parties not only having difficulty in finding common ground but being disinterested in even trying to find it.
With a supermajority in both the Mississippi House and Senate, it has been tempting for Republican leaders to write off their Democratic colleagues, knowing Republicans had the votes to pass whatever they wanted as long as they kept their own members together.
That one-party approach may work with issues on which Republicans are ideologically monolithic. On matters on which they are split, though, little will get accomplished without some bipartisan agreement.
Two such issues are education funding and Medicaid expansion, both of which White wants the House to look at with an open mind. White is of the camp that believes the 1997 education formula, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, needs significant retooling. And while he’s not yet ready to champion Medicaid expansion, White sounds so much more reasonable on this issue than did his predecessor, Philip Gunn, or Gov. Tate Reeves. The unflinching opposition of that pair deterred most GOP legislators from pushing the issue, even as their constituents warmed to the sensibility of accepting an extra billion dollars a year from Washington and providing health insurance coverage for 200,000 or so of the working poor.
White said he would not be playing the same political games of demonizing Medicaid expansion because of its association with a Democratic former president, Barack Obama.
“I’m not going to be hung up on names like Obamacare or Affordable Care Act,” said White. “We’re going to try to do what’s best for Mississippi, and I think with less than 3 million people in our state, there ought to be a way for us to figure this out.”
There might be ultraconservative Republicans who will bristle at White’s early bipartisan overtures. They might call him a RINO (Republican in name only) and point to the fact that he was a Democrat before switching to the GOP in 2012, the year after his first successful run for a House seat. They’ve tried to put that same label on another sensible Republican, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who is not afraid to reach across the aisle to try to build consensus on tough issues.
What this state needs, and what this nation needs, though, are people in public office who think it’s more important to do what’s good for the people they serve than what’s good for their personal political fortunes or their parties. Hosemann has demonstrated he is that type of public servant. It is encouraging to think that White might be cut from a similar cloth.
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Tupelo Daily Journal. January 6, 2024.
Editorial: Communities are defined by the things we do
We don’t want to call more attention than necessary to this past week’s Wall Street Journal article, or give it more online traffic than it’s due, but we will say we find the degree of hopelessness it conveys unwarranted. Mississippi at large, and the Tupelo area in particular, have an outlook that is very bright.
The article is a look at the latest figures on our state’s workforce, with consideration of our young people’s continued departure for greener grass on the state line’s other side. Mississippi lacks a metropolitan area to compete with the attractions of Atlanta or the appeal of Nashville. Our state has a disproportionately high percentage of the population on disability and a disproportionately low percentage of people participating in the workforce. Those facts are concerning and we don’t dispute them. The article offers no ideas on how to counteract those matters though, so anyone seeking facts to use as an excuse to quit needn’t read on.
What does interest us most among the subjects the WSJ skimmed is the extent to which our communities work together. That’s not a subject easily captured. Still, the construction of our future depends on it, is being led by it, is defined by it. It’s why Tupelo caught the publication’s eye in the first place, though, at the risk of sounding tedious or pedantic, that is not something passersby would know. Neither is it something the WSJ seemed to have learned.
The alliance that led to the Toyota plant at Blue Springs, the foresight that continues to drive Tupelo’s Major Thoroughfare Program, the sprit of generosity that drives New Albany’s Sharing at Christmas, those have much more to say about who we are and what we can become than statistics alone.
We’re proud of our communities’ participatory leadership. Our own futures are firmly in our own hands. No one is going to show up and do it for us.
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Columbus Dispatch. January 9, 2024.
Editorial: Mississippi Brightwell University? We like it.
Of course, everyone will have their own opinion about Monday’s announcement that Mississippi University for Women is seeking to become Mississippi Brightwell University, but no one can claim the name change was done in haste or without long and careful consideration. For that reason, we commend the efforts of university president Nora Miller and the school’s naming task force.
As we’ve said before, a name change is long overdue.
The university is asking for legislative approval for the name change in this session. If approved, the name would change this summer.
In truth, the change has been coming for almost 42 years since the United States Supreme Court opened the door for male students to enroll.
Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court’s first woman jurist, wrote the majority opinion, which allowed male students to enter the university’s nursing program, but did not require a change of names. After the July 1, 1982 ruling, the state opened all programs at the university to male students.
At that point, Mississippi University for Women was Mississippi University for Women in name only.
This will be the fourth name change for the university, founded in 1884 as the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls. The name of the school was soon shortened to Industrial Institute and College (II&C) and then to Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) in 1920. MSCW became Mississippi University for Women in 1974.
None of those changes were made on a whim, but rather to better reflect the realities of the time and the school’s mission.
The idea of removing the reference to “women” in the university’s name has been suggested multiple times over the past four decades. Monday’s announcement comes more than two years after Miller announced the university would take up the matter.
“Brightwell” was inspired in part by the school’s literary society’s motto — “We study for light to bless with light.” — as well as by various torch and light symbology used at graduations and commencement ceremonies.
Changing the name is not an effort to wipe out 140 years of providing higher education to women. That history has been carefully preserved.
Anyone with any familiarity with the university understands the school takes great pride in that historic role. To amplify that message, the university announced its plans to create a Women’s College at the university with its own curriculum that will allow its students to receive special recognition at their commencement ceremony and on their academic transcript.
Mississippi Brightwell University will take some getting used to, naturally. No doubt, MUW was known as “MSCW” colloquially for quite some time after the name change. The same applies in this case. The school will be known by many residents and alumni as “The W” far into the future.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But 42 years after the university first opened its doors to both men and women, the new name removes what had been a marketing problem for the university, where males represent just 1 in 5 students. If the name change helps bring in more male students while its new College for Women and its history continue to honor its role in women’s education, the change will have been well worth the temporary discomfort it inevitably creates.
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