STARKVILLE – Federal mandates, state funding concerns and state laws have been just a few issues Mississippi State University has faced so far this school year.
The first challenge for the university came with the federal directive to universities to remove all diversity, equity and inclusion programming, University President Mark Keenum told the Starkville Rotary Club on Monday.
“Every university in our country right now is experiencing some form or fashion of a headwind. We’re not exempt from that here in Mississippi,” Keenum said during the meeting at Hilton Garden Inn. “It really started first of the year when we got a directive on how we were to deal with DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – and that was something that kind of caught (us) … off guard.”
Along with the directive, a recent bill passed by the state legislature in July that restricted state funds from being used for programs or curriculum encouraging DEI and a subsequent injunction filed by a federal judge blocking portions of the state bill caused some “unrest” among MSU students, Keenum said.
“We’re really hung in a limbo of what we can and can’t do between the state, who controls our budget and the federal bench (because) we can’t violate a federal injunction,” Keenum said.
The issue with compliance to both federal and state laws also bled over into student affairs after the Institutions of Higher Learning said student fees are considered “state dollars,” which has caused issues for organizations on campus to host events, Keenum said at the meeting.
“We argued they’re not state dollars, they’re fees that students pay specifically for their activities, but we can’t allocate any fees to any student group or organization for this semester,” Keenum said. “So we’ll be going back to the legislature this coming January to try to get some resolution on what we can do to help our students be able to do the activities that they are funding themselves.”
Keenum said the university will continue to follow the law and guidelines as they are provided, but he hopes to find some kind of resolution by the end of the academic year.
Keenum also noted the university’s most recent enrollment figures, which positions MSU as the only public higher institution to grow in enrollment 10 out of the last 11 years, a press release issued Monday said. Keenum said enrollment for the fall reached 23,563 students or about 400 more than last year.
“We’ve instituted an enrollment plan, a strategic enrollment plan for our campus, and we started this about four years ago, and we’re seeing the fruits of our efforts,” Keenum told The Dispatch. “And we’ve invested heavily in our branding and our marketing and promotion of our campus and the programs we have here beyond just the state of Mississippi.”
MSU’s campus also continues to grow with the construction of the university’s new High Performance Computing Data Center at the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park, which Keenum said should be complete by the end of the year.
The $45 million, 35,000 square-foot building will further expand the university’s capabilities in high performance computing or using supercomputers to conduct large-scale analyses.
“We needed that new computing center because we’ve got these new computers coming, and our current Malcolm Portera Computing Center is completely full of super computers, so we wouldn’t have a home for these very fast super computers coming to us if we hadn’t gotten this facility built,” Keenum told The Dispatch. “So it’s perfect timing for us.”
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