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The more I think of the campaign to move the Mississippi School for Math and Science from its home on the MUW campus to Mississippi State, the more machiavellian it seems, almost to the point that it strains credulity.
Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows.
The plot includes a plan to shut down three of the state’s eight public universities (including at least one of its three HBCUs), Starkville’s machinations in attempting to get the state to fund the lion’s share of a new high school and Mississippi State’s complicity in both.
Last year, a Senate bill to close three state universities came out of the blue at roughly the same time as another bill that initially sought to move the MSMS to the MSU campus, but was later amended to give control of both MUW and MSMS to MSU.
There had been virtually no talk of doing any of these three things prior to the 2024 legislature session, so that they would appear out of the ether at the same time suggests planning not coincidence.
There is a legitimate argument to be made for reducing the number of state-supported universities. The three schools with the lowest enrollment at the time the bill was filed (Mississippi Valley State, MUW and Delta State) served a combined enrollment of just 7,139 which is 11% of the total enrollment of state-supported universities. That’s not a very efficient use of the state’s higher education budget. Consolidation of Mississippi Valley and Delta State, located 45 miles apart, would reduce a fair amount of administrative and operational costs by eliminating duplicate programs. The same is true of making The W a satellite campus of MSU.
That’s the argument. Here’s the problem: Closing an HBCU like Mississippi Valley would be horrible optics for a state whose history on race has been consistently problematic. I often feel as though the only thing preventing Mississippi from going full-frontal racist is Southeastern Conference football. Otherwise we’d still be running around with a combo Confederate/Mississippi flag like a bunch of civil war reenactors. Closing an HBCU, even in Mississippi, requires some tact and diplomacy. Making MUW go away first would insulate the legislature from that claim of race-based motives. The narrative shifts from race to finance.
This is where MSMS enters the chat room.
MUW is to the legislature what the old homeplace is to its heirs. Nobody wants the house, so you put it up for sale. First, you have an estate sale to get rid of all the furnishings. Think of MSMS as being the best piece of furniture in the house.
Couldn’t the legislature avoid all the fuss and simply give control of MUW and MSMS to Mississippi State? Yes, if there weren’t another player in the game, which brings us to the Starkville school district.
Starkville wants a new high school, but can’t afford it, at least not without an outside funding source. It needs a little help from a friend to pull that off. Mississippi State’s plan for bringing MSMS to its campus is predicated on a new Starkville High School, which would create a situation where state appropriations could cover a large part of the building costs for the new high school since it’s hard to tell where MSMS ends and Starkville High begins in this project.
All of this must seem very convoluted, so let’s review:
The state wants to shutter or consolidate three state-supported universities, but since at least one of those universities is a HBCU, it’s politically expedient to make sure the first to go is not a HBCU, which could be achieved by ceding The W (along with MSMS) to Mississippi State.
Starkville wants a new high school it can’t afford. By co-mingling a new MSMS facility with a new Starkville High School on MSU property the door is open to state funding for a high school that would otherwise have to be built through local property taxes.
It’s an interesting equation: If you want to shut down Mississippi Valley State, you have to build Starkville a new high school.
In 1914, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand wound up plunging 30 nations into war, including the United States and Japan, neither of which likely knew Franz Ferdinand from Ferdinand the Bull.
That tragic sequence of events seems almost logical when compared to the machinations we are seeing with the tug-of-war over MSMS and all of the ulterior motives that accompany it.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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