VICKSBURG - Never underestimate the power of dynamic leadership.
As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes in its Sept. 29 edition, the University of Mississippi has had this with Robert Khayat as its chancellor for 10 years.
In a nutshell, a campus fast losing ground to the rest of academia in the early 1990s is now setting a pace others envy.
With the state College Board starting the process of hiring two more university presidents, what's been happening at Oxford should be instructive - to say the least.
For perspective, understand that the Chronicle of Higher Education is the bible of academia. Workaday Mississippians love to loathe the pointy-headed thinkers of higher education. Yes, most of them are wacky liberals and, yes, many of them couldn't change a flat tire. They may not read Field & Stream, but they do read the Chronicle. They live by its words.
The article on Khayat and Ole Miss is not only well-researched, it is backed up by charts and graphs showing, among other things, that:
- Ole Miss enrollment is up by a third to almost 17,500 in 10 years.
- Sponsored research has doubled and now brings $103 million annually to campus.
- The university endowment is up four-fold and is knocking on a half-billion dollars.
- Minorities as a percentage of the student body have more than doubled to 14 percent.
- Where there were six National Merit Scholars in the 1995 freshman class, there were 43 this fall.
And all this took place while contributions from the state Legislature fell from 54 percent of the Ole Miss budget to 21 percent.
Anyone who had predicted that kind of performance the day Khayat accepted the chancellorship would have been deemed nuts, period.
Paul Fain, who wrote the Chronicle piece, did so, quite naturally, from the perspective of an outsider. That led him to point out something most Mississippians don't see: The college world is not an even playing field, and Ole Miss starts out with instant demerits. Call it cruel or unfair, but the state's reputation for ignorance and poverty reflects on its higher education institutions. Too, Ole Miss is known - just as Kent State is known for student deaths during war protests - as one of the main venues where extending civil rights led to bloodshed.
Before even being considered on par with a University of Texas or Colorado or Michigan, Ole Miss, Fain wrote, has to address those images.
Khayat has a mixed record on that score. In what has to be one of the greatest pre-emptive moves of all time, the chancellor invited Stanley Hill and his wife to be his guests for a 2001 Ole Miss game against Iona in the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
Hill was the only black person on the Iona team in 1957, and Ole Miss had been ordered by then Gov. J.P. Coleman not to play the integrated team.
Khayat knew the national TV audience would be informed how the only previous meeting between the teams had ended. No greater statement could be made than to have the cameras then pan to him and the Hills sitting together.
And it's not PR. Khayat has been aggressive in recruiting minority faculty and students and almost lost his job over moves to ban "Colonel Reb" from football games and stop the waving of Confederate flags.
There have been gaffes. The chancellor objected to the initial design of a Civil Rights Memorial, dedicated Sunday, and was called all sorts of predictable names for having aesthetic differences with the artist. Too students have reliably offered up racially loaded actions that have been prankish in their views - yet not so funny to others.
In Starkville, an effective leader, Dr. Charles Lee, has been replaced as president of Mississippi State University by Dr. Robert Foglesong, who appears to have the same mixture of charm, zeal and attention to detail as Khayat. Time will tell for sure.
The College Board, an eclectic and unwieldy group of appointees, picks presidents. Fourteen months ago, it hired University System of Georgia Chancellor Thomas C. Meredith as commissioner - and the board, unfortunately, has embraced his penchant for secrecy.
In the coming months, members will be hiring replacements for Dr. Clinton Bristow, who was putting Alcorn on the academic map before his untimely death this summer, and Dr. Shelby Thames, a brilliant scientist and not-so-brilliant administrator under whom the University of Southern Mississippi was put on academic probation.
We can hope the board members, in addition to agreeing that what they do is none of the public's business, can at least agree to look for proof of dynamic leadership among the applicants.
It does make a difference. See Friday's Chronicle of Higher Education for details.
