JACKSON - The panorama from atop Jackson State University's administration tower is one of abandoned shacks interspersed with a collection of aging, small homes.
Instead of trying to disassociate itself from the city's surrounding high-crime downtown area, the university has decided to embrace it. Now both are in a state of flux.
On campus, students hurriedly walk to class, stepping out of the way of construction workers and heavy equipment.
Old buildings are getting facelifts; new ones are being erected.
President Ronald Mason said he doesn't want the transformation to end at the campus' borders. Mississippi's only urban university wants to revitalize the neighborhood that surrounds it and improve the lives of the people who live in it.
The mission is dubbed e-City. The target is a blighted, 5-square mile area surrounding the university.
E-city is a 10-year plan for the university to partner with various federal, state and community agencies to turn west Jackson into a cluster of technology-related enterprises affecting jobs, housing and health.
The anchors are Jackson's proposed $20 million telecommunications conference facility, the city's 30-acre industrial park and the university's resources and programs.
"If we can pull it all off, it will be a national model," said Mason.
First, capital must be raised.
The Fannie Mae Foundation was impressed with the idea, giving the university a $100,000 grant to begin its initial assessment, said Roy DeBerry, JSU'S vice president for economic development and local governmental affairs.
"At places like Harvard and Yale, they just put a gate around themselves. They have the resources," DeBerry said. "Even if we did have the resources, we wouldn't want to do that.
"We want to take a community that's deteriorated in the past 25 years, and make it a prosperous, wholesome community."
Though Jackson State, one of the state's three traditionally black universities, is poised to share in Mississippi's $246 million college desegregation settlement, that money won't go toward e-City, DeBerry said.
Mason said the university's e-Center, a high-tech research facility and incubator for private businesses located off campus, is integral to the project.
"We think that we're going to be able to develop a package where over 10 years, we'll be able to generate maybe $40 million worth of capital to construct housing in e-City, and put people in $150,000 homes that make $40,000 a year," Mason said. "If we can do that, then e-City will start to look like e-City."
The university, mostly as a result of its own fund-raising efforts, already is in the midst of a building frenzy. Ground was broken last week on a 104,740-square foot School of Business. Mason said a new apartment complex for students will be constructed off campus, as well as a new student recreation center.
Mason, president since February 2000, also has been busy building the reputation of the university that evolved from a Natchez seminary in 1877.
He touts the university's soon-to-be built School of Engineering, which may wind up housed at the e-Center.
Beginning next year, Jackson State will be the only university in Mississippi to have a School of Public Health, he said.
Mason also points to the university's School of Education, which has received a $500,000 planning grant from the U.S. Department of Education "to develop a lab school system which would be a model of teacher training."
The university's computer science program, considered one of the best in the nation, draws students from outside Mississippi, like Jessica Tennon, 20.
Tennon, of St. Louis, Mo., who said she was recruited by larger Division I schools to play volleyball, chose Jackson State after her recruiter told her about its computer science program.
Being a relatively small university is another reason Tennon is drawn to JSU, which had an enrollment of 7,098 this spring. She said she's come to view faculty as members of her family.
"My boyfriend wrecked my car last year," Tennon said. "My counselors gave me a ride to and from school. They were my backbone. It's like a home away from home."
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