JACKSON - Few Mississippians - certainly not this one - knew that at least 25 Russians are attending Alcorn State University, the historically black land grant institution nestled in the woods near Lorman,
The Russo-Alcorn State connection surprisingly has been growing ever since 1998, when a Russian tennis player was recruited via the Internet by the Braves' tennis coach.
How I learned about the Russkies at Alcorn was from a front-page story last week in the New York Times, which had sent a reporter to the isolated school, no doubt drawn both by the international and racial diversity in an unlikely place where diversity is a scarce commodity.
The Russians are among 281 white students at Alcorn, 8.3 percent of the entire student body.
That raises a vital Mississippi question: How does integration - the attendance of opposite-race students in Mississippi higher education - stand now, 40 years after the U.S. Army was needed to put the first black student on the rolls of an all-white state university.
Fascinating as it is that several dozen students have come from far-off Russia to Alcorn, a state college I remember back in the 1960s you could only reach by driving your automobile over a cattle gap, black Mississippians are slowly mixing more and more with whites at the state's eight higher education institutions.
Some of the racial mixing at the higher education level is the result of implementation of the celebrated 1975 Ayers case. That lawsuit was brought by black plaintiffs to make institutions of higher learning in Mississippi comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and give open access for blacks to enroll at the traditional "white" institutions.
Unfortunately over the years, the original Ayers integration goal has been distorted by some black plaintiffs into becoming one of only throwing more dollars at preserving the old system of separate "black" colleges which existed before the 1970s.
So far under an Ayers settlement decreed in 1997 by U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers, the Legislature was ordered to spend $503 million over 17 years for construction, upgrading programs, and providing certain other incentives at the four black institutions, including recruitment of non-black students.
It is certainly worthy of note that a January bulletin issued by the state College Board shows that since 1997, black enrollment at historically white institutions increased by 20.4 percent, bringing the total black students in those schools to 10,385.
More significant is that the number of blacks who have enrolled at the formerly white schools in the last five years is approximately the same number who went to black institutions in the same period. That fact undermines the theory that blacks much prefer the environment of schools where members of their race predominate.
The most notable growth of African-Americans has been at the University of Southern Mississippi (34 percent), but also significant gains were made at both Mississippi State and Ole Miss, the latter having perhaps the most aggressive recruitment policy.
As the New York Times story on the Russian "invasion" at Alcorn State points out, recruitment of white students into the Lorman campus has been a hard-to-crack task given considerable impetus under the administration of President Clinton Bristow.
If Mississippi lawmakers have been spending money like a drunken sailor the last few years, as GOP gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour contends, that inebriated swabby certainly hasn't been tossing moola to the state's universities and colleges.
The percentage of the state budget allotted to higher education and the funding per student has dropped the last three years, even falling below spending levels when Republican Kirk Fordice was governor.
Deepening the higher education funding dilemma is that average salaries of full-time faculty, which had been brought close to that of the other Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states in FY 1995 and FY 1996, have lost considerable ground in recent years.
In FY 2000, the state appropriated $6,321 per full-time student. But with budget cuts ordered in 2001, the per-student funding dropped to $5,791. Again with budget cuts in 2002, it fell to $5,367. It is down to $5,337 in the current fiscal year.
Meanwhile, the SREB average per-student funding has moved $1,156 higher than Mississippi's. How can politicians say, "Our college students are our greatest assets?"
Mississippi IHL faculty salaries fell $3,800 below the SREB average in FY 2000, $6,500 in 2002 and this year are to be $7,225 below the SREB average.
The portion of the state budget going to IHL has dropped from 16.43 percent back in 1990 to 14.9 percent in 2002 and 13.81 this fiscal year, even with budget contingency funds thrown in.
A quote in the New York Times article from one of the Russians attending Alcorn State contained a message Mississippians need to take seriously about whether they are short-changing higher education students in this state.
Said Alex Alexandrov of his attendance at Alcorn: "It's worse than the education we had in Russia, but it's America."
