Shooting Straight

Recently, on social media, I criticized both the governor and the mayor for hiding the bad news and only sharing the good news. One of them is a conservative, and one is a liberal, which might give you the idea that I’m just hard to get along with. This is true, but it also means that, as people of position, I rely on them to tell the truth, even if the truth isn’t pleasant.

There’s an old curse you hear in theater sometimes. A sanitized version says, “Don’t urinate on my feet and tell me it’s raining.” It means don’t hide the bad news from people who need to know the truth.

When I was younger, I was generally thought a gentleman, but I could be passionate and rash, especially when I thought innocent people were being hurt.

Not quite two years after my father’s death, my mother invited me to her house, saying she wanted to show me something. When I got there, she said she needed to tell me something, but I had to give her my car keys first. Whatever she was going to tell me, she didn’t want me driving off in a fury after I heard it.

One of my father’s oldest and closest friends was the president of what was often the largest bank in Mississippi. They traded the title with another bank half a block away. This man played Santa when I was a child. It was he who told my mother that my father died in his office.

After I sat down, my mother told me that this banker called her to say that he felt like the management team that took over my father’s position at my father’s company after his death had hidden the truth about the company’s financial position. Because of that, after more than eighty years in business together, The Mississippi School Supply Company no longer had credit at First National Bank.

What followed was two years of financial and legal battles where a lot of people were worried I’d lost my mind. I got most of what I wanted from the conflict. I accepted a gentleman’s promise that the jobs left in the company would be protected. Never take a gentleman’s promise from someone who wasn’t one.

Where Millsaps is concerned, since I’m not on the board and not on the payroll, my position has always been to support and amplify the school’s established messaging publicly. Since I came out of the box and got involved in public affairs again, I’ve been getting an awful lot of questions about Millsaps where I had to say whatever the public message was because the last thing I wanted was anybody going around town saying I had said something different.

A few weeks ago, the new president of Millsaps, Frank Neville, gave an interview with the Clarion Ledger where he answered very honestly and very plainly questions about our enrollment (which is struggling) and our endowment (which is not.) Within hours, I started getting messages from people saying how much they appreciated what he said.

At church, I saw a long-time faculty member and former department head and asked if he’d seen the article.

“I see we’ve decided to tell the truth, " he said.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Go, Man, Go.” He said, and I agreed.

The truth, even when it’s bad, is better than hiding what’s really going on. Shooting straight and telling people how things really are is the only way to turn weaknesses into strengths.

Today, Frank Neville was inaugurated as president of Millsaps. It’s my sixth inauguration. For those of you who can count, that means I’ve been attending these since shortly after graduating from diapers.

My sister called to ask if I would attend. “Man, I’m going to be there from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” I answered. I almost made it, too. I got home at about 5:30. As part of the procession, they asked my sister to put on our school robe and march, representing her class. I sat under the potted oak, representing the people who did as much as possible not to march in front of the rest of the student body—ever.

The ceremony went pretty much as it always has until it reached the point where his daughter sang a song she had written herself to the tune of a Muddy Waters blues rift. She brought the house down. Afterward, her mother told me the daughter worked at Circle in the Square in New York. It took a second, but I said, “THE Circle in the Square?” There’s some comfort in knowing that whatever happens with Frank, his children are somebody who speaks my language.

Frank’s comments upon accepting the medal of office said the things I wanted the Governor and the Mayor to say the week before but didn’t. He laid out pretty plainly the economic and social troubles of Mississippi. He expressed a commitment to the idea that education is the only way out of these ills, but he was very honest about where, as a state, we stand on that issue on this particular day in October 2024. For a guy who’s only lived here a few months, he sounded an awful lot like William Winter, Jack Reed, Gil Carmichael, Bob Fortenberry, Rowan Taylor, and Ray Mabus.

He gets us and doesn’t hide the truth behind a lot of sweet talk. He tells it like it is. He shoots straight.

Millsaps has always formed a kind of keystone of education in Mississippi. When we started the Heritage and Honors program, all the major universities in Mississippi started to copy it. When we started the Else School of business, the same thing happened. We were the first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Mississippi and the first chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma, the Phi Beta Kappa of business education. We were never asked to be leaders in education in Mississippi; we just did it.

Frank is my sixth Millsaps president, not counting interim presidents, who were often pretty remarkable. There were an awful lot of people who thought we should talk Scooter McMillan into taking the job full-time.

We’re in a position now where all the enrolment gains under George Harmon have been lost. There are reasons they were lost: COVID, the water crisis, and the small college crisis that’s happening all over the country. Whatever the reasons, the only path forward is to deal honestly and openly about where we are today, and go forward. Frank is doing just that.

I learned today that the son of a couple I know, who’s also the grandson of a man I greatly admired and a Boy Scout with my nephews, has taken Laurie Stamm’s job in admissions, the one she graduated from thirty years ago. I feel like that’s a good sign.

Earlier this week, we installed new signage on North State Street to replace the signage George Harmon installed more than forty years ago. Forty years on a sign is a pretty good record. To be honest, they were getting hard to read. Some people loved the new signs, some people hated the new signs. I kept my mouth shut because my aesthetics can be different from most people, but I liked them. What I liked even more was that so many people wanted to talk about it. They wanted to talk about Millsaps in particular and Jackson in general. What these signs represented to me was more than just a graphic statement, it was a sign of new life and new engagement from the people surrounding Millsaps.

Seeing Kay Barksdale, I said, “This is my sixth new president's inauguration. I’m not coming to any more after this.” While it was a joke, it was also a tacit hope that Frank Neville would be with us for a while. Millsaps tends to keep its presidents longer than most schools. I think it’s the food.

About a third of my readers were educated at Millsaps, and another third were educated in Mississippi. I encourage you to take the time to meet and learn about our new president. I think he gets it. My main goal right now is to get Millsaps to a place where I can just coast on it again for a while and do the same for Jackson. At a time when most of my friends are looking to retire, I’m not done fighting. I hope never to be.