The Future and Millsaps
Education is eternal, but the Academy in America has to reinvent itself every fifty years or so regarding how it raises and spends its money and who it considers potential students. The last time it happened was when I was in middle school. Vietnam had just ended, and Jimmy Carter had just beaten Gerald Ford as president. America changed its perspective on what it wanted from a college education. It was a good thing.
The American academy changed because, although much of its structure is based on what was found in Great Britain, the social structure here is very different. Class is volatile in America. A family can go from one class to an entirely different one in a generation. It’s generally a good thing—better than being ensconced in the same classes for hundreds of years with mobility cut off from deserving people.
The last time this happened, Millsaps ran into some stumbling blocks. Everybody loved Eddie Collins (and I do mean everybody), but the school’s money wasn’t coming in like we needed it to. The board and Dr. Collins genially decided it was time for a change.
People tend to blame George Harmon for the sun coming up in the morning, but that’s not accurate. George reinvented how Millsaps raised money and put forward this crazy idea that a small Southern College could have a Harvard-style business school, but that’s about it.
The faculty developed everything else, especially the honor code and the Heritage program, often without any cooperation or approval from the President’s office. Millsaps is, and always has been, a team. Sometimes, there’s bickering among the teammates, but even that can work for the good. The success Millsaps saw in the eighties and the nineties was a group effort.
George put to bed this notion that the President should be a pal to the students. Most students under Dr. Harmon claimed to hate him, but they were actually pretty terrified of him. It’s a little-known fact that George Harmon ate breakfast in the cafeteria every day, choosing to sit at the big round table where the theater kids usually ate (theater kids don’t eat breakfast). He did this every day in hopes that if the students had concerns or thoughts, they could (and would) approach him then. They did not do that. The only student I ever saw sitting with Dr. Harmon at Breakfast was David Biggers—two guys who weren’t famous for small talk.
Every couple of weeks, I get a message from somebody clutching their pearls and wringing their hands about the future of Millsaps. My answer is always the same, “we’ve been through much worse than this.” That’s true, too. A small Methodist school in the middle of Mississippi that never got much financial help from the Methodist Conference, we never had it easy. Just having an educationally aggressive institution in Mississippi was probably a bad idea. We’ve always made it work, but it was never easy.
Last night, I went to the Millsaps End of Year celebration at Fertile Grounds in Belhaven. I’m not accustomed to drinking beer in a place that clean, but it sure is good. Doug Boone suggested this Bock Father to me, and I’ve developed a relationship with it.
Daddy took the Chronicle of Higher Education at home all the time he was on the Millsaps board. I understood little of what they wrote about, but I read it. I read it because I knew it was important even if I didn’t understand it.
The Chronicle is online now, but I still check it occasionally. I’ve been out of the loop on Millsaps for over twenty years, but I’m back now, hopefully for good. Their first issue of the new year had an article titled “Transitions: Millsaps College Names Next President."
I was hoping Frank Neville would be there last night. We’ve corresponded, but we haven’t actually met. As I understand it, he’s in town but moving into the president’s house. I wish more of those Silk Stocking Row houses were still homes and not offices or hotels.
I have some sympathy for Frank. Showing up in the middle of a bunch of folks who have known each other for years, sometimes decades, charged with being their new boss can’t be comfortable.
When I read his curriculum vitae, my first thought was, “This guy’s an awful lot like George Harmon.” When I saw his photograph, I realized he looked like George, too. There are some marked differences, though. For one thing, he seems a lot more personable than George. (Being a lot more personable than George means he’s close to normal, but not quite.) Frank’s wife and children are also apparently very involved in the arts, particularly theater arts. I figure that works in favor of some of my priorities.
I’ve spent the last year and a half getting to know the current faculty at Millsaps. I hoped more of them would come last night, but this awkward separation between the administration and the faculty has always been a part of Millsaps events. I’ve always tried to split my time between the two, but if I’m completely honest, with a few exceptions, I’ve always been closer to the administration.
Neville’s first official day is Monday. On Wednesday, the entire Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church arrives on campus for their meeting. I plan on doing something I’ve never done before. I’m going to attend the Methodist Conference. I’ve been warned it might be boring. If it’s horrible, I’ll go hang out with David Woodward in the cafeteria.
When news of Birmingham Southern's troubles reached my ears, I wasn’t shocked. Although we’ve always played them in sports, and they’re about our size, Birmingham Southern was always a very different school from Millsaps. For one thing, they’ve never had any money, which, in part, is what killed them. The structure of how they raised and spent money was out of balance, and it killed them.
I didn’t know Interrum President Keith Dunn and Board Chair Jay Lindsey would send a letter outlining the differences between Millsaps and Birmingham Southern, but I’m glad they did. I think it made a lot of progress in making people feel better about Millsaps's future.
There’s never been a time when Millsaps wasn’t swimming upstream for everything they tried to do. I’ve always believed that’s why we graduated so many people who challenged the status quo in Mississippi and stuck with the fight long enough to see it through. We’ve always had to fight to exist. That can make for some pretty tough graduates.
Not all of our graduates stay in Mississippi. It’s hard to tell somebody to go through all that for a Millsaps Degree but stay here where Mississippi itself might limit your potential. An awful lot of people I love will never come back to Mississippi. The thing is, I can’t really blame them, although I wish they felt differently.
One thing that gives me confidence is that at last night's event, young black alumni were very evident. We’ve always been careful about that because we didn’t want to take students away from Tougaloo, but I think we’re in a place now where our program and the program at Tougaloo are different enough that we’re not stepping on each other’s toes. Some of our most promising and remarkable students are the descendants of American slaves.
There’s a scene at the end of Spartacus (1960) where Varinia, played by Jean Simmions, finds Spartacus hanging on a cross. She holds a child up for him to see and says, “This is your son, Spartacus. He’s Free. Free! He’ll remember you, Spartacus, because I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him who Spartacus was and what he dreamed of!” Critics have always argued whether Howard Fast intended to draw an analogy between American Slaves and Spartacus, but I don’t see how he could have missed it. The children of freed slaves are the future of this country.
In the eighties, John Palmer started importing South Asian engineers to work at his new phone messaging company. Forty years later, central Mississippi has a vibrant and growing South Asian population, and for reasons I’ve never completely understood, they’ve been very generous with Millsaps, both in terms of their gifts and by sending us their children. They, more or less, adopted us. They even gave us a statue, now ensconced in Millsaps student lore. Last night, a good fifteen percent of the people at the end-of-year event were of South Asian origin, an unexpected but welcome development in the Millsaps story.
The future is always frightening, but the future is always full of potential.
When Pat Taylor came to Millsaps, I thought, "This guy is entirely too nice to make it in this environment.” My goddess at the Else School in those days was a woman named Shirley Olson, who was known for eating inattentive students whole in front of their friends. I swear I imprinted on her and spent the rest of my life trying to meet a girl like that.
I took two classes from Pat, both of which came after the time of day when I went to the gym. That meant that four days a week, there’d be a pretty good chance I didn’t have time to shower and change before class, so I’d often show up improperly dressed and smelling like boiling cabbage.
Pat’s now the most senior member of the Milsaps faculty. So much for him not being tough enough. I guess you can be both nice and tough. Four or five faculty members are left whose tenure stretches from George Harmon to Frank Nevill. Pat’s one, George Bay is another. They’re the ones I’ll look to as a gauge of how things are going with the new guy.
Some people are trying to make political ground on the idea that a liberal arts education is “bad” and a waste of money. Our auditor is probably the loudest. Even though he’s a product of Millsaps, our governor has been quiet about the issue.
I believe in a liberal arts education and I believe in Millsaps. We may have some work to figure out new ways to raise and spend money and lower our per-student costs, but I’m optimistic about the future. If guys like Shad White want to fight about it, then I guess we’ll fight about it.
