A Senate bill seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices on Mississippi college campuses would also create a taskforce to study how the state’s higher education system can become more efficient, a discussion some have feared is the opening salvo in an effort to closeor merge universities.
In addition to banning DEI initiatives, Senate Bill 2515, also known as the “Requiring Efficiency For Our Colleges And Universities System” (REFOCUS) Act, would seek to answer questions like, why does Mississippi have a lower rate of postsecondary degrees than other states and what can be done about it when fewer high school graduates will go to college in the coming years?
Last year’s version of this bill, which was introduced at the same time as other legislation to close universities, sparked concerns that lawmakers were dipping their toes into closing some of the state’s eight public universities. An online petition garnered more than 15,000 signatures opposing the bill.
But the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, told Mississippi Today that’s not her goal. The chair of the Senate Colleges and Universities committee said she wants to use the taskforce to dig into a range of questions, from if Mississippi’s higher education funding formula is equitable to why some universities in the state have better graduation rates than others.
“I think we have to in Mississippi be efficient with the dollars that we have, and this is what this taskforce is looking at,” Boyd said. “The goal of the taskforce is not to close any colleges but is simply to look and see what are the plans that they have to increase their enrollment?”
By “efficiency,” Boyd said she’s referring to whether state dollars invested in Mississippi’s colleges and universities “are producing the best results.” The taskforce would deliver its findings by the end of the year and be led by lawmakers, members of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, and representatives from Mississippi’s research universities, regional colleges and historically Black universities.
“We need to know what the clear path is ahead and what is the direction we are moving in,” Boyd added.
Nonetheless, discussions about closing universities are in the ether in Mississippi. Last year, Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, introduced a bill to close three public universities in an effort, he said, to start a conversation. The bill recalled a plan proposed years ago by Gov. Haley Barbour to merge Mississippi University for Women into Mississippi State University and merge the state’s three HBCUs into one.
“Sometimes you just have to pull the Band-Aid off the wound,” Polk said last year. “Until I introduced this bill, no one was talking about that.”
Boyd did not pass Polk’s bill out of committee. This year, Boyd said she has talked with leaders of the state’s universities, and they are excited to have conversations about how to graduate more Mississippians and keep them working in the state.
The taskforce will eventually look at the state’s community college system, Boyd said. The meetings will be livestreamed and potentially held in college towns throughout the state, an idea Boyd said came at the suggestion of a university she would not name.
“This all is about making them more efficient and then creating a stronger workforce for the state,” she said. “How do we do this because we know we’re going to have, if population trends are what they predict, we know we’re going to have fewer students from the state of Mississippi.”
Boyd tied the taskforce to anti-DEI legislation because, she said, there is a “correlation” between efforts to ban DEI and increase efficiency.
“DEI programs have not proven to be in many situations particularly efficient at really helping people,” she said. “DEI programs in many cases have not been the most productive use of dollars.”
Instead, the taskforce should be looking at how the universities can more efficiently help people on their own merit, she added, whether that’s understanding how best to serve different student populations or how to attract nontraditional students like single mothers.
“We have a tremendous number of people that start college that don’t finish it and then we have a lot of people with student debt,” Boyd said. “Why is that? What happened that they could not graduate? That’s where the emphasis is.”
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