University of Mississippi, USA
The University of Mississippi, commonly known as Ole Miss, is a public research university adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi with a medical center in Jackson. The University of Mississippi is the state’s oldest public university, and is the second largest university by enrollment in Mississippi.
The university was chartered by the Mississippi Legislature on February 24, 1844, and four years later admitted its first enrollment of 80 students. It operated as a Confederate hospital during the Civil War and narrowly avoided destruction by Ulysses S. Grant’s forces. A race riot erupted on campus in 1962 during the civil rights movement when segregationists tried to prevent the enrollment of African American James Meredith. The university has since taken measures to improve its image. Ole Miss is closely associated with writer William Faulkner and owns and manages his former home Rowan Oak. In addition to Faulkner’s home, two other sites on campus—Barnard Observatory and the Lyceum–The Circle Historic District—are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Ole Miss is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The university is one of 33 colleges and universities participating in the National Sea Grant Program and a participant in the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. Its research efforts include the National Center for Physics Acoustics, National Center for Natural Products Research and the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research. Its federally contracted marijuana facility serves as the only Food and Drug Administration-approved source for cannabis research. The university also operates interdisciplinary institutes such as the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Its athletic teams compete as the Ole Miss Rebels in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Southeastern Conference, Division I.
The university’s alumni include 27 Rhodes Scholars, 10 governors, 5 US senators, 1 head of government, and a Nobel Prize Laureate. Other alumni have received honors such as Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, and Pulitzer Prizes. Its medical center performed the first human lung transplant and animal-to-human heart transplant.
The Mississippi Legislature chartered the University of Mississippi on February 24, 1844. Planners selected the university’s isolated rural site in the town of Oxford as it was a “sylvan exile” that would foster academic studies. In 1845, residents of Lafayette County donated land west of Oxford for the campus, and, the following year, architect William Nichols oversaw construction of the Lyceum, two dormitories, and faculty residences. On November 6, 1848, the university—offering a classical curriculum—opened its doors to its first class of 80 students. Mostly children of elite slaveholders, they were all white, and all but one were from Mississippi. For 23 years, the university was Mississippi’s only public institution of higher learning, and for 110 years it was the state’s only comprehensive university. In 1854, the University of Mississippi School of Law was established, the fourth state-supported law school in the United States.
Early president Frederick A. P. Barnard sought to increase the stature of the university, placing him in conflict with the more conservative board of trustees. His hundred-page 1858 report to the trustees on his proposals resulted in little besides the university head’s title being changed to “chancellor”. Barnard’s northern background—he was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Yale—and Union sympathies resulted in heightened tensions: a student assaulted his slave and the state legislature investigated him. Following the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Mississippi became the second state to secede, with the articles of secession drafted by the university’s mathematics professor Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar. Students organized themselves into a military company called the “University Greys”, which merged with the Confederate States Army. Within a month of the Civil War’s outbreak, only 5 students remained at the University of Mississippi, and, by fall 1861, the university closed. In its final action, the board of trustees awarded Barnard a doctorate of divinity.
The University of Mississippi consists of 15 schools. The largest undergraduate school is the College of Liberal Arts. Graduate schools include a law school, a school of business administration, an engineering school, and a medical school.
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