John Monteith
Final
How Diverse is Ole Miss?
The University of Mississippi boasts itself as one of the nation’s top public universities. Students from all over the country come here to experience the South. However, only 20 percent of its students are minorities. Recent controversies, such as the racial sensitivity debate over the mascot and fight song, have caused several people nationwide to question how welcoming Ole Miss is to its minority students and how diverse it truly is.
A freshman here at Ole Miss has felt very left out and, as a result, she is leaving Ole Miss to complete her undergraduate degree elsewhere. She has asked to remain anonymous in order to preserve her preexisting relationships with people on campus.
“I had high-hopes for Ole Miss,” the woman said. “I had been told that Ole Miss wasn’t good to those not associated in Greek Life, but I assumed that wouldn’t be the case, and I was wrong.”
When personal circumstances left her unable to go through rush in the fall, she was instantly made to feel ostracized and excluded.
“My family suffered a great loss, which led me to want to establish a name for myself outside of the Greek system” she said. “I am by no means anti-Greek though, at my new school, I plan on going through rush and joining a sorority.”
The woman is not a minority, however. She is blonde, blue-eyed, Southern, and thin, not unlike many other female students on the campus.
“I would leave my dorm room and ‘GDI’ would be written on my bulletin board,” she said. “People who I thought were my friends stopped talking to me and inviting me to things. My car even got keyed.”
She is transferring back home where she feels that she can be herself, and will be accepted, regardless of her affiliations or circumstances.
“The main reason I’m leaving is that I need a wider range of people,” she said. “If you’ve seen one person, you’ve seen them all. If you’re different, you have no chance of fitting in at Ole Miss”
This form of discrimination does not just affect students. Faculty and staff members also experience rejection and discrimination. Detra Payne, an African-American theater teacher, has felt many shades of discrimination from students.
Payne was born and raised in Los Angeles Calif. When she graduated from college, her parents moved to Oxford, Miss. to teach at Ole Miss. Her mother’s death in 2009 brought her to Oxford to be with her father.
“I felt ready,” Payne said. “Twenty years prior, I would have never. The way things were 20 years ago to now is different.”
Payne teaches several theater classes at Ole Miss, one of which has 400 students. In the class, she has had people write expletives on the attendance roll and several heckle her during class.
“I think it’s very different for these students who have never had a black, female teacher,” Payne said. “So for somebody like me to come and be from L.A. and the person that I am, it threw them.”
Unlike the young woman, Payne feels like she has a strong support system, but she attributes that to the pioneering of her parents.
“I do have a lot of people who are supportive because they knew my parents, but I’m lucky to have that already set,” Payne said. “But I can only imagine what coming here as a new prof and you’re not from here and you happen to be black and you’re a female and you’re just new jack on the scene. They (the University) are kind of like ‘here you go, good luck to you’ and you can’t operate that way. You have to search for support, and I feel like it should already be there.”
Payne does offer some criticisms and subsequent solutions for the problems she has observed.
“We are in the 21st century, but I don’t think the school is there yet” Payne said. “It feels like the education is not as important to them (students) as the partying. The University hasn’t been able to shift that thinking.”
Though both women have noticed similar problems, Payne sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
“If we’re trying to be the best campus in the South, then let’s do it all the way,” Payne said. “Raise the standards for everybody and we’ll do better.”
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