It’s hard to believe that the Mississippi legislature has been in session for over a month. Now that members have been assigned to committee positions and committees have had time to organize, real work is slowing beginning.

I spent most of last week in Appropriation meetings for various state agencies. Each agency comes before the committee and makes their funding request for the 2021 budget. These meetings generally last about 15 to 20 minutes but they give legislators an opportunity to hear the agencies plans and ask questions.

Here is an interesting fact I learned this week. Our community college professors make about $20,000/year less than a professor at a major university. But even more interesting is the community colleges regularly lose faculty to our K-12 schools, because K-12 teachers are paid better than our community college professors.

Over the past several months the Mississippi Center for Public Policy has completed a deep dive into Mississippi’s universities. Here are a few of their findings:

Graduation rates among several IHL universities are unacceptably low.
Athletic expenditures at the Ole Miss and Mississippi State University have skyrocketed, outpacing many schools throughout the nation. Some of Mississippi’s smaller schools have tried to keep pace, passing on these costs to their students.
No school in Mississippi currently requires all its students to complete a course in American government or history. This deficit inevitably diminishes graduates’ ability to participate effectively in our democratic republic.
Although free speech policies at most Mississippi universities are appropriate, this is not the case at Ole Miss. They have a Bias Incident Response Team with highly disturbing implications for freedom of expression and the due process rights of students.