| University of Southern Mississippi | |
|---|---|
| Motto | Creative. Bold. Determined |
| Established | March 30, 1910 |
| Type | Public University |
| President | Martha Dunagin Saunders |
| Academic staff | 712 |
| Students | 18,029 (Fall 2011) |
| Location | Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA |
| Campus | Urban, 1086 acres (1.7 m²) |
| Athletic Conference | Conference USA (NCAA Division I) |
| Colors | Black and Gold |
| Nickname | Golden Eagles |
| Mascot | Seymour d'Campus |
| Website | www.usm.edu |
The University of Southern Mississippi, informally known as Southern Miss, is a large public research university located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, United States. It is situated 70 miles (110 km) north of Gulfport, Mississippi and 105 miles (169 km) northeast of New Orleans, Louisiana.[1] Southern Miss is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award baccalaureate, master's, specialist, and doctoral degrees.
Founded on March 30, 1910, the school occupies the main campus located in Hattiesburg, and multiple permanent branch campuses: Gulf Park Campus in Long Beach, Mississippi,[2] Stennis Space Center, Jackson County, Keesler Air Force Base, J.L. Scott Aquarium, Gulf Coast Research Lab and Pontlevoy, France.
The University has a particularly extensive "study abroad" program through its Center for International Education, and is consistently ranked as one of the top universities in the nation for the number of students studying abroad each year. It is particularly noted for its flagship British Studies program, which regularly sends over 200 students each summer to live and study in the heart of London. The University is also home to a major polymer science research center,[3] and one of the strongest fine arts programs in the southeastern United States.
Originally called the Mississippi Southerners, the Southern Miss athletic teams became the Golden Eagles in 1972. The school’s colors, black and gold, were selected by a student body vote shortly after the school was founded, and while mascots, names, customs, and the campus have changed, the black and gold colors have remained constant.
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The University of Southern Mississippi is a comprehensive research university and holds a "Carnegie Doctoral Research Extensive" designation. The University's primary mission is "to cultivate intellectual development and creativity through the generation, dissemination, application, and preservation of knowledge." Southern Miss is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and its programs are fully accredited by 30 state and national agencies.[4]
Southern Miss offers approximately 189 programs leading to baccalaureate, master’s, specialist, and doctorate degrees. A faculty of about 715 serves 14,096 undergraduate and 3,158 graduate students, with a total enrollment of 17,254 according to school numbers for Fall 2010. Southern Miss has traditionally drawn many of its students from Mississippi schools and community colleges, hailing from every county in Mississippi, though today the majority of undergraduates come from public schools across the southern United States and around the globe. The University of Southern Mississippi Symphony Orchestra has over 90 members (including undergraduate and graduate students) from the United States and 14 other countries.
The University of Southern Mississippi offers more than 250 clubs and organizations, as well as intramural athletics and special events. Student organizations at Southern Miss include the Student Government Association, The Legacy, The Student Printz (the biweekly student-produced newspaper), The Southerner (the yearbook), Southern Style (the University's student orientation team), national fraternities and sororities, honor societies, and various religious organizations. Southern Miss has over 300 cultural events every year. In addition, the school participates in the NCAA's Division I-A, and Conference USA featuring year-round athletics in 17 sports.
The institution's strengths include its large research endowment, its emphasis on accreditation at the departmental and college level, its respected music and art programs, and its athletic prowess. Several degree programs at the University rank among the best of their kind in the nation. The New York Times Book Review rates the University's Center for Writers as one of the Top 10 in the country, and the Polymer Science and Engineering department is consistently ranked among the nation's top 10 by U.S. News and World Report. The School of Communications is ranked among the top ten programs in the nation, according to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and Southern Miss is one of only thirty percent of business schools in the nation accredited by the AACSB International Association for Management Education.
Dr. Martha Dunagin Saunders, a 1969 graduate of USM, was selected as the ninth president of the University in April 2007, giving her the distinction of becoming the first woman to hold that post.[1]
The University of Southern Mississippi is governed by the University President along with the Mississippi Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learnin.[5] The President of The University of Southern Mississippi is the day-to-day administrator of Southern Miss and is appointed by and responsible to the State Institutions of Higher Learning Board.
The University is organized into five colleges, offering academic programs of study in:
In addition to its five academic colleges, The University of Southern Mississippi also offers the following programs:
Mississippi Normal College, eventually renamed The University of Southern Mississippi, was founded on March 30, 1910 to train educators. The college's first president, Joseph Anderson Cook, presided over the opening session of instruction on September 18, 1912 and oversaw the construction of College Hall (the academic building); Forrest County Hall (men’s and married students’ dormitory); Hattiesburg Hall (women’s dormitory); the Industrial Cottage (training laboratory for home management); and the president’s home (now the Alumni House). In its first session, Mississippi Normal College had a total enrollment of 876 students.
The school underwent more name changes in 1924, to State Teachers College, and in 1940, after instruction had expanded beyond teacher training, to Mississippi Southern College.
The college's fifth president, State Archivist Dr. William David McCain, was installed in 1955 and worked diligently to expand Mississippi Southern College. He oversaw the construction of 17 new structures on campus and convinced Gov. Ross Barnett to give Mississippi Southern College university status in 1962. This resulted in a fourth, and final, renaming of the institution to the University of Southern Mississippi.
McCain's administration also superintended the inclusion of African-American students on campus. At the time the school's mascot was the Southerners and was represented by "General Forrest" on the field.
In a period when pressure was growing nationally to integrate the state’s institutions of higher learning, he was well known to vehemently oppose the prospect of having any black students at Mississippi Southern. In recognition of this, in 1964 James Meredith made his attempt to enter Ole Miss rather than Southern, thinking success more likely there.[16]
Indeed, when Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War veteran attempted to enroll at Mississippi Southern in the late 1950s, McCain made major efforts with the state political establishment and local black leaders to prevent it. As a result, Kennard was twice arrested on tromped-up criminal charges and eventually sentenced to seven years in the state prison.
Dr. McCain’s direct involvement in this abuse of the justice system is unclear. He was certainly as aware as other intimate members of the state political establishment were as to how fraudulent and bogus the charges were but made no public objection.[16][17][18][19]
At the very time McCain was so forcefully seeking to keep Clyde Kennard out of Mississippi Southern, he made a trip to Chicago sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, where he explained the reality of Mississippi life saying that those blacks who sought to desegregate Southern schools were "imports" from the North. Kennard was, in fact, a native and resident of Hattiesburg.
"We insist that educationally and socially, we maintain a segregated society. ... In all fairness, I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting," he said. "The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands."[16][17][19]
By the fall of 1965 both Ole Miss and Mississippi State University had been integrated – the former violently, the latter peacefully. University of Southern Mississippi leaders, such as President McCain, had come to realize that the battle to maintain segregation was lost. Therefore, they made extensive confidential plans for the admission and attendance of their first black students. A faculty guardian and tutor was secretly appointed for each. The same campus police department which six years before had attempted to railroad Kennard to prison when he attempted to enroll, now had very strict orders to prevent or quickly stop any incident involving the two black students. Student athletic, fraternity, and political leaders were recruited to keep the calm and protect the university from such bad publicity as Ole Miss had suffered from its reaction to James Meredith.
As a result, black students Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong and Raylawni Branch were enrolled without incident in September, 1965.[1].[20][21]
In 1972, the Southern Miss Gulf Park Campus was founded and the university athletic teams were renamed from the “Southerners” to the “Golden Eagles.” By the time McCain retired in 1975, enrollment had climbed to 11,000 students.[21]
In the years following McCain's campus transformation, the University of Southern Mississippi continued to expand dramatically. Notable changes included: replacement of the quarter system with the semester system, creation of the Polymer Science Institute, reorganization of the university’s 10 schools into six colleges, affiliation with Conference USA, establishment of the School of Nursing as a college; the implementation of online classes; and an expansion of the Gulf Coast campus.
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| University rankings (overall) | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Forbes[22] | 199 |
| U.S. News & World Report[23] | 203–268 |
| Washington Monthly[24] | 87 |
The beginning of the 21st century at Southern Miss saw growth, in the person of Dr. Shelby Thames. The tenure of Shelby Thames was characterized by a significant increase in the quantity of research being done at the University. USM was assigned the "Doctoral / Research Extensive" designation by the Carnegie Foundation during the Thames era, a category that includes the largest, most important research universities in the nation, which number approximately 150. The most recent figures indicate that annual research funding entering the University exceeds $100 million per year. Dr. Thames has been praised by many, including the faculty, for his response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The October, 2005 meeting of the Faculty Senate of the Gulf Park campus, for example, passed an official resolution of appreciation, and the Hattiesburg American reported that his post-Katrina address to the faculty at Hattiesburg was well-received. Furthermore, no University employees were released in the aftermath of the storm, although the Gulf Park campus alone sustained over $100 million in damage. Such was not the case at Tulane University, for example, where approximately 25% of the staff was released, and significant athletic and academic programs- including the Computer Science major and most engineering programs- were dropped.
The Thames administration has presided over the financing and execution of several construction projects on the campus, often in partnership with private-sector entities. A new addition to the student union holds the second-largest Barnes and Noble store in the southern U.S., for instance, and Barnes and Noble pays $1.5 million in annual rent on this facility. Thames also negotiated a financially favorable food services agreement with Aramark (who will donate $9 million to University construction projects). Other enhancements to the campus realized under Dr. Thames include the upscale Power House restaurant (at an old college power plant), the $15 million sorority village, additions to the football, basketball, and baseball facilities, and many enhancements designed to make the campus generally more open, green, and pedestrian-friendly.
In at least one obvious way, though, the overall academic reputation of the University suffered under Thames, and improved when he left. The University experienced an unexpected, highly-publicized drop from "Tier 3" to "Tier 4" in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings beginning in the 2004 edition, a development which roughly coincided with the height of the Shelby Thames controversy. By 2009, Thames was gone, and the University had experienced an atypically large jump back into the upper portion of "Tier 3.".[25] In the 2011 U.S. News and World Report College ranking USM is in the "Tier 2".
USM ranks highly in the college rankings developed by Washington Monthly, a persistent critic of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. In these rankings, which attempt to make a more holistic assessment of an institution's value, USM ranks 98th out of 245 doctoral institutions. This is the highest ranking of any school in Mississippi. A January 2006 college ranking list created by a graduate student at Stanford University based on Google hits also ranks Southern Miss rather high- 62nd out of over 1700 U.S. institutions.[26]
Semesters at the university run from August to December and January to May, with a 10-week summer session. There are also two four-week accelerated summer terms.
In Fall 2006, The University of Southern Mississippi dedicated a 4-story, multi-million dollar addition to its R.C. Cook University Union. The Thad Cochran Center is now home to a 2-story Barnes & Noble Bookstore (proclaimed to be the largest college bookstore in the Southeastern U.S.), three ballrooms, a stadium-style theater(currently unfinished), student organization offices, and Southern Miss Dining and Fresh Foods Company. There are also several meeting rooms held within the union complex. The Union and Programs team hosts over a thousand events each year.
At nearly 300, Southern Miss' student organizations appeal to a wide spectrum of interests and are categorized under the following areas: Business, Education and Psychology, the Arts, Games and Athletics, Graduate Studies, Greek Life, Health and Human Sciences, Honors Societies, Liberal Arts, the Military, Religious Life, Residence Halls, Community Service, and Science and Technology. The largest organizations based on student membership include the: Student Government Association, African-American Student Organization, University Activities Council, The Legacy Student Alumni Association, and Baptist Student Union.
The University’s presence on the Mississippi Gulf Coast began in 1947 when then Mississippi Southern College first organized classes at Van Hook Hall, Methodist Camp Grounds, in Biloxi. In 1958, classroom space and facilities moved to Mary L. Michael Junior High School in Biloxi. To meet the educational needs of various occupational fields and interests along the Gulf Coast, the University relocated in 1964 to Keesler Air Force Base. Classroom facilities were obtained for night classes from the Jefferson Davis campus of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Junior College; the addition was called the USM Harrison County Resident Center.
In September 1966, Southern Miss further extended its offerings by adding the Jackson County Resident Center, located on the Jackson County campus of the MGCCC in Gautier. The Jackson County Center was built for the University by the Jackson County Board of Supervisors, largely through the efforts of Dr. Shelby Thames when he was executive vice president of USM. The center was constructed with the hope that all four years of a number of degrees would be located in Jackson County through USM and MGCCC. Today, that wish is a reality.
In March 1972, the USM Harrison County Resident Center program was moved from the Jefferson Davis campus of MGCCC to the campus of the former Gulf Park College for Women, located on Highway 90 in Long Beach. Gulf Park was a two-year private school founded by Col. J.C. Hardy, who also founded the Gulf Coast Military Academy. The school opened for classes September 10, 1921, and held its final commencement May 29, 1971. The school’s closing was attributed to the sagging economy, damage inflicted by Hurricane Camille in 1969, and the increasing ability of community colleges to provide quality education at a low cost.
In July 1972, the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning established the USM Gulf Park and Keesler Air Force Base Center as an upper-level degree completion regional campus of the University, offering programs leading to degrees at the baccalaureate and graduate levels. On August 19, 2002, Southern Miss admitted its first class of freshmen on its Gulf Park Campus, making the university the only comprehensive university in the state with dual-campus status.
Today, the Gulf Park campus serves as the central campus for several teaching centers, including:
Prominent historic landmarks at the Gulf Park campus in Long Beach are:
In addition, other USM units in the Gulf Coast region are the elements of the College of Marine Sciences; the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs; the J.L. Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium on Point Cadet in Biloxi; the Hydrographic Science Research Center; and the Center for Marine Sciences at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County.
In February 2000, the IHL approved the University’s concept of Gateway to the Gulf, a complex that will be located at Point Cadet and encompass a new marine sciences education facility to replace the existing structure, a public aquarium and other attractions designed to create a destination site for visitors to the region.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused about $115 million in damage to Gulf Park and lead to the relocation of classes to a healthcare facility in Gulfport, Healthmark Center (1520 Broad Avenue, Gulfport, MS). As of July 2006, USM Gulf Park is still being rebuilt. The Friendship Oak, however, has survived this storm as it survived Hurricane Camille and countless lesser storms that have hit the area.
The University of Southern Mississippi has 14 residence halls and about 5,000 students live on campus throughout the school year.
Freshman Quad Residence Halls:
Triad Complex Residence Halls:
Upper-Class Residence Halls:
Special Housing:
The University of Southern Mississippi is one of the few universities to allow a two-day holiday each year for Mardi Gras. Currently, the University does not hold classes on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many USM students expressed a desire for the holiday, due to the University's proximity to New Orleans and its close ties to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where Mardi Gras is celebrated with a devotion that rivals the annual New Orleans celebration. In 1981, Ken Stribling, who was at the time serving his first of two years as president of USM's student body, organized a student drive to institute a holiday that would occur annually on Fat Tuesday. After the University's Calendar Committee refused to allow the hoilday, Stribling appealed the decision to USM President Aubrey Lucas. At an annual Christmas celebration at USM in December 1981, Lucas made a surprise announcement that USM would try the holiday on Fat Tuesday in 1982 to see how it worked. Stribling made a similar effort in 1982, and Lucas again allowed the holiday for Fat Tuesday in 1983. The next year, the holiday for Fat Tuesday was made a permanent part of the University's calendar.
Subsequent efforts by the University's student government in 2003 led to the addition of the Monday before Ash Wednesday as part of the Mardi Gras Holiday, creating a two-day holiday for the event. While many USM students attend Mardi Gras during the holiday each year, the majority of students spend the four-day weekend preparing for mid-term exams or visiting loved ones at home. Regardless, the Mardi Gras Holiday has become a recruiting tool and an enjoyed novelty at Southern Miss.[27]
The Golden Eagles have excelled in all areas of athletics. Southern Miss has captured national titles twice in football and once in track and field. The Golden Eagle baseball is two time Conference USA champions and have been invited to ten regional NCAA tournaments and also a trip to the College World Series. USM basketball is a one time champion of the NIT tournament.
Southern Miss is also the only institution within Mississippi, and one of only a dozen universities in America, to hold accreditation in all four fine arts emphasis areas: art, dance, theatre and music. The Southern Miss Wind Ensemble has a considerable reputation, as does the University of Southern Mississippi Symphony Orchestra,[28] which has performed with such figures as singer Ray Charles, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, violinist Joshua Bell, flautist James Galway, trumpet player Doc Severinsen, and tenor Plácido Domingo. In the past few years, the Southern Chorale, the university's top choir, has come into national and international prominence. The Southern Miss Pride of Mississippi Marching Band has performed at such events as the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. The Department of Theatre and Dance has been active in the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival. Several productions from the University of Southern Mississippi have been selected for performance at the Region IV (Southeast) festival; two productions (Catfish Moon & The Rimers of Eldritch) have been invited to the national KC/ACTF festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C..
See all Notable Alumni of The University of Southern Mississippi.
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