Jackson Jambalaya

This hire ought to work out well….

As an alum, would love to have been a fly on the wall during these Board of Trustees meetings. Thought maybe they would have gotten someone with local connections/Mississippi adjacent. Will see if it works out.

Oh, I thought it was Aaron Neville.

At least he has some idea how to run a college.

Could have chosen a medieval PHd that likes to put on armor and fight with foam swords.

Bless his heart.

Some hard but necessary decisions to make there. Predecessor's package wasn't big enough.

In this day of name changes for institutions of higher learning, Millsaps should change its name to The Walking Dead. Enrollment is significantly down. Tuition is astronomical. The faculty is woke. The financial situation took a big hit under Dr. Lucas and has never recovered and probably won’t. The institution is a white elephant and it’s only a matter of time until it folds.

Talk about a no win job. I'm assuming he'll use this as a resume builder and try to get out in 3 years.

gotta cut some majors and program. it’s been tried before but a near revolt of the faculty saved some of them.

partner with belhaven or mc on the least popular majors!!

I’m a Millsaps grad as well. I would also like to be a fly on the wall at those meetings.

15 or 20 years ago they had 1,000 students, students could get drunk all they wanted, Mike DuBose was there, the Saints were there, and tuition was comparable to paying out of state tuition to a big state school.

Oh how far they’ve fallen. I don’t know of any Millsaps grads that will pay that kinda price tag for their kids to go there. Who the heck are they trying to attract?

I don’t understand all the hate. Best of luck to him. Tough job for sure. Jackson and the metro are better off if Millsaps and the like are successful

Best of luck - kinda like the 'best of luck' concept when the school sent out a notice of this new hire a day early and asked everybody on the massive list to 'keep it quiet' when they planned to announce it 24 hours later. But of course, nobody really cared.

Millsaps is suffering from the expansion of the Honors Programs at MSU, USM and OM - where those students (many of which are children of Millsaps alum) can get a quality education for no cost, as opposed to going to parents school for $40k a year.

Several years ago, a Millsaps education meant something and could somewhat justify the cost. They ought to take a lesson from their sister school to the east and cut that ridiculous tuition claim to something reasonable and quit trying to look like they are worth the money. At 600 student enrollment - less than half of what it was less than a decade ago - hopefully they can keep the doors open as the facility is a star in the dimming galaxy of Jackson.

@3:57 - more likely Neville Chamberlian - to keep with the philosophy of the school

It's only 600?

And to think the students used to hate Harmon.

Will also add that it seems they've turned over/swapped out so many institutional personnel, marketing ploys, and messaging schemes over the last decade or so. Don't think I've gotten a student phone call or an alumni magazine in the mail in years.

I think the AD stepped in to run admissions, which may make sense if D3 athletes are your primary student pool.

If there was/is a compelling, cost-effective brand, they better find it soon.

@8:42 The in-state honors colleges, without question, have taken a toll. I don't want it to take the L; Jackson needs all the help it can get, especially for an eds and meds anchor.

Indeed, it's only 600. No telling what they'll have to do to get enrollment back up. Parents like don't want to send their kids to Jackson either. Small liberal arts colleges like Millsaps are closing like crazy nation-wide, and there are so many reasons why it's a tough sell in the deep south these days. That said, hope the new president can right the ship

When the inevitable closure comes, it might have made a good cross-town campus of Jackson State, and if this were 20 years ago that would have helped with JSU's everlasting housing shortage, but thanks to Jackson's demise and the IHL's plans to diminish JSU, it won't happen. After all, JSU is shrinking faster than Millsaps and that's a done deal. So what happens to Millsaps long term?

His resume hits all the popular buzz-words available on the AI front.

I've always admired a man of upward projection metric calculations in an austere thin-bubble economic model.

You can tell a lot about a man by the socks he wears. If he wears penny loafers and thin socks, be careful - he'll stiff you at lunch.

10:36, it will be absorbed by UMMC.

Imagine asking the question and the answer is:

"Oh, I go to school over at Millsaps".

or...

"I'm a professor over at Millsaps".

@4:15 - What brand of mountain-bicycle you reckon he packs. Even more importantly...the name brand of his luggage.

Pearigen was dealt a very rough deck, when he came in and he managed to keep most of it afloat. There was talk about Millsaps maybe eventually going belly up around 2012-2014. In fact there was one year that they only enrolled half of the expected incoming freshmen. The fact is that the tuition is unreal, and it makes more sense to go to school to Alabama, or a Wash-U, or an out-of-state school, and in some cases, you save money. Also, their refusal to offer graduate programs except for the business school (which is still running strong), is coming back to bite them. Millsaps' insistence to only offer four year degrees, and the MBA program, is coming back to bite them, because the return is very slim. I wish this new guy luck, hopefully he can continue to right the ship/.

The only people who hate on Millsaps are people who didn't go to Millsaps or couldn't go to Millsaps for whatever reason. It's obvious. Why else do you care?

Millsaps is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Both have become very liberal in the past few years.

Millsaps is a good school and people hire their degrees. Their medical school acceptance is out of this world. I didn't attend Millsaps, but I definitely do not want them to close. This school as well as Belhaven and MC, are and have always been expensive! I think that the era of mom and dads money is unfortunately wrapping up as we all become poorer and poorer because our dollars don't go nearly as far as they use to. With the decline of that era we will inevitably see declines in enrollment at schools like this. I have done no research on this topic, that's just my two cents that probably aren't worth 1.

8:17,

6:29 here. I loved Millsaps. I hate on it though. I feel pretentious when someone asks me where I went to college, and I have to respond with “Millsaps.” Have you looked up how expensive Millsaps has gotten? It’s 60K a year. Millsaps is going to say “people don’t actually pay that much.” Well, people don’t know that. The universe doesn’t revolve around Millsaps. What the heck are they doing throwing around a 60K price tag then? They need to charge 30K and give out barely any scholarships.

It’s all been downhill since Bob McElvaine got on Fox News.

Heck, their qb won the Conerly in 2008. Now Millsaps doesn’t even have a qb on its roster.

9:58. MC is now tuition free for Mississippi residents, thanks to a bequest by Leland Speed. The correct language is it used to be expensive for Mississippi.

"The only people who hate on Millsaps are people who didn't go to Millsaps"

And that would be over 99.985% of all college graduates in the state, in the south or in the world.

So stop with the bullshit-elitism. You're not.

And, no...Leland Speed's endowment will NOT pay for every or any Mississippian to attend this school. If it would, the enrollment would be 6200 instead of 600.

I went to Millsaps and it will be a happy day when it closes. Millsaps is nothing more than an echo chamber factory to produce woke robots who cannot think critically. My graduate studies and outside work taught me how to reason. I'll be glad to see all the woke private schools implode.

11:39. Mississippi College has nearly 5,000 students, and its larger than last year. There's not enough dorm space for 6,200 yet, but more are planned and land has been cleared for a mixed use development, which includes dorm space. Please do a modicum of research before saying MC has 600 students.

I was recruited heavily (in sports and academically) from Millsaps back in the late 90's. I thought about going there (and a lot of my friends went there). I just got a better deal elsewhere. We always called it the "Harvard of Jacktown". I had many good nights hanging with friends there when I was in town.

Since those days, the reputation of the school has fallen greatly. Now that I have my own college age (academically gifted) kids, I'm seeing for myself how outdated the "Harvard of Jacktown" has become. We get daily mailings from the State Honor Colleges, personalized birthday cards from Alabama, Florida, and Vandy, and schools like Northwestern and Dartmouth offering to put us up with an alumni for an "official visit". Not a word from Millsaps. 35 ACT, 4.2 GPA, 2 Letters in sports, a national merit finalist, Beta club, and Boys State... nothing. Just kinda weird.

11:30, you don't know your facts. Leland Speed's scholarship is for MISSISSIPPI COLLEGE, not MILLSAPS.

-Elitist

12:12PM, you don't sound very much like someone who "went to Millsaps". As for what you're saying, it's nonsense.

You're on to something, 2:45. Same case where I leave.

4:59 Step outside of the echo chamber, chamber, chamber...

Millsaps has no schtick to distinguish itself to prospective students. Perhaps Millsaps should lean into its location. Developing and effectively marketing a school with a civil rights and literature focus in Jackson is kinda a no-brainer. Look what Hendrix did with their tuition overhaul. Look at Berry. Don’t look at Birmingham Sothern. SLAC turnarounds are happening. But this new president sort of sounds like he is some ai generated jumble of buzzwords. I wish him and ‘saps all the best. Jackson needs Millsaps. Millsaps needs to need Jackson. Go Majors.

@ 12:56 - My apologies. I misread the earlier post to suggest that Speed is posthumously paying tuition at Millsaps, not MC. We can debate the accuracy of that claim at another time.

Great hire. Hopefully Millsaps can remain similar to the little Ivy's in the northeast where the total school size is under 2,000 and students that have the ability to go there have access to world class individualized education.