The jurist who brought so-called “open enrollment” to Mississippi higher education as part of settling historic racial discrimination in funding and resources lawsuit died last month, but he left a powerful shadow over the state’s university system.
Mississippi U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers Jr. died Oct. 15 at his Oxford home at the age of 88. He served in the state’s federal Northern District from his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 until his death. Biggers took senior status in 2000.
After graduating from Millsaps College, Biggers enlisted in the U.S. Navy and over four years served as a navigator on the P2V Neptune maritime surveillance and anti-submarine bomber aircraft. The grandson of a minister, Biggers briefly explored a career in the ministry at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia.
But Biggers soon found his way to the University of Mississippi School of Law and after graduation launched what would become a distinguished six-decade legal career.
Before rising to the federal bench, the Corinth native served as the Alcorn County prosecuting attorney and later district attorney and circuit judge in the state’s First Judicial District – logging 20 years in state and local courts.
The hallmark case in Biggers’ outstanding federal judicial career was the Ayers higher education lawsuit. At inception, the lawsuit was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But in 1992, the Supreme Court sent the case back to Biggers’s court to address the issues of eliminating the effects of state-enforced segregation. Biggers ruled in 1995 that there were still vestiges of discrimination in Mississippi higher education.
Biggers was in charge of enforcing the Ayers settlement, which imposed the same admissions standards for all of Mississippi’s eight institutions of higher education – or what came to be called “open enrollment.” These standards were based on a combination of factors, including GPA and/or ACT, CPC and SAT scores.
For context, the late Jake Ayers Sr. of Glen Allen filed the suit in 1975 on behalf of his children and other Mississippi Black college students, claiming the state had historically discriminated in providing equitable facilities and programs for Jackson State University, Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University in comparison to the state’s predominantly white colleges and universities.
Ayers never lived to see the case adjudicated, but his widow and the rest of the plaintiffs didn’t let the case die with him. Some 30 years later in 2002, the $503 million Ayers settlement that Biggers approved was designed to correct more than a century of discriminatory state taxpayer neglect at ASU, JSU and MVSU. In that settlement, the state and Ayers plaintiffs agreed that the state would distribute $503 million over 17 years to the three universities.
Earlier this year, in a separate case, the Supreme Court reversed a longstanding precedent allowing race as a college admissions consideration that traces back to the late 1970s and that was reaffirmed in part in the early 2000s. The case involved admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
In reaction to the high court decision, Mississippi Commissioner of Higher Education Alfred Rankins Jr. said: “In general, Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning undergraduates are admitted based on completing the college preparatory curriculum in high school, high school GPA, and ACT/SAT score.”
In broad, blunt strokes, Rankins stated Mississippi’s college admissions standards — standards that evolved in great measure out of the settlement of the protracted Ayers higher education lawsuit in the state – weren’t significantly impacted by the ruling.
But one possible unintended consequence of the Ayers settlement is the issue of raising admission standards at the state’s public universities, should some universities desire. That’s one eventuality not addressed by the long slow journey to settle the Ayers lawsuit and craft a path forward for Mississippi higher education. But Biggers was certainly an impactful bridge from the Ayers litigation to current state university admissions practices.
17 comments:
Wow, ole Sid said absolutely nothing in the article.
9:26 - I understood it fully. Why not submit an article of your own and give us a chance to critique it.
Unfortunately, it overlooked legacy admissions and how monetary gifts seem to allow the dumbest among us to graduate from colleges even at the post graduate levels.
The legal effort should have focused more on moving towards a meritocracy.
The " good news"( tongue in cheek) is that autocrats usually know they need smart, well educated people to help them.
The bad news is our would be autocrats missed that memo as they were legacies or attended colleges dependent on other than non-educational influences.
The bottom line is that your "beliefs" cannot be strong if you don't think you can, on merit, win the argument as to why your point of view is superior. You should be able to take apart the opposing position on the merits of yours and the weakness of the opposition without personal insults or lies.
The Ayers lawsuit was a terrific example of what happens when one side of a lawsuit has not the resources or direction to fight to a just conclusion. What Morgan and Morgan calls "going toe to toe". The Plaintiffs ended up settling for nothing but the right to "integrate" which they could not be reasonably expected to do without substantial funding for programs which could favorably compete with the better funded universities to get white students who would otherwise never consider enrolling there. They simply ran out of gas and settled for nothing more than money they would have gotten anyway. Since the Ayers suit one need only look at the development on the respective campuses to see who "won". The state and the IHL had a losing hand but really won when the plaintiffs had to fold their hand when they could not call and stay in the game.
Sid and Jerry Mitchell have to be related.
TL;DR: The judge in the case that enshrined mediocrity for all of Mississippi’s public universities died recently.
I worked in admissions at a University and we looked at students transcripts and stamped them yes or no.
Why should we look at anything but grades for anyone? We even offered remedial ACT testing and all sorts of special considerations and accomodations for children with "limitations"
I know that athletes were a whole separate story, but jesus christ if you could not get yourself approved with all the avenues we offered, you should not be in college and you should THANK us for NOT taking your money.
If you're not interested in history, which this article was about, then I can't help you.
@10:19-- duh?
Ayers Decision = Gotta get more of them white Russians enrolled at JSU in order to make it look like we comply. Truth.
Clearly Ayers backfired. Wound up with a federal judge admonishing HBCUs for not admitting or recruiting white students and required them to get about the business of doing so.
That, Salter, is the only way Ayers 'changed education in Mississippi'.
You can always see poor journalism when they fall back on race issues
5:12 Partly true. The backfire part. HBCU's admitted whites and anyone else long before Ole Miss, MSU or USM allowed integration. Whites simply chose not to go to "those schools". The problem was, as the plaintiff's and Judge Biggers noted, there was duplication of all the HBCU curriculum at the predominantly white universities which were far better funded. So why would whites enroll in inferior programs at HBCU's? That issue still remains the same. Ole Miss, MSU, USM, and the rest did not have to recruit black students since they have the resources the HBCU's never had. The HBCU's were forced to scrap for any "minorities" they could get, often from foreign countries. The "Ayers settlement" was a joke and did not change the status quo one bit.
History will show Judge Biggers presided over a fiasco (the fix was in). His career had to be better than that one case. Let him rest in peace.
All our Universities should increase enrollment requirements. College shouldn’t be for everyone.
The percentage of funding some colleges in the state has shrunk over the years. I’ve heard that some colleges only get about 25% of their funding from the State of Mississippi. The rest comes from tuition and donations. The tail is waging the dog.
I am white and enrolled in a HBCU for one class. I called the school and asked about Ayers money as I heard there was scholarship money available. The lady told me that I was not eligible since I was not degree seeking at the university. When I asked if I was being counted as a white student, the lady hung up on me.
Judge Biggers allowed the state to settle with the victims for a nickel on the dollar. I suppose that's not his fault.... They did get the nickel.
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