University of Mississippi

The University of Mississippi ( byname Ole Miss) is a public research university that is located adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi, and has a medical center in Jackson. It is Mississippi's oldest public university and its largest by enrollment.

The Mississippi Legislature chartered the university on February 24, 1844, and four years later it admitted its first 80 students. During the Civil War, the university operated as a Confederate hospital and narrowly avoided destruction by Ulysses S. Grant's forces. In 1962, during the civil rights movement, a race riot occurred on campus when segregationists tried to prevent the enrollment of African American student James Meredith. The university has since taken measures to improve its image. The university is closely associated with writer William Faulkner, and owns and manages his former Oxford home Rowan Oak, which with other on-campus sites Barnard Observatory and Lyceum–The Circle Historic District, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ole Miss is classified as "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". It is one of 33 institutions participating in the National Sea Grant Program, and also participates in the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. Its research efforts include the National Center for Physics Acoustics, the National Center for Natural Products Research, and the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research. The university operates the country's only federally contracted Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved cannabis facility. It also operates interdisciplinary institutes such as the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Its athletic teams compete as the Ole Miss Rebels in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s Southeastern Conference Division I.

The university's alumni include 27 Rhodes Scholars, 10 governors, 5 US senators, a head of government, and a Nobel Prize Laureate. Other alumni have received honors such as Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, and Pulitzer Prizes. Its medical center performed the first human lung transplant and animal-to-human heart transplant.

History

Founding and early history

The Mississippi Legislature chartered the University of Mississippi on February 24, 1844. Fowler (1941), p. 213. Planners selected an isolated, rural site in Oxford as a "sylvan exile" that would foster academic studies. Cohodas (1997), p. 5. In 1845, residents of Lafayette County donated land west of Oxford for the campus and the following year, architect William Nichols oversaw construction of an academic building called the Lyceum, two dormitories, and faculty residences. On November 6, 1848, the university, offering a classical curriculum, opened to its first class of 80 students, most of whom were children of elite slaveholders, all of whom were white, and all but one of whom were from Mississippi. For 23 years, the university was Mississippi's only public institution of higher learning and for 110 years, its only comprehensive university. In 1854, the University of Mississippi School of Law was established, becoming the fourth state-supported law school in the United States.

Early president Frederick A. P. Barnard sought to increase the university's stature, placing him in conflict with the more-conservative board of trustees. Cohodas (1997), pp. 6–7. The only result of Barnard's hundred-page 1858 report to the board was the university head's title being changed to "chancellor". Barnard was a Massachusetts-born graduate of Yale University; his northern background and Union sympathies made his position contentious—a student assaulted his slave and the state legislature investigated him. Following the election of US President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Mississippi became the second state to secede; the university's mathematics professor Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar drafted the articles of secession. Students organized into a military company called "University Greys", which merged with the Confederate States Army. Cohodas (1997), p. 9. Within a month of the Civil War's outbreak, only five students remained at the university and by late 1861, it was closed. In its final action, the board of trustees awarded Barnard a doctorate of divinity.

Within six months, the campus had been converted into a Confederate hospital; the Lyceum was used as the hospital and a building that had stood on the modern-day site of Farley Hall operated as its morgue. In November 1862, the campus was evacuated as General Ulysses S. Grant's Union forces approached. Although Kansan troops destroyed much of the medical equipment, a lone remaining professor persuaded Grant against burning the campus. Grant's forces left after three weeks and the campus returned to being a Confederate hospital. Over the war's course, more than 700 soldiers were buried on campus. Cohodas (1997), p. 11.

Post-war

The University of Mississippi reopened in October 1865. To avoid rejecting veterans, the university lowered admission standards and decreased costs by eliminating tuition and allowing students to live off-campus. In 1882, the university began admitting women but they were not permitted to live on campus or attend law school. In 1885, the University of Mississippi hired Sarah McGehee Isom, becoming the first southeastern US college to hire a female faculty member. Nearly 100 years later, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies was established in her honor.

The university's byname "Ole Miss" was first used in 1897, when it won a contest of suggestions for a yearbook title. The term originated as a title domestic slaves used to distinguish the mistress of a plantation from "young misses". Fringe origin theories include it coming from a diminutive of "Old Mississippi" and from the name of the "Ole Miss" train that ran from Memphis to New Orleans