Ole Miss Embraces Its Painful Past to Move Forward

People trust Robert C. Khayat. That’s a good thing, because the burden of trust is especially heavy at the University of Mississippi, where Mr. Khayat has been chancellor since 1995.

Few universities must grapple with the painful memories and fierce loyalties that cling to Ole Miss. The university’s complex history can be seen in its buildings, like Ventress Hall, where stained-glass windows depict the University Greys, a company of Ole Miss students and professors who fought for the Confederacy and were almost all killed or wounded, and the Lyceum, the university’s first structure, built in 1848, which served as a hospital for both Confederate and Union troops and, in 1962, as a refuge for besieged federal marshals during one of the most violent episodes of the civil-rights movement.

As Mr. Khayat leads a university with such an emotionally charged history through a period of unprecedented change, it has been crucial that alumni, students, parents, and faculty members believe he is looking out for the best interests of Ole Miss, whether or not they agree with him.

Ole Miss was floundering when Mr. Khayat became chancellor. Enrollment at the university’s main campus, in Oxford, had dropped by a thousand students over four years, to about 10,000. Facilities were outdated and decrepit, and the endowment was only $114-million. At a time when the university desperately needed to modernize, its new leader was, in many ways, a living representation of its past.

A native of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and a two-sport star as an undergraduate at the university, Mr. Khayat, 68, is married to an Ole Miss alumna. He had attended Ole Miss during its athletics heyday, a time of tranquillity shortly before the campus riots of 1962, when the university and the state fought violently and unsuccessfully to prevent a black student, James H. Meredith, from enrolling in the law school.

But many here say that Ole Miss needs such a chancellor to embrace the modern era. Who better, the logic goes, to eliminate the use of the unofficial Ole Miss emblem — the Confederate flag — at football games, or to do away with the on-field mascot, Colonel Reb, than a beloved former star athlete who was once bestowed with the title of Colonel Reb by his fellow undergraduates, a high honor at Ole Miss for many years.

The 11 years since Mr. Khayat took charge of the university have featured profound changes. He battled skepticism to create an honors college and to bring a Phi Beta Kappa chapter to the campus, overcoming a century of snubs by the national honor society.

Under his watch, Ole Miss has undergone a facelift, with $300-million in new construction and restoration of its historic buildings, paid for in large part by alumni donations at a time when the share of the university’s budget made up of taxpayer dollars dropped from 54 percent to 21 percent. The changes have attracted more students: Enrollment has grown by 5,000. The number of black students has more than doubled, to almost 2,000.

Supporters say those changes were achieved in part because Mr. Khayat knows when his alma mater must be the University of Mississippi and when it can be Ole Miss. His deft management of the university’s dual image has preserved some traditions and purged others, all while Ole Miss seeks to live up to Mr. Khayat’s ubiquitous slogan: “one of America’s great public universities.”

The university requires a leader “who’s got a connection to the soul of Ole Miss,” says Charles L. Hussey, a professor and chairman of the chemistry department who arrived on the campus as a freshman in 1966. He says Mr. Khayat’s background has allowed him to tear down symbols and traditions at the university.

“He could get away with it,” Mr. Hussey says. “You don’t jump on Chancellor Khayat. Because if you do, you look like a fool.”

The Kick

On November 15, 1958, during Mr. Khayat’s junior year at Ole Miss, he seemed far more likely to be remembered as a failure than as one of Mississippi’s favorite sons.

On one of his regular morning strolls around the campus, Mr. Khayat requires only a little prodding to describe the painful memory of that day. Despite being hobbled by knee problems, he has the posture and physique of a former professional athlete. He wears an Ole Miss track-team T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, and displays his casual charisma, which evokes comparisons to Bill Clinton, as he warmly and sometimes teasingly greets the early-morning set of students, groundskeepers, and faculty members.

Mississippi takes its football seriously, and in 1958 the university was beginning its greatest stretch of excellence in the sport. Mr. Khayat, who earned a scholarship for both football and baseball, was an offensive lineman, but his specialty was placekicking.

On that day in November, his team was squaring off against the University of Tennessee Volunteers in a crucial road game in Knoxville. Ole Miss was trailing by two points. The team had moved the ball to Tennessee’s 29-yard line with a minute and 20 seconds to play when Mr. Khayat was called on to attempt a field goal. If he made it, Ole Miss would probably hold on to win and play in the national spotlight of the Sugar Bowl.

He missed. Wide left.

Fortunately for him, Ole Miss was just entering its football glory days, and would lose only three games in the next four seasons. Mr. Khayat got a second chance, leading the nation in scoring as a kicker in 1959. An academic All-American, he went on to play five seasons in the National Football League.

The blown field goal, however, sticks with him.

“It hurt me badly,” Mr. Khayat says, holding his fingers a few inches apart to show how far his kick erred. “I can see the goal post.”

“It happened in 1958, and it comes up every day,” he says.

Mr. Khayat would be personally and publicly stung at Ole Miss once more, in 1994, when he was rejected in a bid to become dean of the university’s law school — just one year before he was selected as chancellor. Mr. Khayat earned his law degree from Ole Miss shortly after wrapping up his football career, and had taught at the law school for years.

Carolyn E. Staton, the provost, who long served as a member of the law-school faculty with Mr. Khayat, says he was passed over in part because some faculty members were skeptical of his academic credentials, believing him to be an “athletics person.” A friend and supporter of Mr. Khayat’s, she says he was “pained” by the rejection.

Mr. Khayat acknowledges that that rap long followed him, but he says personal failures, particularly the missed kick, have given him an “obsessive commitment to meeting and exceeding expectations.” That drive extends to the university he loves, where he has turned ugly historical episodes into assets while erasing the stubborn image of Ole Miss as a country club for privileged and academically uninterested white students.

Instead of trying to ignore Ole Miss’s resistance to integration, the university under Mr. Khayat’s leadership has embraced that period. In 1999 the university opened the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, which promotes diversity through campus programs in several Mississippi communities. The institute has also collected oral histories and produced a documentary film to commemorate the state’s turbulent civil-rights era.

On October 1 — the 44th anniversary of James Meredith’s enrollment — Ole Miss will unveil a monument to the university’s desegregation, a life-size bronze sculpture of Mr. Meredith walking toward a limestone portal with Greek-revival columns like those featured on several Ole Miss buildings and inscribed with the words “opportunity, courage, knowledge, and perseverance.”

Mr. Khayat says Ole Miss had no choice but to be in the forefront of the national dialogue on racial relations.

“I’ve described the university as a beacon in the state,” he says. “It has a moral responsibility to take the high ground.”

Change and Criticism

Not everyone has praised Mr. Khayat’s aggressive efforts to remake the university. The uproar over the Confederate flag resulted in a lengthy court battle and earned him death threats and a bodyguard. A former state lawmaker expressed his displeasure with Mr. Khayat by mailing him a pair of pink panties and a bra. The backlash continued with the Colonel Reb controversy of 2003, with a white-supremacist group mocking the “Lebanese chancellor” for pushing “integration” at Ole Miss (Mr. Khayat’s grandfather was from Lebanon). A Web site (http://www.saveolemiss .com) continues to carry the torch for Colonel Reb.

Mr. Khayat has also received more-thoughtful criticism, including some for his early firings of several administrators, some of whom he felt had underperformed. To improve the university’s finances, he fired the vice chancellor for administration and finance and brought in a consultant with whom he made the controversial decision to sell a large parcel of university land.

And, most recently, he received heated criticism and charges of being a micromanager for his decision to scrap the first design of the civil-rights monument because he didn’t like its appearance and inscription. The rejected design had survived a lengthy approval process that included input from students, faculty members, and civil-rights veterans, and the vote of an independent jury.

Terry Adkins, an associate professor of art at the University of Pennsylvania whose design Mr. Khayat nixed, last year called the decision a “travesty.”

“You have this small group of people deciding what’s best for everyone else,” Mr. Adkins told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The land sale is one painful choice by Mr. Khayat that has yielded a big payoff. The university’s finances were dire when he became chancellor. Early in his tenure, he began the process of trying to sell 22,000 acres of forested land the university owned in the southern part of the state. Although environmentalists and hunters vigorously protested the sale, Ole Miss eventually earned $40-million from the U.S. Forest Service for the land, money that was reinvested in buildings and landscaping on the Oxford campus.

Mr. Khayat also overcame doubts about his ideas for the campus, most recently his ambitious plan for a performing-arts center. Colleagues were wary of the scale of the planned center and thought it was a potential money pit, but in 1998 Mr. Khayat secured a $20-million gift for the center from the Gertrude C. Ford Foundation. After receiving $10-million more from the state, the university opened the 88,000-square-foot Gertrude Castellow Ford Center in 2002 to largely rave reviews.

State financing has not kept up with the growth at Ole Miss, but Mr. Khayat is a talented fund raiser. The university recently completed a $525.9-million capital campaign. Major gifts, many of them from Ole Miss alumni, have enabled the creation of the honors college, the interdisciplinary Croft Institute for International Studies, the Lott Leadership Institute, and even paid for faculty raises.

“The alumni have been so generous with the university under his leadership,” observes Thomas C. Meredith, commissioner of Mississippi’s governing board for higher education.

A Changing Image

People at Ole Miss are quick to point out that the negative stereotypes that chase the university are frequently based on incomplete or false information. For example, the school colors, a dusky crimson and blue, are often thought to be taken from the Confederate flag. In fact, they were chosen by the university’s founders to pay homage to the colors of Harvard and Yale.

For Ethel Young-Minor, an associate professor of English, the Ole Miss image needed no explanation when she was growing up in Memphis, about 10 miles from the Mississippi border. While she was deciding which college to attend, Ms. Young-Minor, 37, who is black, says she had scholarship offers from institutions in Mississippi. She says her decision to ignore the offers and to attend the University of Tennessee was easy.

“You could not have given me enough money or given me enough scholarships to come to Mississippi,” she says.

By 1996 she was at Ole Miss, teaching English. She is proud of the university, and praises the collegial feeling among faculty members and the unusually amiable dialogue with administrators. Ms. Young-Minor laughs as she describes her membership in the Ole Miss Women’s Council for Philanthropy, which raises scholarship money for young women. For her to belong to a group with a name like that, at an institution that would never have admitted her father, shows how much Ole Miss has changed.

“It’s hard for me to believe,” she says.

For his part, Mr. Khayat admits he is tired of hearing questions about race, although he answers them gamely.

“I’d rather be asked about the law school or the English department,” he says.

To be certain, Ole Miss has more to brag about in recent years. The endowment has almost quadrupled since 1995, to $421.4-million, while the university has topped $100-million in sponsored research for the last several years, double the $53-million it had reached in 1995. Campus officials acknowledge that Mr. Khayat’s strong ties to lawmakers — such as Mississippi’s two Republican U.S. Senators, both of whom are Ole Miss alumni — have not hurt.

Alice Clark, the university’s vice chancellor for research, says a key factor in its growing research enterprise has been Mr. Khayat’s strategy to focus on niches. Rather than trying to compete with the big budgets and facilities of the University of Georgia or the University of Florida, Ole Miss has focused on top programs in fields including natural products, physical acoustics, computational modeling, sensor design, and literature and Southern studies.

Making the Pitch

In his frenetic first few years as chancellor, Mr. Khayat, who was concerned that Mississippi’s brightest high-school students were leaving the state to attend college, personally visited more than 50 Mississippi high schools to pitch the university.

At least, he quips, those recruiting trips meant students “knew Ole Miss was here.” But university officials credit the trips, along with the creation of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, which he championed, with helping to improve the academic reputation of the university, which boasts 43 National Merit Scholars in this year’s incoming freshman class, up from six in 1995. Both programs also helped increase minority enrollment.

Erin Miller was a student at Jackson Preparatory School when Mr. Khayat came to speak there. She later talked with him individually when he dropped by the school library. Although she says she was “star struck” by the encounter, she remembers being surprised by how approachable Mr. Khayat was.

“If I liked him, then I figured I would like Ole Miss,” says Ms. Miller, who graduated from the university in 2004 and now works in the admissions office. “He was Ole Miss to me.”

Although Mr. Khayat has altered the image of the university, many people on the campus say more time must pass for the old wounds to heal. Some black students say they must defend their choice to attend the university to family and friends, and the university still struggles with its image as a party school. But the strong consensus is that Ole Miss is moving in the right direction. And, according to some, the burden of history has helped the university speed its transformation.

“That’s part of the pressure,” says James T. (Pete) Boone, the university’s director of intercollegiate athletics. “To a certain extent I think people operate better with a little urgency.”

‘Everybody’s Favorite Uncle’

The University of Mississippi is small for a public flagship university. The campus is clustered around an east-west axis in a design created by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York City.

During his morning walk, Mr. Khayat describes his desire for the university and the state to exceed low expectations.

“One of the burdens of people in Mississippi is that we’re frequently presented in a negative light,” he says, on a day when headlines proclaim the state as having the highest obesity rate in the country. “I’m really afraid of complacency.”

Mr. Khayat’s desire to exceed expectations is on display in a mundane way during this particular walk across the campus. As he passes through the arched gate at the university’s main entrance, he stoops down to pick up soggy paper trash on the sidewalk.

Although even Mr. Khayat’s biggest supporters may gently complain about his obsession with details, for the most part he seems immune to much of the anti-administration flak that college presidents receive. Faculty members are riding high after having received an average raise of 13.8 percent in July. And somehow, a broad range of students say they identify with their chancellor — no small feat for a 68-year-old who attended a drastically different university.

“While you’re in college, he’s your surrogate family member and everybody’s favorite uncle,” says Rebecca Bertrand, a 2006 graduate of the university and former Associated Student Body president. She says Mr. Khayat pops up in pictures posted by students on their Facebook Web pages.

When students in Ms. Young-Minor’s African-American literature class are asked about Mr. Khayat, the only concern they mention is that he will be hard to replace. The 35 or so students praise his open-door policy, his moral leadership, and his ability to save traditions they say are worth keeping, like the popular tailgating party before home football games.

One student shyly says he was driving around the campus recently when he spotted Mr. Khayat picking up litter. He says he was impressed with the act, particularly given that no one else was around. Later, the student said, he saw a piece of trash on the campus.

“I was tired, and I wanted to pass it so bad,” he says, but he picked it up anyway.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF OLE MISS The University of Mississippi has made substantial gains under the leadership of Robert C. Khayat, who became chancellor in 1995. The university comprises the main campus, in Oxford; a medical center, in Jackson; and two small campuses, in Tupelo and Southaven. Total budget 1995 $164-million 2006 $339-million Endowment 1995 $114-million 2006 $421-million Sponsored research 1995 $53-million 2006 $103-million State contribution to budget 1995 54% 2006 21% Proportion of students on main campus who are black 1995 6% 2006 14% Enrollment 1995 12,254 2006 17,325 National Merit Scholars in freshman class 1995 6 2006 43 SOURCE: U. of Mississippi

http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 53, Issue 6, Page A26