Ole Miss’s Chancellor Will Step Down More Than a Year Before His Contract Expires

Nick Krug, The Lawrence Journal-World via AP

The University of Mississippi’s chancellor, Jeffrey S. Vitter, will step down in January 2019, the institution announced on Friday, six months after rumblings about his departure were first heard.

Vitter, who has held the job since January 2016, will remain a tenured professor in the School of Engineering’s department of computer and information science, the state’s Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning said in a statement. The statement offered no explanation for the chancellor’s decision.

Vitter’s leadership has “moved the university forward in numerous ways, and we are grateful for his service,” Shane Hooper, the board’s president, said in the statement.

Also in the statement, Vitter said he was “gratified that we have grown dramatically in impact, stature, and commitment in the past three years.” He continued: “We are a more diverse community with a more visible dedication to inclusion and civility.”

In May a writer for Rebel Grove, a website for Ole Miss sports fans, wrote on Twitter that Vitter’s contract wouldn’t be extended beyond its June 2020 expiration date. At the time the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning said in a statement that “there is no truth to the rumor” and that a future contract for the chancellor would be “considered at the appropriate time.”

In recent months Vitter has weighed in on several campus controversies, including an alumnus’s Facebook blunder and a professor’s social-media post.

An assistant professor of sociology, James M. Thomas, caught the ire of conservatives and right-wing media after an October tweet. “Don’t just interrupt a senator’s meal, y’all,” Thomas wrote on the day of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Put your whole damn fingers in their salads. Take their apps and distribute them to the other diners. Bring boxes, and take their food home with you on the way out. They don’t deserve your civility.”

Days after the post, Vitter weighed in on his Facebook page. He didn’t name Thomas, but he said that a “recent social-media post” by a faculty member “did not reflect the values articulated by the university, such as respect for the dignity of each individual and civility and fairness.”

“While I passionately support free speech, I condemn statements that encourage acts of aggression,” Vitter wrote.

Articles about the tweet gained steam on both mainstream and conservative websites, eventually ending up on Breitbart News. Thomas estimated that he’d received at least 300 emails and nearly 100 voicemails in the week and a half after Vitter’s Facebook post. Several people described “very specific threats” against Thomas and his family, and the campus police had to investigate, he said.

Charlottesville and Oxford

Around the same time, Vitter wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper in response to a report issued by a faculty group called the UM Race Diary Project. The group’s report assessed racial microaggressions at the university.

The extensive report, of which Thomas is a co-author, found that “racial and other tensions are a fixture of campus life” at the university. Though the authors found evidence of “interracial generosity,” they wrote that personal experiences revealed a campus “where persons of color are routinely insulted, women are repeatedly denigrated, Muslims are feared, Jews are dismissed, and gays and lesbians are humiliated.”

“Under the circumstances,” the report concluded, “we are not surprised that a racial tragedy like Charlottesville occurred on a college campus. The surprise is that Charlottesville didn’t happen in Oxford.”

In his op-ed Vitter said he was “disturbed” by the incidents chronicled in the report. However, he wrote, he “must take exception” with the assertion that the university had made “halting but tangible progress toward creating an inclusive campus environment.”

“In fact,” Vitter wrote, “UM has made sustained, substantial, and measurable progress during that period.” Nearly 24 percent of students are people of color, he said, and one in eight students is African-American.

Vitter also said it would be “premature” to consider new names for the university’s School of Journalism and New Media, which was named for an alumnus, former administrator, and substantial donor, Ed Meek. In September, Meek wrote on Facebook about recent fights and arrests following football games. “I hesitated until now to publish these pictures, but I think it is important that our community see what the camera is seeing at 2 a.m. after a ballgame.” He attached photos of two black female students, dressed for a night out.

Vitter replied to the post that night, saying it suggested an “unjustified racial overtone that is highly offensive.”

Southern Symbols

Many faculty members and students signed a petition that called for renaming the journalism school for Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist and anti-lynching activist. Meek himself said he wanted his name removed. But in the op-ed Vitter wrote that any naming decision “goes through very careful consideration through an established process.” That process is still underway.

Also, Vitter said, a petitioner’s request to remove the campus statue of a nameless Confederate soldier had already been addressed through a “thoughtful and deliberate yearlong review of all Southern symbols on our campus.” But three history professors argued in an opinion piece of their own the following week that the status of the Confederate statue had never been on the table for discussion by an advisory committee on history and context. (The committee was created by the interim chancellor who preceded Vitter; it has conducted much of its work under the outgoing chancellor.)

The fallout from the Thomas tweet and the report on microaggressions have made things “a bit crazy” on campus lately, said Brice Noonan, an associate professor of biology who is chairman of the Faculty Senate. Despite that, Noonan characterized the senate’s relationship with Vitter as “not bad.” Faculty members met with Vitter last week to discuss their concerns about his responses to both the Twitter controversy and the report on microaggressions, and he seemed “receptive and open” to issuing a statement reaffirming his commitment to academic freedom, Noonan said.

Vitter succeeded Daniel W. Jones, who was ousted in 2015 by the university’s governing board, which cited concerns over the management of the university’s medical center. Jones’s departure was far from seamless. Students, professors, and alumni protested en masse. Angry donors threatened to pull donations. Days after the decision was made, Mississippi’s governing board for higher education seemed to consider reversing its decision, The Chronicle reported at the time.

Ultimately, the board didn’t waver. Vitter, a computer scientist and brother of a former U.S. senator, David B. Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, was selected for the job. He had served as provost of the University of Kansas, been a dean at Purdue University, and taught computer science at Brown University and Duke University. He had no previous ties to Ole Miss before becoming its chancellor.

An interim chancellor will be named “soon,” the board’s statement says.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.