(Crossposted from Brainstorm)
The University of Mississippi’s decision in spring 2007 to send the Commission on Presidential Debates its $1.35-million application fee prompted a campus visit that summer by a commission team headed by producer Marty Slutsky. According to Andy Mullins, executive assistant to Chancellor Robert Khayat, Slutsky was taken by the beauty of the campus and the suitability of its Ford Center for the Performing Arts as a debate site. He was impressed by the school’s recent efforts to overcome its history of troubled, sometimes violent race relations. These efforts have been both symbolic—a statue of James Meredith adjacent to the Lyceum, the scene in 1961 of a white riot meant to keep Meredith from enrolling—and tangible: a large and growing African-American student population (about 16 percent). Rich Forgette, the chair of the political science department and a northerner, says, “The University of Mississippi has a more diverse student body and a more open dialogue on race relations today than northern schools that I’ve experienced.”
Slutsky worried, however, about some other things. Ole Miss is 80 miles from a major city and airport. Where would the roughly 3,000 expected media people stay? Ole Miss’s answer—mostly in Memphis—was acceptable in part because of equally remote Centre College’s experience hosting a successful debate in remote Danville, Kentucky, in 2000. And where would they work? In the large, wood-floored, big-screened, wired-to-the-hilt tent the university would construct adjacent to the Ford Center. In the end, Ole Miss promised to make more than $3.5-million worth of adjustments to the campus, all of it raised (like the application fee, a gift from the Herrin Foundation) from private donors by Khayat. About $1.5-million of that will be of lasting value to the university, notably the state-of-the-art information technology improvements it’s making.
Ole Miss also mobilized the state’s political leadership—its governor, senators, and, because they’re all Republicans, former Democratic governor William Winter—to write to the commission on the university’s behalf. “The commision tells you politics doesn’t affect its decisions, but we wanted to cover all our bets,” says Mullins.
From summer until November, Ole Miss, like the other 18 debate applicants, waited. According to Mullins, “The commission doesn’t tell you anything until they make their formal announcement.” Even now, the university has no idea why it got the first presidential debate this year instead of a later debate, the vice presidential debate, or no debate at all.
Next: How the debate is affecting life on campus.
