Jackson State Faculty Complain About Funding

Black Issues in Higher Education, March 4, 1999

JACKSON, Miss. -- Jackson State University needs to hire more professors and scale back its growing administration, the president of the JSU Faculty Senate says, claiming that "excessive administrative expansion" since 1992 is draining dollars needed to hire instructors.

"There is a lack of money to hire instructors in biology, math, history, and English," Ivory Phillips says.

For the past seven years, administrative expansion under JSU's president, Dr. James E. Lyons Sr., has taken away funds needed for library books, computers, and other high-tech tools, according to Phillips. He also criticized a recent report on class size that could be used to reduce faculty at the historically Black institution.

The report says the student/teacher ratio at JSU was 19 to 1. But Phillips says the report was "erroneous." He calculates a ratio of 6 to 1.

Lyons says, in a one-page written statement, there are no plans to trim faculty or administrators: "We may eventually look at some reallocation of faculty as certain departments grow and others decline, but overall, we will not reduce faculty."

JSU's dean of the School of Business, Dr. Glenda Glover, says funding shortages are a longstanding concern.

"We are woefully underfunded in many areas," she says. "We are short of faculty in the business school. We are trying hard to rectify it."

Biology professor Vernon Archer says JSU should invest more on the academic side: "We're on a shoestring budget now. We can't get microscopes fixed."