Follow
The University of Mississippi (colloquially known as Ole Miss) is a public, coeducational research university in Oxford, Mississippi, United States. Founded in 1848, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven, as well as the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It also operates the University of Mississippi Field Station in Abbeville. It is both a sea-grant and space-grant institute. Sixty-one percent of undergraduates are from Mississippi and 25 percent of all students are minorities. International students come from 93 nations. Ole Miss is Mississippi's largest university with a total enrollment of 23,096 in fall 2014
The Mississippi Legislature chartered the University of Mississippi on February 24, 1844. The university opened its doors to its first class of 80 students four years later in 1848. For 23 years, the university was Mississippi's only public institution of higher learning, and for 110 years it was the state's only comprehensive university. Until 1962, when James Meredith was admitted after a civil rights challenge, the publicly funded college admitted only white students, excluding any of known African descent.
When the university opened, the campus consisted of six buildings: two dormitories, two faculty houses, a steward’s hall, and the Lyceum at the center. Constructed from 1846 to 1848, the Lyceum is the oldest building on campus. Originally, the Lyceum housed all of the classrooms and faculty offices of the university. The building’s north and south wings were added in 1903, and the Class of 1927 donated the clock above the eastern portico. The Lyceum is now the home of the university's administration offices. The columned facade of the Lyceum is represented on the official crest of the university, along with the date of establishment.
In 1854, the university established the fourth state-supported, public law school in the United States and also began offering engineering education.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, classes were interrupted when the entire student body from the University of Mississippi enlisted in the Confederate army. Their company, Company A, 11th Mississippi Infantry, was nicknamed the University Greys. It suffered a 100% casualty rate during the Civil War.[9] A great number of those casualties occurred during Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, when the University Greys made the deepest encroachment into Union territory. Some of the soldiers crossed the Union defensive fortification wall, only to be killed, wounded or captured. On the next day, July 4, Confederate forces surrendered at Vicksburg, Mississippi; the two battles together are commonly viewed as the turning point in the war leading to victory by the Union. When Ole Miss re-opened, only one member of the University Greys was able to visit the university to address the student body.
The Lyceum was used as a hospital during the Civil War for both Union and Confederate soldiers, especially those who were wounded at the battle of Shiloh. Two hundred-fifty soldiers who died in the campus hospital were buried in a cemetery on the grounds of the university.
During the post-war period, the university was led by former Confederate general A.P. Stewart, a Rogersville, Tennessee native. He served as Chancellor from 1874-1886.
The university became coeducational in 1882 and was the first such institution in the Southeast to hire a female faculty member, doing so in 1885.
The student yearbook was published for the first time in 1897. A contest was held to solicit suggestions for a yearbook title from the student body. Elma Meek, a student, submitted the winning entry of "Ole Miss." Meek's source for the term is unknown; some historians theorize she made a diminutive of "old Mississippi" or derived the term from "ol' missus," an negro term for a plantation's "old mistress." This sobriquet was chosen not only for the yearbook, but also became the name by which the University was informally known. "Ole Miss" is defined as the school's intangible spirit, which is separate from the tangible aspects of the university.
The university began medical education in 1903, when the University of Mississippi School of Medicine was established on the Oxford campus. In that era, the university provided two-year pre-clinical education certificates, and graduates went out of state to complete doctor of medicine degrees. In 1950, the Mississippi Legislature voted to create a four-year medical school. On July 1, 1955, the University Medical Center opened in the capital of Jackson, Mississippi, as a four-year medical school. The University of Mississippi Medical Center, as it is now called, is the health sciences campus of the University of Mississippi. It houses the University of Mississippi School of Medicine along with five other health science schools: nursing, dentistry, health-related professions, graduate studies and pharmacy. (The School of Pharmacy is headquartered on the Oxford campus).
During the 1930s, Mississippi Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, a populist, tried to move the University to Jackson. Chancellor Alfred Hume gave the state legislators a grand tour of Ole Miss and the surrounding historic city of Oxford, persuading them to keep it in its original setting.
During World War II, UM was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a Navy commission.