My friends at The Daily Mississippian,
As an award-winning publication that’s touted as the cornerstone for this university’s journalistic objectivity, your coverage of Glenn Boyce and the IHL’s search process for a new chancellor has been extremely disappointing and one-sided. From your short-sighted editorial vitriol to your distasteful article that insinuated our new chancellor harbors some segregationist sentiment simply from his employment history, you’re trying to find a politically conspiratorial throughline that simply isn’t there.
Instead of sensationalizing these events, give us articles shedding light on why the IHL was constitutionally given this authority in the first place. Maybe as a result, protesters and critics would know to advocate to our state legislature, where there’s power to reevaluate the IHL’s governance structure, instead of to the IHL, which lawfully operated within its parameters. Tell us what bylaws (201.0509) the IHL used to justify its decision-making and then attempt to qualify that it’s corrupt. Make clear that our university community always only had advisory power. If you’re shouting for a fair process, condemn the leakers that broke confidentiality during the interview process. And if you’re going to editorialize, provide the not-so-wild alternative that the IHL members knew from their professional and personal experience with Boyce that he was the most qualified candidate for Ole Miss.
You have every right to be upset, but don’t purposefully vilify the IHL without providing both sides. Don’t render a guilty verdict to our new leader before he’s had a chance to testify. Don’t say a process is corrupt without explaining what that process is fundamentally. You all have the most incredible opportunity and responsibility to help shape informed public discourse on this campus, to present the facts objectively and to be a mouthpiece for the students. But this isn’t the way to do it. This, as you eloquently put it, is “bullshit.”
Rod Bridges was the 2015-2016 Associated Student Body president and is currently a University of Mississippi law student.
