MUW 20/20: Envisioning Our Future, Fulfilling Our Promise

President Limbert's August 10, 2009, Address to Faculty Staff Convocation Announcing Proposed Name Change

Typically, the opening day convocation at a university is not a newsworthy event, but we have many special guests here today for an important announcement and members from the media are also here. 

This is a good opportunity then for me to say something that I truly believe: this University has the most dedicated faculty and staff of any university.  I want to publicly thank you for your dedication.

The first day of school. Whether preschool, middle school, high school, college … whether you’re the student, the nervous parent, or even the most experienced staff or faculty member … you all have one thing in common:  A full spectrum of emotions.

Those emotions run the gamut from nervous to excited to anxious to confident. And I assure you as I stand before you today, on a personal level, I, too, share some of these same emotions.

But, on a professional level, and on a University level, I stand here today more excited, more confident, and more proud than any other “first school day.”

The reason is that the name change announcement you are all waiting to hear will not only be looked upon for years to come as one of the most exciting moments in our University’s storied history, but it will also be seen as the foundational moment of unprecedented growth, and a renewal in focus, vitality, and spirit of this great University.

In listening to Blake Wilson read the list of old and new names for all those different entities ….I must admit that I didn’t recognize some of the old ones, while I found the current names easily recognizable.  I also had to wonder what these entities went through in their name change processes.

Well, here’s some data on what our process has been like for us:

As impressive as these numbers are, they, of course, tell only part of the story.  The process worked because of the dedication and commitment of the participants.  I thank them all for their hard work.
The University’s part of the name change process has been thorough, thoughtful, and transparent.

The proposed names that finally emerged from that process were Reneau and Waverley.   Before I announce my recommendation, it must be clearly understood that the process does not end with my recommendation.  Instead, the process moves to another stage, which we have repeatedly referred to time and time again.

My recommendation to the IHL Board of Trustees is that our University be renamed Reneau University. 

Let me tell you about Sallie Reneau.

Sallie Reneau was a remarkable woman.  More than any other single individual, she was responsible for us being here at this university. 

Sallie Reneau was 18 years old and teaching in a girls’ school in Grenada when she first petitioned the Mississippi Legislature to establish a college for women.  When she presented her proposal to the legislature, no state-supported female colleges existed in the entire United States.

Reneau said in her 1856 petition:

"The present era is propitious to woman. Our State  . . . is rapidly advancing on the great road of human progress" and the "time has arrived when daughters and sisters may claim the right to have their minds as fully enlightened as sons and brothers; and when man shall cheerfully concede that his own interest and the welfare of the whole human family are promoted by the . . . intellectual improvement of woman. . . . History attests, and everyday observation confirms, that woman is capable of receiving the highest order of intellectual culture" and "wielding a powerful influence in the ‘republic of letters.’"

Sallie Reneau did not envision a female college for just the southern elite.  One of the most significant benefits to be derived from a public female college, she said, would be that both "the indigent and the opulent" would receive from this institution "the imperishable riches of a well cultivated mind."

Just as MUW is known for the teachers it produces, teaching was an honored tradition among Sallie Reneau’s forebears.

In 1856, the Mississippi legislature endorsed Sallie Reneau’s proposal and established the State Female College in Yalobusha County.  Unfortunately, the lawmakers did not appropriate any funds for the institution.

The Civil War delayed but did not destroy Reneau’s dream of a female college in Mississippi.

Rather than romanticizing the impending war, Reneau very practically organized a group of ladies in Panola County to serve as "Mississippi Nightingales” who would visit various camps “to nurse the sick and wounded soldiers and to sew for those who might need it." She wrote Mississippi’s governor: "If you will provide for us as we request, we will endeavor to organize a Mississippi Volunteer Relief Association . . . to go around to the camps to distribute to the [soldiers] such necessities as the Association may furnish them, and to nurse the sick as best we can."  Reneau’s effort to establish a wartime Volunteer Relief Association predated the establishment of the International Red Cross by several years.

Sallie Reneau’s demand, or her plea, to the governor for equal pay for the women volunteers was a remarkably visionary position for that time.

As the Civil War divided the nation into North and South, so it divided the Reneau family into Blue and Grey. While Sallie’s father supported the Confederacy, two of her uncles sided with the Union. One of Sallie’s first cousins was named Ulysses S. Grant Reneau. And while Sallie’s brother William served in the Confederate army, her first cousin Thomas Reneau was a sergeant in the Union cavalry.

Most white Mississippians were psychologically unprepared for military defeat and the emancipation of the state’s 436,000 slaves, but circumstances beyond their control forced them to accept the "world remade by the Civil War."  Sallie Reneau, however, welcomed that bold new world with open arms and renewed her effort to establish a state female collegiate institution.

In 1872, the Reconstruction legislature, which for the first time in the state’s history included African Americans and Republicans, established a state supported female college and named the institution in honor of Sallie Reneau.

The Reneau Female University of Mississippi was to be established at Oxford as a co-equal branch of the University of Mississippi to provide college level courses to women "on the same and equal privileges that the males have been and are now being taught."  The statute named Sallie Reneau "Principal of Reneau Female University, and Vice-President of the faculty of the University of Mississippi, at Oxford."

One of the special features of Reneau Female University was its commitment to Mississippi’s increasingly important teacher corps. In 1870, Mississippi had established a statewide system of public education, so the Reneau Female University would provide four years of education for prospective teachers in return for those graduates working two years in the new public school system.

But, again, Sallie Reneau’s dreams were dashed when the legislature did not appropriate any funds for Reneau Female University.

In 1872, the state of Mississippi was funding the University of Mississippi, Alcorn University (which was a public university for African Americans), the State Normal School (which was a public coeducational teachers college for African Americans in Holly Springs), and the normal department at Tougaloo (which was a private co-educational college for African Americans in Jackson).  White women were the only segment of Mississippi’s population that did not reap the benefits of state-supported higher education.

But Sallie Reneau would just not give up on her vision for a Mississippi university for women, where "the indigent and the opulent" could acquire "the imperishable riches of a well cultivated mind."  Apparently under the spell of her persuasive power, in 1873, the Mississippi legislature established the Reneau Female University of Mississippi at Sardis.

Reneau’s crusade for the education and elevation of women was a remarkable story and what she had long envisioned was at last achieved in 1884 with the founding of the Industrial Institute and College at Columbus, largely through the efforts of Annie Coleman Peyton and Olivia Valentine Hastings.  However, Sallie Reneau did not live to see the fulfillment of her dream.

During the Yellow Fever epidemic in the late summer of 1878, Sallie Reneau went to Germantown near Memphis, Tennessee, where she organized a small band of ladies to care for those who were sick and dying from that scourge that swept across the lower Mississippi valley. In late 1878, Sallie Reneau wrote to her father:

My dear Father, I am tired . . . It has been two months of continual fear and excitement, which is as much as human nerves can stand. . . .There have been ten thousand deaths from this disease . . . and it has scattered gloom and distress all over the land.

I have never felt so entirely helpless as now. Who is there to look to but God?  God help us! I am low spirited, distressed. I had rather die here. I am glad that I came. God bless you! Good night.

Two weeks after she wrote this letter, Sallie Eola Reneau fell victim to that dreaded disease.  Her obituary in the October 20, 1878, issue of the Memphis Daily Appeal speaks eloquently of this truly remarkable woman:

The deceased leaves a large circle of friends throughout the Union who will mourn her  loss. A woman of great mental endowments and rare intellectual attainments, she leaves her impress upon the minds and hearts of those who were favored in being her pupils, as well as upon her associates and friends. The motto of her life was "Universal love to all mankind," and like many others at this hour, she laid down her life for her neighbors and  friends.  

            “Verily Death loves a shining mark.”
When Mississippi’s United States Senator James L. Alcorn learned of Sallie Reneau’s death he declared, "The State of Mississippi, at the earliest session of her legislature, should erect over her remains some monument . . . worthy of this great scholar of the state of which she was proud to be have been a daughter."

I believe that one hundred and thirty one years after her death, the monument worthy of Sallie Reneau, a true loyal daughter of Mississippi, is to name this wonderful institution Reneau University.

We have now completed the first stage in the renaming process.  The process now moves to the IHL Board of Trustees, who will make a recommendation to the Mississippi Legislature, which alone has the constitutional authority to name and rename state institutions.

We must remember that this University is not an island.  Rather, we are part of a greater system of higher education supervised by a single board of trustees.  That board is charged with ensuring that Mississippi’s citizens have an efficient and effective university system that is both accessible and affordable.

We must also remember that our University is a university of and for the entire State; therefore, we must listen and be open to those who govern the state at large. 

In my time as President, I have seen Board members and our legislators work day and night, year in and year out to improve our system, even when times were difficult and there are more clouds than sunshine.

I want to conclude by quoting President Reagan.  His optimistic view of America mirrors the optimism we should feel about our University at this time.  President Regan said: 

“It is time for us to realize that we are too great . . . to limit ourselves to small dreams.  We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline.  I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do.  I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

I will close by saying that serving as President of this University is a great honor. 

Thank you.