Change comes slowly to Mississippi, a state that puts tremendous stock in tradition and is predisposed to reject anyone and anything that challenges it.
But change does come, however belatedly. Just as we were confident several years ago that Mississippi would eventually change its flag, we are equally confident that it will eventually change the name of the state’s lone university that was founded based on the students’ gender.
It will change the name of the Mississippi University for Women for three reasons. The name is inaccurate, it’s old-fashioned, and the university will not grow with it.
The latest to spark discussion about a name change is its current president, Nora Miller, an alumna of the school who has worked there for more than 20 years, the last four as president.
She has formed a task force to examine a name change, reviving an issue last addressed in 2009 by a previous president, Claudia Limbert. Limbert wanted to change the school’s name to Reneau University — to honor the woman who pushed for the school’s creation in the mid-19th century — but she was stymied by opposition from outspoken alumnae.
As years pass, though, many of those traditionalists die or age out. Younger generations of MUW graduates — including men for the past four decades — don’t necessarily see the school’s name as an asset. Some consider it an oddity on their resumé and a liability to building the school’s enrollment past the 2,700 or so it has been stuck on for decades.
Presently, men make up 18% of the student enrollment at MUW. There almost certainly would be more if the word “women” were not in the school’s name. Previous research has also shown the name hindered the recruiting of female students, who have less stratified perspectives than their mothers and grandmothers had.
A nice compromise would be changing the name to something gender-neutral that includes the letter “W,” so that the school could keep it’s well-branded nickname, “The W.” One suggestion years ago was Welty University, named after Eudora Welty, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author who attended the school for two years in the 1920s.
Mississippi University for Women is a wonderful public university, a liberal arts college with strong academics, a nurturing faculty and a close-knit campus.
It just needs to get with the times.
