The State Board of Election Commissioners voted Wednesday to allow the Mississippi Democratic Party to replace its candidate for secretary of state after its previous nominee, Shuwaski Young, announced he was withdrawing from the race.
The three-member commission, comprised of Gov. Tate Reeves, Attorney General Lynn Fitch and Secretary of State Michael Watson, also voted to accept Young’s reason for exiting the race.
Young announced last month that he intended to drop out of the race because he experienced a “hypertensive crisis” that would have made campaigning over the next several months difficult.
State law allows for party nominees to withdraw from a general election if the reason is non-political, including medical reasons.
But shortly before the Democratic candidate revealed his place to withdraw from the race, an election official with the secretary of state’s office wrote Young a letter questioning if the candidate met the statutory requirements to run for office, as previously reported by Mississippi Today.
Young claimed the letter questioning his qualifications had no bearing on his final decision to exit the race. Still, it was up to the commission, made up of all Republicans, to determine if Young’s sudden exit was truly medical and not political.
Watson, the incumbent secretary of state, sent a proxy to the meeting, but his representative abstained from voting because the issue involved Watson’s political opponent. Fitch and Reeves approved Young’s request without any major discussion.
The next step is for the Democratic Party’s executive committee to name a substitute nominee to appear on November’s general election ballot. State law does give the party a deadline for submitting a replacement, but the secretary of state’s office is required to publish a sample of the general election ballot by September 13.
Mississippi Democratic Party Chairman Cheikh Taylor did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when the party intends to announce its replacement candidate.
Brandon Presley, the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, stood in front of the gates of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion last week to lob two major accusations at his Republican opponent, Gov. Tate Reeves, over his connections to the state’s welfare scandal.
The first allegation was Reeves has accepted nearly $1.7 million in donations from people who have personally benefited from the state’s welfare scandal that Mississippi officials have labeled the “largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.”
The second major claim was that University of Southern Mississippi-affiliated donors began to quickly donate to Reeves after he approved the firing of Brad Pigott, the state’s attorney who initially handled a civil lawsuit to recoup misspent welfare dollars.
“Today, our campaign is revealing that his rich friends who have benefitted from the largest public corruption scandal in state history and Tate’s efforts to stifle that investigation gave his campaign nearly $1.7 million in return,” Presley said.
The Democratic nominee claimed most of the contributors who had profited from the scandal were affiliated with the USM Athletic Foundation, which landed $5 million in federal welfare funds to help construct a volleyball stadium. This project and its welfare funding source, reporting has shown, was shepherded by NFL legend and USM alumnus Brett Favre.
To support his corruption claim, Presley’s campaign team distributed a spreadsheet to reporters that listed 54 individuals and companies who were purportedly affiliated with USM and who have donated to Reeves. But a review of those groups and people by Mississippi Today shows that at least 20 of them have no apparent ties to the scandal and have not served on any leadership panel at USM’s athletic foundation.
Presley’s math on the donations is accurate, but his claim that Reeves accepted $1.7 million from people who directly “benefitted from the scandal” is misleading and lacks evidence.
For example, the spreadsheet lists Joe Frank Sanderson Jr., CEO of Laurel-based poultry producer Sanderson Farms, as someone who has benefitted from the welfare scandal and who has donated over $300,000 to Reeves since he first ran for public office in 2003.
Sanderson is a major USM donor and a top campaign donor to Reeves, but there’s no public evidence to show that he has profited from the scandal that involves at least $77 million of questionable spending, most of which was funneled through the Mississippi Department of Human Services during former Gov. Phil Bryant’s administration.
The campaign’s other serious charge is that donations from USM-affiliated donors spiked by $244,000 after the governor signed off on cutting Pigott loose as the lead attorney in the civil litigation.
On Presley’s distributed spreadsheet, Mississippi Today tabulated 32 total donations that those contributors made after June 22, 2022, the date Pigott was fired.
But only about half of those donations occurred between the day after Pigott was fired to the end of the calendar year — a five-month window that would most clearly show if a correlation between Reeves’ campaign donations and Pigott’s termination existed.
The rest of those donations occurred in 2023, when Reeves announced he was running for reelection, arguably the time when any candidate’s donations would spike.
While the campaign’s list of donors with known ties to the scandal is inflated, Presley’s decision to highlight the USM Athletic Foundation appears timely and warranted. The state’s civil lawsuit to recoup misspent TANF funds is ongoing, and just last week, DHS attorneys subpoenaed almost 30 current and former members of the athletic foundation, the USM athletic department and the alumni association.
The latest subpoenas, which Front Office Sports first reported, include a handful of names or businesses that also appear in the Presley campaign’s distributed spreadsheet of donors who have allegedly benefited from the scandal.
Without a doubt, there are any number of welfare scandal-related questions Presley could publicly ask of Reeves. Just last week, text messages released by the governor’s campaign to preempt Mississippi Today reporting show that his brother, Todd Reeves, coordinated a damage control strategy with State Auditor Shad White over part of Favre’s early role in the scandal.
Additionally, why does the governor continue to hold on to political donations from Nancy and Zach New, two people who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes connected to the welfare scandal? And what, exactly, was the extent of Reeves’ involvement in his personal trainer receiving more than $1 million in welfare funds?
To be fair, Presley has raised many of these questions during the campaign cycle. But why would he put forward a half-baked accusation on USM donors, especially when many of the college’s alumni are part of a crucial voting bloc he needs to win in November?
Instead, Presley chose to stand in front of the Governor’s Mansion and potentially undermine his long-standing strategy of pairing the governor with the scandal. To outright claim, without evidence, that many USM-affiliated donors are pulling the levers of Reeves’ campaign stretches the truth about a widespread scandal that, no doubt, deserves more facts and answers.
Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging House Bill 1020 are looking for a workaround to prevent the appointment of judges to the Hinds County Circuit Court and a separate court system within the county.
Under the law, passed during the past legislative session, Supreme Court Justice Michael Randolph is tasked with appointing four temporary judges to the circuit court and one to the Capitol Complex Improvement District court. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Jackson residents argues HB 1020 violates the U.S. Constitution for race discrimination. A temporary restraining order in place since May has prevented Randolph from making those appointments, but Randolph was dismissed from the lawsuit in June, putting into question whether the court can continue to block his appointments.
If the restraining order is lifted, Randolph will be able to immediately appoint judges, the plaintiffs argue. Attorneys are asking U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate to approve motions that would still block appointments without focusing on the chief justice.
Plaintiffs are requesting a temporary restraining order against four yet-to-be-known circuit court appointees to prevent them from taking oath and assuming office. Although the identities of the judges are not known, the plaintiffs plan to give them notice of the restraining order through a legal notice in the Clarion Ledger, attorneys said.
“A continuous and seamless prohibition is further necessary to maintain the status quo and avoid possible irreparable harm from any violation of constitutional rights to equal protection of the law,” plaintiffs wrote in the Aug. 3 motion for a temporary restraining order.
Another motion by the plaintiffs asks to amend the lawsuit complaint to add defendants: two state officials, the five unknown court appointees and two yet-to-be-known prosecutors appointed to the Capital Complex Improvement District court by the attorney general.
Plaintiffs are also asking Wingate to clarify that Randolph was dismissed at the plaintiff’s request for injunctive relief but not remaining claims for other forms of relief.
Attorneys for the defendants – state officials such as Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, Capitol Police Chief Bo Luckey and the attorney general – have opposed the motions in writing and in court Tuesday.
Wingate did not rule on any pending motions from the bench. He plans to prepare a written order addressing Randolph’s presence in the lawsuit by next Wednesday, when he will hold another hearing. Remaining motions will likely be addressed in writing in the coming weeks.
A separate state challenge to House Bill 1020 is ongoing. The Supreme Court has not ruled in that case.
On Tuesday, Wingate also heard from the U.S. Department of Justice about why it wants to intervene in the lawsuit and whether its presence would prolong the case.
The Civil Rights Division argues the appointment of judges to the Hinds County Circuit Court and creation of a new separate court system in Jackson is racially discriminatory and unconstitutional, according to court records.
The state argues that the federal government is attempting to sue the state of Mississippi to get around the court’s dismissal of Randolph in the lawsuit and his ability to appoint judges.
Wingate also asked whether this was the DOJ’s driving force behind the department’s intervention.
Attorney Bert Russsaid circumventing his order was not the driving force behind the department’s intervention, nor would its presence prolong the case.
“Our interest is to ensure the residents of Hinds County are free from discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause,” he said.
The Oak Grove Warriors last week became the first Mississippi football team to ever knock off perennial Alabama powerhouse Hoover. Oak Grove coach Drew Causey joins the podcast to talk about the victory and his talented Warriors. Also, the Cleveland boys remember Jimmy Buffett, the Mississippian who parlayed his passion and his talent into billionaire status and made people smile all along the way.
CLEVELAND — It was the fourth day of classes at Delta State University last fall when the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Ellen Green, asked the music department to not hate her forever.
The 12 faculty members had just experienced one of the most tragic things to ever happen at the tiny college in the Mississippi Delta. Their department chair, Karen Fosheim, had been beaten to death in her home. Her stepson, then 14 years old, confessed to killing her.
It was on Green to hire a new chair for the grieving department. That day in August, she said she’d finally settled on someone to do it: Kent Wessinger, Ph.D.
A self-proclaimed “people scientist,” Wessinger has been called by one professional development group the “world’s foremost authority on workforce trends and solutions.” The tagline for his consulting company, the Florida-based Retention Partners, which focuses on millennials in the workforce, is “attract, engage and retain.”
He had been the headmaster of a missionary school in Jamaica, a program coordinator at the University of the Virgin Islands,and a visiting faculty member in entrepreneurship at a university in Belize, where in 2018 or so he says he struck up a friendship with Andy Novobilski, who’d go on to become Delta State’s provost. Novobilski announced in August that he was stepping down.
But Wessinger was not a musician. He was not even a tenured faculty member at Delta State or any university. According to his LinkedIn profile, he had never run a university department.
Green acknowledged it was “highly unusual.” That’s why the university planned for Wessinger to have a co-chair, a music faculty member who he’d simultaneously train to eventually take over full leadership of the department.
“He is a people person,” Green said, according to a recording of the meeting. “He is very likable. I found him to be — how do I put this? He likes building relationships. He understands what we do is all based on relationships.”
Despite Wessinger’s professed leadership expertise, his year helping lead the embattled music department did not raise morale or build bonds between faculty and students, but rather further grieved faculty who already feared for the department’s future, according to interviews with more than 16 faculty and current and former students. Multiple people asked not to be named, fearing retaliation.
Wessinger’s legacy in the department goes beyond personal or professional disagreements. He has been accused of domestic violence — a fact that, once uncovered, didn’t sit well with faculty still rattled by Fosheim’s killing.
His appointment raises a crucial question: Did Delta bring in the right person to lead its respected music department, and did it do enough — or anything — to vet him? And, if it did know about the past claims against Wessinger, what was Delta State’s responsibility to inform its faculty and students after the trauma they had suffered?
For some faculty, Wessinger’s decisions as department chair — made with the administration’s support — were possibly career-ending. He was involved in an attempted firing of the tenured band director, Erik Richards, a decision that a university committee recommended be overturned. He recommended denying tenure to an award-winning vocal teacher, Jamie Dahman, based in part on what Wessinger admitted, in his denial letter, was speculation.
A third faculty member who asked to not be named was reprimanded by the dean for unacceptable conduct and saying Wessinger had been accused of domestic violence, which the dean called “defamatory,” according to a letter the faculty member sent to Human Resources.
Students were also affected by the seeming disarray. In at least one instance, Wessinger took standard student complaints to human resources instead of following the typical process in higher education: To run them up the academic chain.
“The entire music department and the faculty were already mourning Dr. Fosheim, and now I feel like it’s just been constantly going downhill ever since she died,” said Lexie Johnson, a fifth-year music education major. “We just can’t catch a break.”
For his part, Wessinger says that every decision he made was for the students and in consultation with Julia Thorn, his co-chair. After granting an interview to Mississippi Today in July, he stopped discussing matters related to the university, claiming Delta State had instructed him and other administrators to “have no further contact with the press.”
“All of those decisions were made out of one single spirit and that spirit was for the students,” he said in July. “We don’t want this department to die.”
Delta State declined to comment on a majority of Mississippi Today’s inquiries, responding only to three questions a spokesperson said were not about “confidential personnel matters.”
Wessinger’s controversial handling of the department comes as Delta State is experiencing an employee retention problem. Since 2018, it has lost 46 faculty members, more than any other public university in the state, according to data from the Institutions of Higher Learning. Last school year, multiple departments were helmed by interim chairs, though music was the only one where an interim wasn’t an expert in its speciality.
And IHL recently cited one music degree for producing few graduates, putting it at risk of shutting down.
“If it doesn’t work with Dr. Wessinger, it’s four months, okay?” Green told the faculty. “This is very, very temporary.”
The Heartbeat of the Department
Like much at Delta State, the music department has seen better days.
Its building, Zeigel Hall, which sits on the campus’ historic quadrangle, in recent years has been plagued by asbestos and a faulty elevator that’s known to trap students for hours at a time.
The instruments are aging. The enrollment has shrunk. The band used to be renowned for producing band directors, but nowadays, students go to other schools, seeking the pomp of a traveling SEC game or the bravado of the Sonic Boom of the South.
Karen Fosheim, a pianist who became chair of Delta State University’s music department, in 2016, was found dead in her home in Boyle on June 14, 2022. Credit: Courtesy of Delta State University
In the midst of this challenge was Karen Fosheim. She was, students and faculty say, the heartbeat of the department. A pianist who became chair in 2016, she had a preternatural ability for knowing what was going on in the department at all times, many said, attending every concert and remembering the names of every student.
She was also skilled at uniting people, the chair’s most important role, recalled Mary Lenn Buchanan, Fosheim’s close friend and a retired Delta State music professor.
This was important because musicians have notorious egos. And there was already a rift in the music department. In 2019, Richards, the band director, received tenure despite opposition from some music faculty. The disagreement had dogged Zeigel Hall ever since.
But Fosheim commanded respect, Buchanan said, by always telling the truth.
“Unless Karen needed to tell someone they were pretty and they really weren’t, she did not lie,” Buchanan said.
Fosheim also directed that straightforwardness toward Delta State’s administration, especially during the pandemic, which may not have endeared her to them. By last summer, a rumor was circulating that Fosheim was going to be replaced.
The week of June 14, 2022, Fosheim didn’t show up for a scheduled work performance.
That day, concerned faculty asked the university police to request a wellness check on her home in Boyle, a small town just south of Cleveland. Her husband was out of state, and though Fosheim had been responding to texts, the replies were strange, unlike her.
Worried that Fosheim’s stepson, Alseny Camara, who is Black, would feel unsafe around police, two faculty members drove over that afternoon. They walked through the home with a detective. It was freezing inside and smelled.
Fosheim’s bedroom door was locked. The officer said he could get in via a window. As he removed the screen and peered through the glass, he saw a body prone on the floor.
That’s when Camara ran, according to testimony from a Bolivar County sheriff’s deputy during an August circuit court hearing. Deputies using K-9s found him shortly after 9:30 p.m., hiding in the woods near Fosheim’s home.
At the precinct, Camara confessed to killing his stepmom with an aluminum baseball bat. He was upset Fosheim, who was 57, had scolded him for trying to get out of his shift at a pet motel,according to the court hearing. He admitted he had impersonated her over text.
Jamie Dahman, then an assistant professor of music, had checked on Camara that day while Fosheim was still considered missing.
It still haunts Dahman that while he was talking to Camara, Fosheim was dead on the floor of her bedroom. It “sat with me for a long time,” he said, “and it still kind of gives me chills.”
As school was about to start two months later, the chair’s office was still full of Fosheim’s things: Half-finished crochet projects, potted plants, Nerf guns and foam darts, a picture of her stepson. Her voice was still on the answering machine. Her university memorial service still had to be planned.
If that weren’t enough, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees had suddenly fired the president, William LaForge, sparking fears of budget cuts across the cash-strapped university.
And the music faculty still hadn’t heard from the administration about who would lead the department. The lack of leadership was becoming a problem. An important lock in the building wasn’t working. A new sound engineer needed to be hired.
Frustrated, Dahman sent an email to the department. He cc’d the dean, Green, and the provost, Novobilski. Since Novobilski, whose background is in business, came to Delta State in 2021, he had earned a reputation as a stickler for the hierarchy of academia.
The email got their attention. On Friday, Aug. 12, Green and Novobilski met with faculty.
A recording of the department meeting, the first without Fosheim, shows it was tense from the start. Voices were strained and shaky. Their anxiety stemmed from the stakes: Chairs have immense power in a department. Everyone wanted to trust that whoever took the role would be on their side. But faculty were worried administration, particularly Novobilski, had already come up with a plan for the role without them.
Andy Novobilski, stepped down Monday, Aug. 21, 2023, as Delta State University provost. Credit: Courtesy of Delta State University
When Novobilski began the meeting, he seemed to confirm that fear by noting he had in fact been working to replace Fosheim. He acknowledged he should have called a meeting over the summer.
Dahman loudly interrupted him: “May I ask why we weren’t informed of what was going on?”
Then, a back-and-forth ensued. Novobilski told Dahman to take a deep breath.
It ended when Green asked if other faculty wanted to speak. One teared up explaining that he would have felt guilty volunteering for the vacant role. Another said that without Fosheim, the atmosphere in the department felt more toxic than ever.
Finally, Novobilski intimated he thought the department could benefit from someone outside “the music community” given its history of division.
“I have someone in mind, I’ll be honest with you,” Novobilski said. “This is someone I have worked with. … He has a lot of experience working with conflict resolution, mediation and he brings a lot of experience working with different groups of people, plus he’s a listener.”
This person, Novobilski said, did have administrative experience at the “college level.” But his specialty was business.
Dahman groaned.
Faculty barely trusted a colleague to take the job — let alone a non-musician. One faculty member protested that he thought the department could make it work with an internal hire. Josh Armstrong, then the faculty senate president, said “this definitely feels much more like here’s your new boss, and here you go.”
If faculty weren’t happy with Wessinger by the end of the semester, Novobilski conceded, “we’ll put him to work doing something else.”
But his mind seemed made up. Wessinger would be on campus by the end of August.
‘People Crisis’
About eight years ago, Wessinger set out on a mission to understand the relationship between millennials and organizational structures.
Ever since, the 59-year old Georgia native says he’s been trying to help Fortune 500 companies, churches, regional banks, rotary clubs and insurance companies — that is, “anyone who would listen” to him — solve their workforce crisis.
“I’m not just about identifying the problem,” he says in a January 2022 YouTube video titled “People crisis.” “I want to be the guy who helps you to understand what’s going on but also provides sustainable solutions for you.”
When faculty scanned his LinkedIn, Wessinger appeared impressive at first. He was a keynote speaker at more than 30 conferences a year, the author of three books and the creator of a proprietary database on millennials. His companies had ambitious names — Create2Elevate, Generational Forces, Retention Partners.
Kent Wessinger, who was hired as interim chair of the music department at Delta State University, spoke at the inaugural Mississippi Public Safety Summit May 8-10 in Flowood. Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety
After a closer look, faculty didn’t understand how an accomplished business consultant had time to uproot to the Mississippi Delta.
Most notably, his experience in higher education was patchy. The administrative work Novobilski referenced at the Aug. 12 meeting appears to have primarily consisted of Wessinger setting up a satellite campus of the University of the Virgin Islands that offered remote classes, according to his LinkedIn.
They also discovered something particularly troubling. A 2012 opinion from the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands in a divorce proceeding with an ex-wife, Robin Wessinger.
One line from the third page caught their eye: “The Motion stated that Kent ‘has been found to have committed repeated acts of domestic violence against [Robin] and was held in contempt of Court by [a Superior Court Magistrate] as a result of his continued violations of the January 20, 2010 Domestic Violence Restraining Order, which is in itself an act of Domestic Violence.”
This concerned faculty, who were still reeling from Fosheim’s death. It made many of them distrust Wessinger from the beginning.
Many students didn’t meet Wessinger until mid-October, almost two months into the semester, when he spoke to the recital class, according to an email.
Piper Gillam, a fifth-year music education major, said it “felt like a sales pitch.” Gillam said he called the students in the department, who were mainly born after 2000, “millennials.”
“In my head I was like, ‘I’m not a millennial. I’m Gen-Z,’” Gillam said. “And he was like, ‘and I know what you guys are thinking,’ and I was like, ‘OK, thank God, he’s gonna correct me,’ and he was like, ‘but you guys are millennials.’ So I googled it to see what age group am I, and it said Gen-Z, and I was like, alright, alright. I’m not trusting this man.”
Wessinger ran the music department like it was a business.
Faculty said he ignored their emails. But when they sought him out, they said he was hard to find in his office. Some meetings that Fosheim had scheduled months in advance now came with a few-hours notice from the department secretary. One faculty member said Wessinger neglected to notify them about a key deadline related to their tenure portfolio.
His lack of music knowledge was obvious, faculty said. He didn’t know what a “tone-row,” a basic composition method, was. He mispronounced the word “viola.”
“He said, ‘Vye-Ola,’” Richards recalled. “As in Davis.”
It didn’t make faculty feel like Wessinger was qualified to assess their work. In December, with evaluations around the corner, Green extended Wessinger’s part-time contract through the spring.
By then, faculty’s relationship with Wessinger had gotten so toxic, some started recording their interactions with him.
Wessinger seemed to have soured, too. According to sources close to Wessinger, and a text message sent on Oct. 18 by a faculty member to Wessinger’s co-chair, he started saying that Fosheim had left a “mess” in the department that he was going to “clean up.”
Erik Richards said he asked about Wessinger’s dissertation the first time they met. Credit: Courtesy of Delta State University
His prime target was Richards, the band director. A blunt and, by his own admission, polarizing figure in the department, Richards said he had questioned Wessinger when they first met. He wanted to know more about Wessinger’s dissertation on how limited opportunities for creativity in the Caribbean contributes to the region’s socio-economic crisis. It has several misspellings, including the name of a Haitian town.
Wessinger, according to sources close to him, talked openly about how he did not like Richards, who had other detractors as well.
On Feb. 22, Wessinger placed Richards on administrative leave pending an investigation into his “alleged contumacious conduct” – or as Webster’s dictionary defines it, “stubbornly disobedient” conduct.
About a month later, Lisa Giger, the human resources director, met with Richards’ wind ensemble class, according to a text message. She spent the session asking about the atmosphere of the class, multiple students said, and when they mentioned Richards, she had follow up questions.
Then on April 10, Richards received a letter from Novobilski: After a “thorough investigation by the Human Resources Department,” Richards was fired.
A university committee ultimately found that while Novobilski’s letter listed a slew of student and faculty complaints against Richards, only one had ever been formally documented. The previous administration had investigated and resolved that complaint in 2018-2019.
The thorough investigation, the committee wrote, seemed “one-sided,” but the committee couldn’t confirm that appearance because Richards was not allowed to ask any questions, which appears to be a violation of Delta State’s policies.
It is “completely outside of what is considered normal” for human resources to get involved in student complaints, said Daniel Durkin, a University of Mississippi professor and the president of the United Faculty Senate Association of Mississippi.
It is also “very unusual,” Durkin said, for someone like Wessinger who has not achieved tenure to evaluate applications for the prestigious distinction.
But that’s what Wessinger proceeded to do.
That spring, Dahman, the faculty member who was close to Fosheim, was considered for tenure. His application would become another piece of collateral damage in Wessinger’s drive to clean up the department.
Jamie Dahman’s tenure application became another piece of collateral damage in Wessinger’s drive to clean up the department. Credit: Courtesy of Delta State University
Dahman, a vocal teacher who researches Bulgarian art song, had lots of reasons to be confident. In seven years of teaching at Delta State, he had never received a low mark on his annual evaluations, according to his tenure application. He’d earned a Mississippi Humanities Council Teaching Award in 2019. His students were accepted into graduate programs, won regional competitions and sang in churches and funeral homes.
And chance was on his side. Most people who apply for tenure at Delta State end up getting it, according to an analysis of IHL data.
That’s why when Dahman was offered an extension on his tenure application in the fall, he did not accept it. In retrospect, he wonders if he should have. Dahman had received a verbal reprimand after his behavior at the Aug. 12 meeting, then he was put on a performance improvement plan in December. The plan required him to demonstrate “collegiality” with students, faculty, administration and campus visitors.
In late January, the department’s tenure committee, a panel of Dahman’s peers, recommended that Dahman receive tenure, and raised only minor concerns.
Then in mid-February, Wessinger recommended Dahman be denied on the basis of his teaching and collegiality, speculating there were more “violations” than the committee knew of. Two days later, Green, the dean, also recommended denial, claiming Dahman had “aggressively pounded the table” during the Aug. 12 meeting, an allegation that is not substantiated by the recording.
Dahman was devastated and angry.
His feelings spilled into his annual evaluation with Wessinger and Thorn in March. Wessinger began by asking if he could record due to the “environment” in the department, not knowing Dahman was recording as well.
Then, Wessinger revealed that he had recently taken Dahman’s students to HR and told them Dahman was on a performance improvement plan, something meant to be confidential. The students had complained about a remark Dahman had made in defense of his teaching — yet another issue that should have been resolved without HR.
Wessinger topped off the meeting by giving Dahman low marks for teaching. Dahman protested, but there was nothing he could do.
“This is my life, this is my livelihood, it’s how I support my children,” Dahman told them. “I feel like I’m being unfairly targeted because I snapped at the provost.”
Deconstructing hope
As the fall semester starts, many students and faculty say the music department is still struggling to get out of Wessinger’s shadow, even as he has moved on to lead a new department.
In June, Novobilski announced that Wessinger was going to be the interim chair of the Division of Management, Marketing and Business Administration.
Some faculty made a last-ditch effort to get rid of him. They sent an anonymous letter to Daniel Ennis, the new president of Delta State, summarizing their concerns with Wessinger — the adminstration’s decision to bring him on, his lack of music qualifications, the court document that said he had “committed repeated acts of domestic violence.”
Ennis didn’t respond to the letter, but even he has had to address the after-effects of decisions Wessinger had a hand in, like the hiring of Steven Hugley, the interim band director who made transphobic remarks on a podcast. Ennis also made the final call on Dahman’s tenure application, ultimately deciding to grant it.
A month later, Wessinger stood in a music room facing rows of empty risers for an interview with Mississippi Today. He talked about why he wanted to come to Delta State and how he had grown to care for it. Cleveland, he said, reminded him of the Virgin Islands — a place that needed help and where educational institutions are bastions of hope.
But some people had troubled him, deep in his soul.
“My personal issues have been accentuated to tear down and deconstruct the very opportunity that every student has here in this university,” he said, sweeping his hand out wide.
Wessinger acknowledged Fosheim’s killing had traumatized many faculty. But when he spoke about the anonymous letter, he grew agitated. He said it was full of “half truths, lies, manipulations.” He added that if Mississippi Today printed its reference to domestic violence, he was “not gonna be a happy camper.”
“We know who they are,” he said. “Anonymous, they’re not, and libel, they are.”
Yet Wessinger’s alleged past mistreatment of women goes beyond the restraining order that he violated in his divorce in the Virgin Islands, according to documents obtained by Mississippi Today.
Three other women across the U.S. have been granted restraining orders against him, all based on claims of domestic violence or mistreatment. In two of those cases, Mississippi Today confirmed through court records that Wessinger either sought or received a restraining order as well.
That was the case in Georgia, where a divorce was filed against Wessinger in 2016 in part on the basis of “fraud, cruel treatment,” which he denied. Affidavits submitted on behalf of his ex-wife, Laurie Higginbotham, allege that Wessinger wrote letters containing elaborate “false statements” that she had Huntington’s disease, and it was causing her to live in an altered state of reality.
In a phone call, Wessinger told Mississippi Today that every person who had accused him of domestic violence was “connected” and that he had believed at the time what he wrote in the letters about Higginbotham. He denied that he had ever mistreated or been violent toward a woman, adding that if he had, a judge would have taken away custody of his children.
“Attorneys will say anything in motions,” Wessinger said. “You’re reading a motion. You’re not reading the truth. You’re reading allegations. That doesn’t make it the truth.”
Faculty don’t know about the additional allegations against Wessinger, and it is unclear if Delta State’s administration knew before hiring him. The restraining orders may not have shown up on a background check since they are not public information or were hidden in court files.
Through a spokesperson, the president’s office declined to comment, citing personnel matters.
On Aug. 10, Ennis gave his first convocation.
“I’m here beside you to tackle the challenges we face, but today, put them aside and join me in celebrating what we do,” he said in his address.
Wessinger wasn’t there to hear it. He was in Florida, speaking to the CEO Council of Tampa Bay, giving a speech about solving the workforce crisis.
Jimmy Buffett, pictured at the bronze plaque honoring Buffett and Fingers Taylor in front the The Hub at Southern Miss. Credit: USM Communications
HATTIESBURG — Former Southern Miss president Martha Dunagin Saunders was a USM undergrad in the late 1960s at the same time as Pascagoula native Jimmy Buffett, the future billionaire singer-songwriter. The two were friends.
“My most vivid memory of Jimmy from those days is of coming out of night class, and seeing him racing across campus with a guitar over his shoulder, obviously running late to play a gig,” Saunders said Saturday, hours after learning of Buffett’s death. “All Jimmy wanted to do back then was play his music. He really had a passion for it.”
Rick Cleveland
Saunders, now the president of the University of West Florida in Pensacola, described a young Buffett as, “Crazy witty. Always smiling. Always funny. Always with a story.”
That wit and passion, along with a keen business acumen developed later in life, catapulted Buffett to remarkable fame and fortune. At the time of his death early Saturday, at age 76, he was ranked No. 18 on the Forbes’ list of the Richest Celebrities of All Time with a net worth of $1 billion.
Saturday, in Hattiesburg, news of Buffett’s death superseded even the anticipation of the Golden Eagles football opener with in-state rival Alcorn State. An announced crowd of just over 30,000 watched Southern Miss defeat Alcorn 40-14 and was serenaded with Buffett’s familiar ballads during timeouts throughout the night. A video tribute and moment of silence to honor Buffett preceded the opening kickoff. Thousands stood, swayed and sang his hit anthem “Margaritaville” during a timeout midway through the second quarter. Flowers were left at the base of a bronze marker in the center of campus where Buffett met fellow student and harmonica player Greg “Fingers” Taylor in front of The Hub where the two first played music together. Taylor was a long-time member of Buffett’s famed Coral Reefer Band.
Buffett was inducted into the USM Alumni Hall of Fame in 2018. Credit: USM Communications
“The Southern Miss family mourns the loss of our 1969 graduate, Jimmy Buffett, whose work ethic and global success exemplified Southern Miss grit,” current USM President Joe Paul said. “Our prayers go out to his family, friends and all who knew and loved him.”
Paul, as many, attended the game in a Hawaiian shirt, a paean to the island/beach lifestyle Buffett’s music celebrated and to his millions of followers often referred to as “parrot heads.”
Paul and Saunders weren’t the only presidents mourning Buffett’s death Saturday. President Joe Biden issued a statement: “Jill and I send our love to his wife of 46 years, Jane; to their children, Savannah, Sarah, and Cameron; to their grandchildren; and to the millions of fans who will continue to love him even as his ship now sails for new shores. We had the honor to meet and get to know Jimmy over the years and he was in life as he was performing on stage – full of goodwill and joy, using his gift to bring people together.”
Buffett once told a California reporter, “I’m not a great singer, and I’m not a great guitar player. But I’m a good entertainer.”
He was also a terrific story teller, stories he told not only in his songs but in books. Indeed, he is one of six authors to have topped both the New York Times fiction and non-fiction best seller lists. Three of the others: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Styron.
Buffett’s music often received harsh critical reviews because of its simplistic style and limited musical range. Buffett never made apologies and, in fact, received praise from the likes of Bob Dylan. Dylan once listed his six favorite songwriters: Buffett, Gordon Lightfoot, Warren Zevon, John Prine, Guy Clark and Randy Newman.
Dylan reportedly was particularly smitten by the lyrics to Buffet’s “He Went to Paris,” a ballad Buffett penned in the early 1970s after meeting musician Eddie Balchowsky, a one-armed veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Here’s the closing stanza:
Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin’s
And drinks his green label each day
He’s writing his memoirs and losing his hearing
But he don’t care what most people say
Through 86 years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he’ll smile then he’ll say
Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
But I had a good life all the way
Buffett’s family moved from Pascagoula to Mobile when he was young and he grew up in Alabama’s port city. He first attended Auburn University but flunked out, and then found his way to Pearl River Junior College in Poplarville – and from there to USM.
He was very much a non-traditional student, majoring in journalism, joining the Kappa Sigma fraternity but spending much of every week playing music in the New Orleans French Quarter 100 miles away.
Petal photographer/author Vaughn Wilson was a student at Southern Miss two years behind Buffett and, like Buffett, a musician at the time. “Jimmy lived off campus in a house with about four or five other guys, and I was over there pretty much every night,” Wilson said. “When I walked into the house, Jimmy would point to his acoustic guitar standing in the corner and tell me, ‘Go have at it.’ I loved that guitar and he’d let me play it. He was just a good guy, a funny, fun-loving guy. He was just Jimmy then, before he was Jimmy Buffett. But he had that big ol’ smile that became so famous.
“He left Hattiesburg and I guess it was about four or five years later, I turned on the radio and heard him singing ‘Come Monday.’ The rest is history.”
Wilson says he never saw Buffett in person again. Saunders did.
“Jimmy and I graduated on the same day,” Saunders said Saturday, chuckling. “I went into academia and he became a legend.”
Jimmy Buffett, left, with Martha Saunders in 2010. Credit: USM Communications
Saunders served as USM president from 2007 to 2012 and brought Buffett back to campus several times.
“I remember once he dropped in and it turned out we were both going to attend a New Orleans Saints game the next day,” Saunders said. “So he said, ‘Why don’t you just fly down with me?’ So my husband and I got on his fancy jet and flew to New Orleans. Jimmy was the pilot.”
Saunders said Buffett made it clear to her that although he originally attended Southern Miss because of its proximity to New Orleans, he very much enjoyed his college days in Hattiesburg. He was inducted into the USM Alumni Hall of Fame in 2018.
“I have always thought that Jimmy is proof that heart will get you further than talent,” Saunders said. “If you want it and if you are passionate about it, that passion will take you a long, long way.
“Look at Jimmy. He brought so much joy to so many people. I was talking to a mutual friend this morning who said, ‘You can’t think of Jimmy Buffett and not smile, can you?’ It’s so true. I thought that was a perfect description. And how’s that for a legacy?”
In this edition of Mississippi Stories, Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey sits down with author Nash Nunnery about his new book, “Magnolia Gridiron Cathedrals“. Ramsey contributed 47 paintings of the featured high school stadiums in the new book.
Nunnery, a longtime freehand sports writer, traveled all around Mississippi and tells stories about the soul of many small Mississippi communities — their high school stadiums. From Laurel’s brick stadium to the super fan whose ashes were spread beneath one field’s artificial turf, Nunnery bring Mississippi’s gridiron cathedrals to life.
Bessie Coleman became the first female pilot of color to take part in a flying exhibition in the U.S., performing over New York’s Long Island.
Born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, to a Native American sharecropper and an African-American maid, she excelled in school. At age 23, she moved from Texas to Chicago, where she worked as a manicurist.
Her brothers, who both fought in World War I, talked of the flying machines and how women in France could be pilots. She decided she would fly, too, but every U.S. flight school she tried turned her away because she was a woman or because she was black — or both. She saved her money and traveled to France, where she learned to fly and obtained her international pilot’s license in 1921.
After her first exhibition, she continued to fly, wowing integrated audiences across the U.S. and Europe with her flying stunts. Asked once how she overcame racism and other obstacles, she replied, “I refused to take no for an answer.”
She dreamed of opening her own flying school and survived her first major airplane accident in 1923 when her engine stopped working and she crashed. By 1925, she was back in the skies, performing again. A year later, she took a test flight with a mechanic named William Wills, who was piloting that day. A loose wrench reportedly fell into the engine, causing the plane to crash. A reported 10,000 attended her Chicago funeral, where crusader Ida B. Wells spoke.
Starting in 1931, Black pilots in Chicago would fly over her grave in Lincoln Cemetery and drop flowers. The Bessie Coleman Aero Club also opened, training many Black pilots, including Willa Brown and the Tuskegee Airmen.
In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp honoring her. In 2021, an all-Black female crew flew on an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Phoenix in honor of her becoming the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license and calling attention to the lack of Black women in the commercial airline industry — less than 1%. In 2023, the U.S. Mint depicted her in its series, “American Women Quarters Program.”
Likely Mississippi voters by an overwhelming margin continue to support the issues touted by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley even if they do not support him.
The latest Mississippi Today/Siena College poll further highlights the electoral disconnect that has been evident in earlier polls conducted by the same pollster. The polls have consistently shown that people support Presley’s proposals, but he still trails Republican incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves.
The latest poll, conducted Aug. 20-28 of 650 likely voters ahead of the Nov. 8 general election, shows Reeves leading Presley 52% to 41%.
Yet a whopping 92% are concerned with the financial condition of Mississippi hospitals that put them at risk of closure. While Reeves has barely spoken of the hospital crisis unless asked about it by the media, Presley has made the issue key to his campaign.
Editor’s note: Poll methodology and crosstabs can be found at the bottom of this story. Click here to read more about our partnership with Siena College Research Institute.
And one of Presley’s primary solutions to the hospital crisis — expanding Medicaid to provide health care to primarily the working poor while at the same time providing another source of revenue for struggling hospitals — is supported by 72% of poll respondents and opposed by 23%.
To further amplify that voter disconnect, poll respondents are evenly split on which candidate “would do a better job addressing the Mississippi hospital crisis” at 44% each.
The only issue polled by Siena where Reeves appears to have an advantage is on the issue of transgender women competing in women’s sports. The issue was viewed as a concern by 70% of respondents, with 50% saying it was a very serious concern.
Reeves has made trans issues a key plank in his campaign. Anti-trans issues have been the subject of two of Reeves’ first six televised campaign commercials.
The governor has hammered his Democratic challenger on the issue even though Presley has stated, “I don’t think boys should be playing against girls, and girls shouldn’t be playing against boys. I don’t think minors should be getting surgery to change their gender.” But the Democrat has not focused on the issue like Reeves has.
Presley even has the more popular position on one of Reeves’ longtime favorite/pet issues: tax cuts. Reeves has touted the need to eliminate the state income tax for years. But the most recent Siena poll found that respondents by a wide margin support Presley’s proposal to cut the state’s 7% tax on groceries more than they support Reeves proposal to eliminate the state income tax. Eliminating the income tax is supported 62% to 28% with 10% undecided, while 83% favor cutting the grocery tax and 13% are opposed with 4% undecided.
The disconnect perhaps can be attributed to the fact that a vast majority of Mississippians want to vote for the Republican candidate over the Democrat more than they want to expand Medicaid or address the hospital crisis or cut the grocery tax. For many Mississippians, their default position is to vote for the Republican.
And the poll also found that still, about two months before the Nov. 7 election, a sizable group of Mississippians don’t know Presley. Presley is in his fourth term as Northern District Public Service commissioner, tasked with helping regulate many of the state’s utilities. He is running for statewide office for the first time. Reeves, on the other hand, is running his sixth statewide campaign and has almost a 9-to-1 cash advantage to help get out his message.
Presley was viewed as positive by 38% of poll respondents and negative by 26%, with 35% saying they did not know enough to offer an opinion.
What exactly should Presley make of this clear voter disconnect? He is clearly on the right side of many of the issues in terms of them being supported by the public, but he must be discouraged that that might not have an impact on how many Mississippians vote.
Reeves was viewed negatively by 49% and positively by 46%, with only 5% not offering an opinion. For an incumbent to be viewed unfavorably by nearly a majority of the electorate has to be a warning sign for Reeves.
The Mississippi Today/Siena College Research Institute poll of 650 registered voters was conducted August 20-28, 2023, and has an overall margin of error of +/- 4.0 percentage points. Siena has an ‘A’ rating in FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of pollsters.
