University Of Mississippi

It's hard to conceive of an institution with an image more entwined with Southern history and tradition than the tree-shaded campus of the University of Mississippi. During the Civil War, when Ole Miss was all male, its entire student body withdrew to enlist in the Confederate army. "Dixie" and the Confederate battle flag still are mainstays at sporting events, and Colonel Reb--a whiskered caricature of a plantation owner--is the school mascot. Even the nickname is a throwback.

A tornado touched down in a southern Mississippi college town Sunday evening, officials said, inflicting "significant damage" and injuring at least 10 people. "We do have significant damage throughout the city,” Kyle Hopkins, emergency operations director for Forrest County, told the Los Angeles Times. No deaths had been reported, he said, but at least 10 people were taken to a hospital with injuries. The University of Southern Mississippi  in Hattiesburg posted a statement on its website Sunday declaring a state of emergency, confirming damage to at least four campus buildings and asking students not to return to campus until further notice.

The University of Mississippi has banned a fraternity for leaving two members naked and painted with racial slurs at mostly black Rust College. The chancellor of Ole Miss said Wednesday that the incident had opened an old wound at the university, where violence erupted in 1962 when its first black student, James Meredith, enrolled. "Nothing can totally undo the effects of the deplorable events of Sept.

Karl Fleming, a former Newsweek reporter who helped draw national attention to the civil rights movement in the 1960s - and risked his life covering it with perceptive stories about its major figures and the inequalities that fueled it - died Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84. The cause was related to a number of respiratory ailments, said his son Charles Fleming. Born and bred in the Jim Crow South, Fleming worked his way through small North Carolina newspapers to become chief of Newsweek's Atlanta bureau in 1961.

Randy Karliner of Ocean View High School has signed a letter of intent to play football at the University of Mississippi, Ronald Karliner, his father, said Tuesday. Karliner, a 6-foot-2, 195-pound quarterback and linebacker, has been a three-year starter for the Seahawks. He was twice selected first-team all-Sunset League and was named the league's offensive player of the year as a senior. As a junior, Karliner guided Ocean View to the league co-championship, the school's first football title.

A former football player at the University of Mississippi said alumni promised him money for touchdowns and he saw other players get paid, a newspaper reported. J.J. Walker, a backup receiver in his only season at Mississippi after signing a scholarship in 1989 out of Daleville (Ala.) High, told the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle: "I had alumni promise me $400 for a touchdown catch and $200 for a touchdown run. I never accepted their money, but I saw other guys get money."

Students at the University of Mississippi questioned the school's fire safety procedures as investigators returned to a charred fraternity house Saturday to find the cause of a fire that killed three people. Twenty students and a house mother escaped the fire at the two-story, brick-and-wood frame Alpha Tau Omega house on Friday. "We're going to do everything humanly possible to identify what may have happened here," Mark R.

The University of Mississippi football program was put on four years' probation and had its scholarships halved Thursday in what the NCAA called "one of the most serious cases" heard recently. The Rebels will not be allowed to play postseason games in 1995 and 1996 and cannot appear on television in 1995. It is the second time in less than 10 years that the Mississippi football team will serve probation.

The King was dead--on that, at least, the scholars seemed to agree. But there was consensus about little else. Was the blue-eyed, hip-swiveling crooner more rooted in gospel or country? Was the poor boy from Tupelo consciously turning the world on its head when he strummed his guitar and twitched his leg--or just doing what felt good at the time? Were his 31 feature films mere schlock or veiled political commentary?

Ron Lee (Chuckie) Mullins, a University of Mississippi free safety, suffered a paralyzing neck injury Saturday when he made a first-quarter tackle in the Rebels' game against Vanderbilt. Mullins, a 6-foot, 170-pound redshirt freshman from Russellville, Ala., was airlifted 75 miles to Baptist Central Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. A spokesman in the hospital's critical care unit said no condition was immediately available.

When the federal Department of Health and Human Services recently issued a request for proposals, seeking competitive applications for the production, analysis and distribution of "marijuana cigarettes," the request might have seemed a bit unusual to those unfamiliar with Washington's dance around cannabis research. The federal government, after all, is not widely known to support marijuana cultivation. But those in the know just shrugged. The department has issued similar requests every few years to select a contractor to conduct government-approved marijuana research, and with depressing regularity it has then awarded an exclusive contract to the University of Mississippi.

For the University of Mississippi, Friday's debate is about more than presidential politics: Officials hope it also helps combat what may be one of the most enduring public relations problems in American higher education. They know that for many Americans, Ole Miss means little more than the deadly 1962 riot sparked by the matriculation of the first black student, James Meredith, and the 1990s-era controversy over the display of the Confederate flag at football games.

THE Ole Miss Rebel football team had taken a 7-0 lead over rival Mississippi State when a strange cheer erupted in a corner of the Rebels' home stadium. It was emanating from a small group just behind the marching band's tuba section. A dreadlocked South African named Badidile Mazibuko was leading it. "Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy!" Mazibuko yelled. "Oi! Oi! Oi!" his friends responded. "Ozzy!" "Oi!" "Ozzy! "Oi!"

Overseas American Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics Gene H. Bell-Villada University Press of Mississippi: 260 pp., $28 * ONE consequence of the enormous global U.S. presence since World War II has been the large numbers of American youth whose upbringing has taken place, in whole or in part, outside the U.S. mainland, writes author Gene H. Bell-Villada, who is himself one of these children he calls "Third Culture Kids."

Ed Orgeron, USC's defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator, has been hired as head coach at Mississippi and will be introduced today at a news conference in Oxford, Miss. Orgeron, 43, replaces David Cutcliffe, who was fired Dec. 1 after the Rebels finished 4-7. It is the first head coaching job for Orgeron, a Louisiana native who was an assistant at Miami, Nicholls State and Syracuse before joining USC's staff under former coach Paul Hackett in 1998.

Students at the University of Mississippi questioned the school's fire safety procedures as investigators returned to a charred fraternity house Saturday to find the cause of a fire that killed three people. Twenty students and a house mother escaped the fire at the two-story, brick-and-wood frame Alpha Tau Omega house on Friday. "We're going to do everything humanly possible to identify what may have happened here," Mark R.

THE Ole Miss Rebel football team had taken a 7-0 lead over rival Mississippi State when a strange cheer erupted in a corner of the Rebels' home stadium. It was emanating from a small group just behind the marching band's tuba section. A dreadlocked South African named Badidile Mazibuko was leading it. "Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy!" Mazibuko yelled. "Oi! Oi! Oi!" his friends responded. "Ozzy!" "Oi!" "Ozzy! "Oi!"

It was before the assassination of Medgar Evers, before people rioted over a black man attending the University of Mississippi. The civil rights movement was still young. So, in the winter of 1957, Stanley Hill expected nothing more than a basketball game when he and his Iona College teammates traveled south to play the University of Mississippi.

On autumn weekends, a Southern ritual plays out under the arching magnolias and oaks on the University of Mississippi campus: Alumni congregate by the thousands in "The Grove" before home football games, here to enjoy the deviled eggs and good cheer as the university band, "the Pride of the South," blares a rousing version of "Dixie." And they come to cheer Colonel Rebel. The life-size mascot -- a white-whiskered, hatted gentleman who looks much like Col.

Alice Faye, who died at 83 in 1998, was a cherished star of Hollywood musicals in the late 1930s and early '40s who stayed in the public eye almost until her death, even though she walked out on a flourishing movie career in 1945. A beautiful blue-eyed blond with a stunning figure, a warm personality and low singing voice, she brought a sultry quality to the screen. In a mere six years at 20th Century Fox, Faye became America's No. 1 female box office star.