Law Schools: New Mood at Ole Miss

The prep school for political power in Mississippi is the state university law school. The last four Mississippi Governors studied there; three-fourths of the state’s lawyers attended Ole Miss; and there are enough of the school’s grads in the Mississippi senate to control all legislation in the state. Ole Miss produced eight of the nine members of the Mississippi Supreme Court and all three of the state’s federal district judges, including Claude F. Clayton, who last week firmly ordered do-nothing police to protect Negro schoolchildren from savage white mobs in Grenada.

What the law school is the state very largely is—and there’s the rub. For a century the school allowed its all-white student body to ignore the winds of U.S. constitutional change, while steeping itself almost entirely in local law, customs and politics. Ole Miss law graduates emerged with their Deep South views untouched, after which they ran the state with an isolated narrow-mindedness that has mired Mississippi in racial tragedy.

Broader View. Remarkably, the school that could transform Mississippi is now being transformed itself. In 1962 it took a federal army to get Negro James Meredith into the university; in 1966 the law school’s 368 students include nine Negroes—more than can be found at almost any non-Negro law school in the U.S. As classes convened last week, the 21-man faculty also included eight recent graduates of Yankee Yale. The Ole Miss Yalies—along with many another surprise—were brought there by the law school’s dean, Joshua Morse III, 43, once a country lawyer in Poplarville, Miss. It was in 1963, after he was chosen by a faculty committee to head the Mississippi school, that Morse made the enterprising decision to take a year off for training at Yale Law School. During that year he came to believe that “many of the problems which plague the University of Mississippi and our state stem from a provincial outlook—our students are accustomed to examining every question in the light of its impact upon Mississippi culture rather than taking a broader view.”

Determined to change all that, Morse landed five of the seven Yale law graduates from this year’s class who decided to go into teaching. Three of the graduates even turned down job offers from a top Manhattan firm. “It’s like the Peace Corps, except we’re given much more responsibility,” says Frederick B. McLane. “This is becoming the one institution in this state that is generating interest and excitement—we want to be a part of it,” adds his colleague Michael B. Trister.

Jet-Set Course. The new mood at Ole Miss has created a new willingness to listen to outside opinions. Bobby Kennedy spoke there last March on racial discrimination, drew an ovation from 4,500 students. Law students also brought in as speakers Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. Leader Charles Evers and Atlanta A.C.L.U. Official Charles Mor gan Jr. Last year eight law professors from Yale and seven from Harvard spent two weeks each on the campus for what students dubbed “the jet-set course.” Mississippians were fascinated. “Even though I might not go with them politically,” says Student Jack McCormick, “I thoroughly enjoyed Archibald Cox, and Paul Freund was terrific.”

The change leads Yale’s Law Dean Louis H. Pollak, one of last year’s part-time faculty members, to believe that the Ole Miss law school “is at the threshold of becoming a focus for the kind of thinking that can bring Mississippi into the 20th century.”