Molly Minta

Mark Keenum’s contract as president of Mississippi State University has been renewed for four years, to 2025. His salary will remain $800,000 per year, with the state now paying half.

Protests are rarely seen at Alcorn, the nation’s oldest historically Black land grant university, where students face pressure to resolve issues with administration internally.

The move appears to make it the first higher education governing board in the country to do so.

These first weeks of the semester, researchers say, are prime time for outbreaks to occur on college campuses. Here’s a a list of efforts state universities say they are taking to track, trace, and report COVID cases on campus.

The 9–2 vote came the same week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which many faculty and staff had hoped would open the door for the board or the universities to require the vaccine.

None of the state’s public universities are requiring students or faculty to get vaccinated despite hundreds of faculty across the state requesting they do so.

To date, no college or university in Mississippi is requiring students to receive the vaccine, though some are incentivizing it.