‘Ole Miss and Oxford

Oxford MS seems like a college town built by Hollywood for one of those movies about a writer falling in love in a steamy southern town between the wars, when everything in the world seemed just about perfect. But it’s no movie set. It’s a real town. There’s a white stone county courthouse in the village square, surrounded on all four sides by retail–all of it local–with covered sidewalks and New Orleans-style wrought-iron porches. There are two thriving bookstores, one with two stories of creaky wooden floors. There are cafes, restaurants and bars and an actual local department store, the likes of which disappeared from college towns fifty years ago. The surrounding neighborhoods are among the most beautiful residential neighborhoods anywhere I’ve ever been.

This is Faulkner country. And you can see why anyone living here would be inspired to write. It’s just about perfect.

I can’t write about Ole Miss (The University of Mississippi, if you want to be technical about it) without writing about Oxford because the two seem so linked. Our tour guides asked us “Have you been to the village?? You have to see the village!” and in town, especially in the bookstores, you felt surrounded by people who just looked like they were doing really interesting things. Engineers? Novelists?, Blues historians? Each and all, no doubt.

The campus is compact and very Greek: Mississippians love the Corinthian aesthetic and they pull it off with great success. There are gardens everywhere, a handful of fountains, and a gorgeous 11-acre park well-shaded by dozens of dogwoods and magnolias (you need shade in this climate), all pointing to an old bandstand at park’s edge. You could imagine Georges Seurat, with an easel on a May afternoon.

Immediately outside the old core of the campus are massive new facilities and as this is an SEC school, most of them concern athletics. There’s new basketball arena, new baseball stadium, well…you get the point. A huge addition to the student union is at the finishing stages. Other academic buildings are aging but appear well-maintained.

There’s a powerful symbol of change in front of The Lyceum–essentially the “Old Main” of the university–with the statue of James Meredith, the first Black student to enroll after a century of segregation. He’s walking toward a stone arch embedded with the word ‘courage’. Our tour guide, an African-American, told us she had been to an event the year prior and had met Meredith, now a very old man. She later called her mother, shaking with excitement, telling her “I hope some of the air I breathed in that room will rub off on me”. It might be the single best student anecdote I’ve heard on a college tour.

Ole Miss has some stellar programs in southern history and culture, English writing, business, education and engineering and their grad programs in southern culture are among the best anywhere. The BB King blues archive in the library is the nations’ largest collection of blues recordings.

And it’s not just the buildings that shout Greek. Fraternity/Sorority life here is a really, really big deal and the Greek houses are huge and impeccably maintained. You’re in the minority if you opt to not go Greek but that didn’t seem to bother our tourguide who was not Greek and very happy at the University of Mississippi.

For the out-of-stater, especially the non-southerner, the University of Mississippi will present a uniquely interesting cultural experience: this is about as deep southern as it gets. If you’re up for that, Ole Miss provides excellent academic opportunities on a lovely campus, filled with some of the friendliest students anywhere.

And you get to live in Oxford for four years.