JACKSON Miss. – Jackson State University President Ronald Mason said Monday he’s leaving JSU with a better campus, a larger research budget and a stronger relationship with the local business community as he prepares to take a new job heading the Southern University System in Louisiana.
Speaking at a press luncheon in Jackson, Mason said he has no regrets about his decade leading Mississippi’s largest historically Black university.
Mason, 57, will leave JSU at the end of June. The Southern University System, based in Baton Rouge, La., oversees three academic campuses, a law school and an agricultural center. Like JSU, it is a public, historically Black institution.
Mason said when he started at JSU, there was a widespread belief on campus that the predominantly White local business community didn’t care about the university.
“It was sort of ‘the other Jackson,’” Mason said. “There’s kind of like two Mississippis, if you’re an outsider looking in. There’s a White Mississippi, there’s a Black Mississippi. And the business community, we thought, didn’t like Jackson State. But it really wasn’t the case at all. What it was, was that they just didn’t see Jackson State University. It just wasn’t part of the Mississippi that they saw.”
Mason said he worked to build relationships.
“One of the challenges that we had was that the business community had to accept the fact that Jackson State … could be the capital university of the state of Mississippi, but it didn’t have to be a White institution,” he said.
