<p>Ibad96 said: “okay, apologies about the Fiske Guide. But Faulkner and Grisham are the only two alumni who are/were actually capable of making a decent impact on the world in any aspect.”</p>
<p>You can add Jim Barksdale to the list, you know, the Netscape guy, who sold his company to AOL. He’s worth about $600 million, and gave the money to found the Ole Miss honors college. He has funded a lot of education initiatives in Mississippi. He’s still active in business, and a few years ago created a dedicated fiber-optic cable from Chicago to New York that cut the data transmission time by a fraction of a second. Stock and currency traders paid a hefty premium for this advantage.</p>
<p>I invite you to look a list of notable Ole Miss alumni, which you can find on Wikipedia by doing an Internet search, since I’m not supposed to post links.</p>
<p>Willie Morris didn’t attend Ole Miss, but he was the writer in residence for many years. I never had him for a class, but I treasure the hours we spent talking together. Morris urged fellow writer Barry Hannah to accept a young student into his graduate-level writing course. That student’s name was Donna Tartt. She just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Goldfinch.</p>
<p>Shepard Smith was a classmate of mine, and we had a number of classes together. He’s done okay. A lot of my friends have done just fine in life. You’ve probably never heard of Ole Miss grad Mike Moore, but as attorney general he initiated the tobacco lawsuit in which I think every state eventually joined. Unless you smoke you probably think this is a good thing.</p>
<p>A fraternity brother and roommate of mine is now a cancer researcher. He’s not famous, but if you Google his name you will find he’s slogging along with various studies on the effectiveness of various drugs. I can list any number of friends who are doing just great in life. A few are “stars,” but it’s okay to just have a good life, make a decent living, and raise a family. That’s what they are doing.</p>
<p>As for the grade-point-average mentioned in the article, that is an absolutely GREAT grade-point average. Grades at Ole Miss traditionally have not been as inflated as at other schools. For many years the law school actually sent out a “grade inflation letter” explaining that grades at Ole Miss were about seven or eight tenths of a point below those of most law schools (Teachers graded on a true bell curve. There would frequently be only one A). I remember in my undergraduate accounting class one semester there were 53 students and I was one of the lucky three to make an “A.” It’s not that the students weren’t good, the grading was just harder.</p>
<p>As a school, by court order admission standards have to be low, and in fact many schools admit athletes based on the NCAA minimum. Many of these high-risk students don’t last very long, but they are given the chance. Ole Miss has responded to the challenge of being forced to have relatively low admission standards by creating a top-notch honors college (average ACT, almost 32), The Lott Leadership Institution and the Croft Institute, all of which cater to top students. The Accounting school is considered one of the best in the nation, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Anyone wanting a good education from Ole Miss can get it, and it’s still small enough that students can talk to their professors. Hopefully the school will not grow any more; it’s big enough.</p>
<p>Many football players are marginal scholars. Many would not attend college were it not for the chance to play football. One of the first things Hugh Freeze did was to hire people to sit in the entrance of all of the major academic buildings and take roll of whether or not the football players attended class. He has elevated the importance of academic performance for the team, and I salute him.</p>