During its April meeting, the State Institutions of Higher Learning staff distributed to the board, and subsequently to the public, a budgetary report which showed that the Ayers allocations – $1.45 million each to Alcorn State University (ASU) and Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU) and $3.8 million to Jackson State University (JSU) – end this fiscal year. The Ayers case had originally been filed in January 1975, alleging that the historically Black institutions of higher learning had been and continued to be discriminated against in terms of funding, among other things. Then, for more than 30 years, the case wound its way through the courts before being settled with relatively small monetary allocations being awarded to those universities.
