Ruling Letting Colleges Offer Casino Management Angers Gambling Opponents
by Ed Thomas and Jenni Parker
June 15, 2005
(AgapePress) - A recent court ruling allows the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) to add gaming management to its list of available courses of study. The Jackson, Mississippi, civil court judge's ruling represents a re-interpretation of a law that was believed to prohibit offering such classes.The state College Board had previously sought legislative approval of courses in casino management, but without success. Then, in 2004, the Board filed suit over whether USM's Gulf Park campus could offer a bachelor of business administration in tourism degree with an emphasis in casino and resort management.
Under Mississippi law, the state's Gaming Commission regulates schools or training programs that offer gaming classes, and the law prevents such schools from being located on public property. Therefore, public schools, under the law, cannot teach or train people to be gaming employees.
But, as a recent Associated Press report notes, the College Board argued that as a constitutionally created body, its decisions were immune to any state agency's veto and no law can prevent it from creating a gaming management curriculum or stop any university from offering the courses. Chancery Judge Patricia Wise agreed, and her decision has angered and disappointed many gambling opponents who were already unhappy with Mississippi's gambling resorts.
One Mississippi lawmaker, Representative Steve Holland, contends it was inevitable that the courts would intervene in the matter, because state law had a gray area about whether the legislature or the College Board had jurisdiction over curricula.
Holland says USM filed its lawsuit believing state law gives the College Board exclusive discretion and authority over curriculum matters for institutions of higher learning. "They took it to Judge Wise in Jackson," he adds, "and she ruled that indeed that was the purview of the College Board and not the legislature."
The state legislator refrained from making any moral judgment about casino gambling one way or the other. However, he did say he feels it is futile for the legislature not to approve the classes for an industry employing more than 30,000 people and pumping more than $300 million in revenue annually into the state's economy.
Nevertheless, some pro-family advocates are calling the civil court's ruling in favor of the gambling course another form of judicial activism. Buddy Smith of the American Family Association, a pro-family group based in Mississippi, says the gambling lobby has used the courts and a judge to subvert the will of state residents who have a moral opposition to gambling, legal or not.
Smith says many Mississippians are strongly against casino gambling and strongly oppose their state's reliance on gambling revenues. He believes this is why many of the lawmakers in the state legislature would not act to change the law, and why USM eventually turned to the courts.
"As a Christian," the AFA spokesman asserts, "it is morally reprehensible to me that we as a state have become so dependent on this business [of casino gambling]. So here we have a judge who has taken matters into her own hands and gone against our wishes and our will."
Smith advises gambling opponents to remain vigilant and to do all they can to stop the further advance of the gaming industry in Mississippi. However, Representative Holland doubts there will be sufficient political will to appeal and fight Judge Wise's ruling, now that it has been made.
Meanwhile, AP reports, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Tulane University have announced an agreement for the Louisiana school to offer casino and resort management courses at the Pearl River Resort near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Tulane already offers casino and resort management classes at its Biloxi campus, where 70 of the 300 students are enrolled in casino management.
