Consider these two isolated sentences from the March 5 Hattiesburg American article about the planned March 10 meeting at the Coca-cola plant:

"She said she was contacted by Hattiesburg businessman Bobby Dews to provide him with some 'positive information"'about university trends, such as increases in research funding, enrollment and other accomplishments"

". . . we just want to make sure that a broad base of the community is really aware of some of the great things that are happening."

A hypothesis: It sounds to me that somebody may be trying to collect data for a media blitz. Like a full-page newspaper advertisement.

No inside information here - just a guess.

I'm surprised that they don't already have the "positive information" that they are requesting from the university. Maybe some folks are not as well informed as it might appear from the naive data-free letters to the editor that appear from time to time.