NATCHEZ — The future of Natchez-Adams County and Alcorn State University are intertwined, ASU President M. Christopher Brown II said Tuesday.

Brown’s comments were made at the Alcorn Day in Natchez luncheon, hosted by the Natchez-Adams County Chamber of Commerce.

Alcorn was originally founded to serve as a safe academic space for the education of the children of former slaves, but as time has passed. the model universities in Mississippi use — and their mission — has shifted, Brown said.

“The responsibility of any public university is to serve the community in which it is situated,” he said. “That means that that institution must be integral of the business development, the academic stability and the cultural resources of that community.

“(Alcorn’s) first role in this partnership is to be certain that we are promoting the educational achievement of Natchezians.”

That means, he said, ensuring students in Natchez high schools and at Copiah-Lincoln Community College know that Alcorn is for the entire community.

“Alcorn State University is not the university of Lorman, Mississippi, it is the university of southwest Mississippi,” Brown said. “We need to make it clear that Alcorn is each and every one of your universities.”

Looking at this year’s graduating valedictorian and salutatorian, Brown said, can emphasize this.

“One of them is 21 and the other is 51,” he said. “One is male and one is female. One is black and one is white. One began as a freshman at the Lorman campus and one began as a freshman in the community college and transferred to the Lorman campus. That is the breadth and spread of Alcorn.”

ASU will also have to work more clearly around workforce issues in the region, Brown said, and just as Tupelo and Columbus have thrived with partnerships between local universities and industrial development, so can southwest Mississippi.

“The ability to have a K-12 and a postsecondary system to support new industry and workers is critically important,” Brown said. “We must make certain that our academic and business partnership is strong to bring those same kinds of businesses to southwest Mississippi.”

ASU currently houses 4,308 students, and Brown said recruitment goals are to reach 5,000 in the next two years. That will mean continued opportunities for partnerships with the surrounding communities.

“I do not plan to build 5,000 beds on our campus,” he said. “That means that the communities that surround the university will have to begin crafting and exploring economic and business ventures that will provide housing and living arrangements for this growing population of students.

“Students will discover after their first week as freshmen that there is no McDonalds at the end of the stretch, no Walmart and no beauty salon. That means that they have to come out to purchase goods and services, and that means that the growing population of this campus becomes integrally inclined into Natchez.”

Alcorn can also help in the work of racial reconciliation by providing spaces where it is safe to have open discussions and facilitate forgiveness, Brown said.

“(Racial reconciliation) is the ability of us to really understand the humanity of all the persons of southwest Mississippi,” he said. “We will have to give up, accept and concede our past history.”

The community will continue to see other ways in which the growth of ASU webs out into the surrounding area, Brown said

“If we work together, over time we will find that this will be a beautiful, beautiful partnership,” he said.