Welcome to the barnyard with Steve Robertson. As always, I am your good friend and host Steve Robertson here on the Hump Day edition of the yard. Some days I have to look at my phone to know what day it is. Every day runs together when you work every day, which is kind of where I am. I kind of depended on Mississippi State's schedule sometimes to kind of keep me on track.

But without school being in session, without ballgames being played, some days,

every day feels like a Thursday.

This is kind of how it is.

I've got to remind myself, oh, we've got to record the show today.

So here we are, and the big news right out of the gate, let's go ahead and get right to this. Mississippi State

University, the premier Institute of Higher Learning in the sovereign state of Mississippi

has announced that it does plan to have in-person instruction this fall when classes resumed.

Let's get right to the statement, Sid Salter.

Long-time respected journalists in our state has been kind of the spokesperson for Lee Hall now for some time.

So I'm just going to read you the statement in its entirety, so we don't lose anything. That's one of things that has happened in our culture. A lot of times people just read headlines and they read the lead and don't get into the details, which is why we have this name, image, and likeness discussion. We're going to spend a lot of time on name, image, and likeness today, too, so go ahead and prepare for that. I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've reached out to some people that know a lot more

about this than you and I do, and I'm going to share some of the concerns.

But before we get to that, let's read that Sitz-Salter statement.

Mississippi State University President Mark E. Keenum said the university is fully committed to welcoming

students back to campus this fall, and that plan to resume in-person, I think we've got a mistake

there, this fall, and that plans to resume in-person classroom and laboratory instruction in the fall 2020 semester

are on schedule and taking Silwood farm as the university continues development of specific

new operating guidelines. So the first thing we can take from that is we will have in-person

instruction this fall at Mississippi State University. But clearly there are going to be some precautions taken. There's going to be, you know, some new measures in place to ensure safety. Keenham on April 28th announced MSU's institutional intention for MSU to resume more traditional operations in the fall.

Under Keenham's direction, the university has convened a COVID-19 task force that is focused

on fostering a safe environment for the return of MSU students, faculty, staff, and visitors

to campus, whether than the confines of official, federal, and state government guidance

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