He strolled, on this mild winter morning, through the heart of campus, among the scarlet oaks and flowering dogwoods and the monument to the Confederate dead, near the place where white students rioted in 1962 as James Meredith, the school’s first black student, tried to enroll.

Even with his new haircut, and even amid the sea of white faces — Ole Miss is 77 percent white — Mr. Coon, who stands about 6-foot-4, with green eyes under heavy eyebrows, was recognized by a number of black students. Some approached and bumped knuckles. Others caught his eye from a distance, and tilted their chins his way. A subtle gesture of respect.

Mr. Coon pointed out other things he wished to see changed. Last year, the school placed an explanatory plaque in front of the Confederate monument noting that the South’s defeat freed millions. Mr. Coon would have rather seen the whole monument carted away.

He said he would like to see a new name for the campus building that currently honors James K. Vardaman, the early-20th-century Mississippi governor and United States senator who once declared, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”

Not much better, in Mr. Coon’s eyes, is the Lott Institute, which offers a degree in public policy leadership. Its namesake, Mr. Lott, was the senator from Mississippi who resigned from his leadership post in 2002 after publicly praising the 1948 pro-segregation presidential campaign of Senator Strom Thurmond.

“This entire place is in many ways a shrine to white supremacy,” Mr. Coon said.

The fight over the flag was the kind of college experience that Mr. Coon had hoped for three years ago when he left Petal, a white-flight suburb of Hattiesburg, and enrolled at Ole Miss, founded in 1848 to educate the scions of the Mississippi planter class. As a middle school student, Mr. Coon had been a Confederate apologist, he said. But by the 12th grade, his obsession with race and racism was in full bloom, and Ole Miss beckoned to him as an American problem — one in his own backyard, one that he believed needed solving.

Ask him what flipped the switch, and he offers a laundry list: Listening to the hip-hop group N.W.A. Discovering “The Colbert Report.” The Trayvon Martin case. An act of racism by someone close to him still too raw for him to publicly share.