The moves put the University of Mississippi, as the college is formally known, near the forefront of a movement called contextualization. “Our whole framework is predicated on the principle that it’s better to educate and contextualize rather than remove or move or erase,” said the school’s chancellor, Dr. Jeffrey Vitter.

But at Ole Miss, even that middle ground can be excruciatingly slow and painful to reach. One plaque, placed at the monument to a Confederate soldier, was thrown out and redone last year. Both the campus NAACP and some history professors objected to its original wording because it failed to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War.

And on the other side, members of the student senate pushed through a resolution to try to “pause” the committee process.

Hovering over deliberations was the fact that descendants of some of the historical figures remain in Mississippi. Don Barrett, a lawyer from Lexington, Miss., who called himself the representative of conservative alumni on the committee, described a series of compromises and called his fellow committee members, some of them faculty, “liberal as hell.”

“We struggled for months,” he said.

Ole Miss’s identity is intertwined with slavery and the Jim Crow era, partly because of the state’s history, but also because the school vigorously embraced Confederate symbols.

It was partly the university’s difficulty in recruiting top black athletes that led to the removal of the most offensive symbol. Two decades ago, the chancellor at the time, Robert Khayat, received death threats after he decided to eliminate the Confederate flag.

By 1979, the mascot had been changed from a student dressed in a gray Confederate uniform to a friendly-looking Disneyesque character named Colonel Reb. Eventually he, too, was replaced by Rebel Black Bear, a reference to a short story by Faulkner. “Dixie” was played less frequently, then banned in 2016.