Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Entries by Robert L. Campbell
Friday, July 13, 2007
Funding for an Orthodox Objectivist Faculty Member Rejected by Texas State
David Glenn of the Chronicle of Higher Education has followed up his article on the denial of tenure to John Lewis with a new article on the Leonard Peikoff, er, Ayn Rand Institute's efforts to place orthodox Objectivists in academic jobs.
Till it turns into a pumpkin, the link is
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i45/45a00701.htm
(If you open a free online account with The Chronicle, you'll be able to read the entire article.)
The Philosophy Department at Texas State (formerly Southwest Texas State, in San Marcos) was offered a multi-year grant by the Anthem Foundation to fund a visiting professor who would specialize in Objectivism.
They turned down the money.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Libertarian/Green Alliance on Nuclear Power?
I've arrived sort of late for the discussion of the 10 "Green Goals" and how much common ground they afford between Greens and libertarians.
What's more, the generic—even boilerplate—nature of most of these goals impedes discussion. According to Roderick Long, the interpretations that most libertarians place on the Green Goals are incorrect, because they presuppose coercive means of achieving them. Well, yes, but it appears that the interpretations that (many? most?) Greens make of the Goals are likewise incorrect—because they, too, presuppose achievement through coercive means.
So the extent to which the Green Goals are worth achieving or require further action to achieve can’t be determined, without a major exercise in specification and clarification.
In the meantime, maybe we could try something more concrete.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Clemson administration retreats farther
Further news today on Clemson University's "free speech zone" policy:
(1) Policy changes are expected by next semester. According to Teresa Hopkins, a spokesperson for the administration, faculty and students will be consulted before the new policy is put in place.
(2) Gail A. DiSabatino, the Vice-President for Student Affairs, wrote to Andrew Davis, chairman of the Clemson Conservatives, as follows:
I am removing the administrative and censure sanctions placed on Clemson Conservatives and directing the office of student conduct to destroy the file related to the discipline case.
DiSabatino was also the author of the statement that I quoted in my previous post, to the effect that the policy was under review.
So it looks as though the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has been highly effective in getting the Clemson administration to withdraw its "free speech zone" rules.
How Clemson acquired those rules remains to be accounted for. I have some hypotheses in mind, but no data yet with which to test them.
Robert Campbell
PS. My source for today's news is an article by Matt Wake, "Clemson Conservatives cleared of protest infractions," on the front page of today's Daily Messenger. The Messenger is a tiny newspaper published in Seneca, South Carolina.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Free Speech Zones at Clemson?
Until recently, if anyone had suggested that Clemson University was suppressing free speech by confining demonstrations, protests, or outdoor rallies to a couple of small, low-traffic areas where as few students as possible would have to witness them, my response would have been, "You have to be kidding."
It turns out that Clemson has been requiring student organizations to limit their demonstrations to a couple of fairly out-of-the-way "free speech zones." I don't know how long the administration has been at it, but the "free speech zones" have been mentioned in Freshman orientation for at least a couple of years.
The policy was kept remarkably quiet till last Friday, when the Clemson Tiger published a long front-page article on the administration's response to a protest by the Clemson Conservatives on October 30.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Reintroducing Myself
I thought it might be worthwhile to reintroduce myself, as I've been absent from Liberty and Power for about a year.
Friday, August 19, 2005
USM: Another Year in the Fourth Tier
America's Best Colleges 2006, the well known publication from US News & World Report, is now out.
One year ago, the University of Southern Mississippi dropped into the fourth tier of national universities. Today it remains there, ranked 198th out of 248.
I have not yet seen the hard copy of America's Best Colleges 2006, so I can't comment on all of the components of USM's ranking. However, the institution's peer evaluation score (25% of the total) has slipped by just one tenth of a point, from 2.2 to 2.1 (on a scale where 1.0 is lowest and 5.0 is highest). Considering that USM remains under the misrule of one of the worst university presidents in American history until May 2007, and is presently under probation from its accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, it's amazing that the peer evaluation score hasn't dropped more decisively.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
USM Update: New Commissioner, No More Chief Operating Officer
Since the fateful announcement on May 19, that President Shelby F. Thames was being limited to 2 more years in office, it's been fairly quiet at the University of Southern Mississippi. There has been little to report since the delayed revelation of Thames' total expenditures on his futile effort to fire Frank Glamser and Gary Stinger.
At the end of May, the summer school session opened with a major scheduling snafu, occasioned by Associate Provost Cynthia Moore's insistence on using unnecessary scheduling software and waiting till the last minute to make room assignments. And the second annual MIDAS awards, cash bonuses given to researchers who get grants that "buy out" part of their teaching time, led to a minor flap at the end of June. (I may return to this incentive program, a brainchild of Shelby Thames that has few counterparts anywhere else, in another entry.)
On July 6, a bite was taken out of another member of Shelby Thames' henchcrew, Ken Malone. Among the shifting and mutating array of appointments that Malone has held, a major source of power was his Provost-like control over the Gulf Park satellite campus, where his official title was Chief Operating Officer. As per the university press release:
After serving as chief operating officer for The University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast campus for the last year and a half, Dr. Ken Malone is leaving that position to focus on his duties as chair of the Department of Economic and Workforce Development.
Malone will be replaced by an Associate Provost. He was a hired as a less than half-time Department Chair, with a salary of $49,500 a year, and as a less than half-time Chief Operating Officer, also with a salary of $49,500, so no Board approval of his appointment would be required--the threshold is $50K. But there has been no announcement that his salary is being cut by $49,500...
In the judgment of sources on the USM campus, Malone's mismanagement of the Gulf Park facility and his long string of unflattering stories in the press made him vulnerable to remaining rivals on the henchcrew, particularly Joan Exline, who is in charge of accreditation, and Cynthia Moore. It is to be hoped that he will return to the chemical industry well before Shelby Thames' term in office expires in May 2007.
Today's big news comes out of the monthly meeting of the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees, which controls USM along with 7 other state unversities. A new IHL Commissioner has been urgently needed to replace Richard Crofts, who came out of retirement to serve on an interim basis and is due to leave in December. The Board chose Tom Meredith, who is currently the Chancellor of the Georgia state system. Meredith, not so coincidentally, led a workshop for the Board in February--on the topic of a strong-commissioner model for system boards of trustees. His attitude toward USM is, at present, unknown, but the initial expectation is for him to continue Crofts' policy of keeping Shelby Thames on a short leash. Meredith has a track record of siding with university presidents against sports boosters; considering that USM athletic supporters demanded the removal of Horace Fleming in 2001 and played a substantial role in the coronation of Shelby Thames in 2002, this is a positive sign. Whether he will tend to privilege the Univesity of Mississippi and Mississippi State over USM remains to be seen.
Meredith is almost certainly a big improvement on Eric Clark, Mississippi's Secretary of State, who was reportedly being considered by the Board, but according to a story in Tuesday's Jackson Clarion-Ledger, did not end up being interviewed for the position. Putting a professional politician in charge of Mississippi's state universities would not help USM solve its problems, and could easily exacerbate them.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
USM: $457,000 Worth of Presidential Foolishness
Reuben Mees of the Hattiesburg American has now picked up the story, first featured here on June 19, of the purposely delayed announcement of $107,000 in legal fees arising from Shelby Thames' attempt to fire Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer.
After adding the two years of salary and benefits for each senior faculty member that were mandated in the settlement that the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees imposed in April 2004, the price tag for a single fit of presidential rage mounts up to $457,000. (And the cost of substitute instructors to cover Glamser and Stringer's courses, after they were suspended in the middle of a semester, has yet to be factored in).
Now that the Board has declared Thames a lame duck, the revelation should give many of his erstwhile supporters a way of distancing themselves from his failed presidency. Mees quotes one of the organizers of the pro-Thames pep rally at the Warren Paving Company:
Alumna and Thames supporter Bonnie Drews said she was shocked to learn of the extent of the legal fees from the case.
"Wow. That's something way out of my sphere of information and I doubt if very many alumni are in that loop either," she said. "I doubt if very many people at all know about this."
This is not the message that Bonnie Drews was giving out three months ago. Plenty of those who agitated to keep Thames in control of the University of Southern Mississippi could fairly say that he and his public relations operatives were lying to them. It is to be hoped that others will follow her lead.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
USM: Presidential Foolishness Is Expensive
Just under a month ago, on May 19, the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees announced that Shelby Thames would be stepping down in two years from the presidency of the University of Southern Mississippi. Buried in the minutes was an item not reported by any media outlet that day:
Payment of legal fees for professional services rendered by Adams & Reese (Statement dated 8/31/04) from the funds of The University of Southern Mississippi. (This statement represents services and expenses in connection with the Thames v. Glamser case.)
TOTAL DUE....................................................$107,589.05
So when Shelby Thames called Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer into his office on March 5, 2004, and told them they were fired, he ended up costing his university $107K in legal fees alone. The settlement that the Board imposed on April 28, 2004 cost USM an additional two years of salary and benefits for each senior professor. Both are now working for other universities; neither has taught or done research at USM since he tried to fire them.
Also telling was the delay in reporting the payment. The IHL Board often reports payments to law firms a month or two after billing. But this item was kept out of the minutes for nearly 9 months. (Some other legal bills for USM were also held back longer than usual. But those items, date October and December 2004, were a good deal less pricey.)
The most plausible explanation: Roy Klumb, who served as Board president until the May 19 meeting, was trying to get 4 more years for his guy Shelby Thames, and wanted to keep embarrassing details away from the media.
The delayed announcement smarts all the harder, coming at a time when the USM administration has announced a freeze on hiring to faculty positions. To save money, any openings for professors that were not yet filled at the beginning of June will remain that way, at least for the next year.
Meanwhile Klumb, who lost out when the Board voted to strengthen the IHL Commissioner's role, then had to settle for 2 years and out for Thames, skipped the most recent meeting of the IHL Board (which took place on Thursday June 16). Klumb was upset that his colleagues on the Board were planning to raise tuition at the 8 state universities (the largest increases came in at 5%, a modest percentage compared to what has been happening in some other state university systems). Today, Klumb's letter to the editor appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Besides calling on the Mississippi state legislature to cap tuition, he bemoaned
the utter futility of a state like Mississippi having eight free-standing universities, two mostly separate statewide agriculture programs, 15 community colleges, all with unnecessary, duplicative program offerings, [and] two completely separate coordinating boards, that rarely talk to one another
By implication, Klumb wants Mississippi State to absorb Alcorn A&M (currently, they maintain the separate Ag programs). But he also seems to be calling for the elimination of the University of Southern Mississippi--or, at the very least, cutbacks extensive enough to keep USM from competing with Ole Miss, or with Mississippi State (which just happens to be his alma mater).
Shelby Thames thinks he was installed on the throne to make USM over into a cluster of opulent industrial research labs, plus a college of econonic development that would bring in tuition revenue while forging advantageous alliances with local officials and politically connected business interests. He will almost certainly go into retirement without ever realizing that his sponsors actually wanted him degrade USM's capabilities and insure that it would no longer constitute a threat to the two top universities in the state system.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
USM: Settling Scores and Endangering Accreditation (Again)
On May 19 Shelby F. Thames, the notorious President of the University of Southern Mississippi, was told he would be leaving office in two years. The Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees, which controls USM, also gave him a list of tasks to accomplish. Number one on the list, for obvious reasons, was getting USM out of the jam it is in with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and with the various specialized accreditation bodies.
You would be pardoned for thinking that Thames would at least refrain from any activities that would further jeopardize USM's accreditation.
But Thames doesn't understand accreditation, despises accrediting bodies because they expect him to follow their rules, and--according to people who know him--has a consuming desire for revenge on anyone who has crossed him. Besides, when relegated to lame-duckitude, upper administrators who are a good deal more moderately endowed in the malice department have purposely left messes behind for their successors to clean up.
Thames is so eager to settle scores that he is about to embroil USM in still another accreditation crisis.
Education programs at American universities are accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. The Ed programs at USM are well along in their NCATE cycle; a site visit will be taking place in Spring 2006.
Thames' dismal track record on accreditation is enough to justify apprehension about the way the NCATE process is going. When Thames conducted his purge of the academic deans in January 2003, in the guise of reorganizing to save administrative expense, he fired Carl Martray, a respected administrator who was reputed to be on top of NCATE issues. (Martray is now at Mercer University.) Thames then begged NCATE to put off its next site visit--because a new dean had just taken over the College of Education and Psychology.
Although he was hired on Thames' watch, my sources at USM agree that Willie Pierce, the current Dean of CoEP, has performed pretty well under difficult circumstances. It's hard enough trying to shield the college from the excesses of Thames and his crew in the central administration...
But Pierce also has also faced a constant threat from below. The department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education is chaired by one Dana Thames. No one at USM thinks that her skimpy record of research and publications, and her distinct shortage of management skills, would have gotten her the post--unless the fix was in. Shelby Thames pushed for his daughter to get the appointment before he became President in 2002; she then proceeded to undercut Dean Martray and clamor for his removal. (She apparently wanted the deanship for herself, but nervousness about the precise scope of Mississippi's anti-nepotism laws kept the prize out of her hands.)
Although Pierce has tried not to antagonize Dana Thames, simply occupying the office and doing his job are sufficient. He, too, has been targeted for removal.
Last week an NCATE consultant arrived at USM under unusual circumstances. Pierce had already brought in a different consultant, had not requested this one, and was given no warning that he was about to show up on campus. The new consultant had been invited by President Thames and given the specific charge of determining (hint, hint) whether the dean's office was hopelessly remiss in dealing with NCATE issues and needed clearing out. In the end, much to Thames' displeasure, the consultant concluded that Dean Pierce, Associate Dean Mitch Berman, and Assistant Dean Carole deCasal were taking care of business.
But, of course, no one thinks that was the end of it. Reports are that Dana Thames is not particularly knowledgeable about NCATE, or proactive in handling NCATE material. But none of this has restrained her from selling the upper administration on the proposition that she is an NCATE expert, while no one in the Dean's office should be allowed anywhere near an NCATE issue. What's more, she has apparently obtained the support of Joan Exline, Thames' special assistant. Exline would like to be seen as an accreditation guru, even though her knowledge is based on a 6-month crash course in dealing with SACS, and the professors who have been spending most of their spare time doing SACS-related committee work don't trust her.
At a rather eventful meeting of the President's Council on June 8, Tammy Greer, an Associate Professor of Psychology conducted a lengthy exchange with Shelby Thames, during which she asked him what he had in mind for the next two years:
"Now that you have an end in sight, are you going to do something dramatic before you go out?" Greer asked. "People are also saying that because there has been such vocal opposition to some of the things you proposed, you are going to use your final two years to retaliate or that the faculty is going to use these two years to beat down on you."
Thames, who announced last month that he will resign in May 2007, said he has no intention to do those things.
He said the university reorganization of early 2003 was the only major change he had planned when he took office in 2002, and the university is still dealing with its repercussions.
"We've already had the major change, and while it did happen very fast it was also very effective," Thames said. "But just like planting a tree, the roots need to grow.
"As far as the other goes, I'm not in the business of retaliating. I have to do what I think is best for this university, and if I spend all my time retaliating, this university won't move forward."
These statements did little to allay fears in the College of Education and Psychology. After all, Shelby Thames probably believes that chopping off more roots will help a tree grow.
If Pierce, Berman, and deCasal (deCasal is an NCATE expert with years of experience as a consultant) are pushed out, and Dana Thames is put in charge of accreditation, the college will be put on probation after the NCATE site visit next spring. And it is doubtful that NCATE will fall for the same Thamesian ploy twice in a row: "Hold it, we're not ready, I just fired another dean."
What's more, if one tenth of the stories about her are true, Dana Thames is completely unfit to run an academic department. Here's just one story that has circulated widely on the USM campus. On more than one occasion, Education classes taught on the Gulf Park campus have gone without instructors for a week or more because Dana Thames neglected to hire adjuncts before the semester started. And while questions and complaints from students poured in, she sat in her office playing Solitaire, instead of contacting potential instructors.
If Dean Pierce judges that he is about to be fired, he should call Shelby's bluff and take a long overdue action: firing Dana Thames. His predecessor didn't fire her, maybe because he was afraid of getting fired for doing it... but he ended up getting fired anyway. Up to now, Dana Thames has drawn little scrutiny from the press--because the Thames regime so done so many other boneheaded things, she has driven nearly anyone who looked like a rival out of her department, she has packed the junior faculty positions with obedient followers (many of whom got their doctoral degrees at... USM), and students are said to be afraid that they won't get their degrees if they complain about her. But if Pierce fires her, then Shelby Thames fires him, Thames will be obliged to explain exactly why he did it, to newspaper reporters who have come to pay close attention to everything that he does and to believe virtually nothing that he says. The ensuing publicity might be enough to try the patience of at least one more member of the IHL Board, and expedite Thames' departure from office.
It isn't just Pierce who is on the hot seat. Dean Harold Doty of the College of Business did the unforgivable in February, when he challenged the Black Friday memo, which ordered immediate implementation of an MBA program desired by Thames' lieutenant, Ken Malone, and commanded an immediate halt to any "basic research" by Business professors. After the memo became public, IHL Commissioner Richard Crofts ordered Thames to retract it, because that implementing it would threaten USM's accreditation with SACS as well as the College's accreditation with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Recently Provost Jay Grimes (who was simply carrying out orders by issuing the memo, but has since decided to stand or fall with the Thames regime) refused to approve a change in the Business curriculum that had been requested by the IHL Board. Now Thames and crew are said to be trumping up a case against Dean Doty; they want to fire him for... endangering SACS accreditation!
Shelby Thames never knows when to quit. But if he continues down his current path, he may be compelled to quit, well before May 2007.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
USM: A Thames Ally Apologizes to the Faculty
Robert "Toy" McLaughlin, an alumnus of the University of Southern Mississippi who runs an investment company and serves as the President of the USM Foundation, has been in hot water lately.
Back in April remarks McLaughlin made on EagleTalk, a message board for fans of the USM Golden Eagles, dismissed anyone on the faculty who criticized President Shelby F. Thames. Using his handle "Isomniac Eagle," McLaughlin declared that you can tell which professors support Thames because they work hard, while "The Thames detractors are consistently lazy, gossipy, and self centered." This was not, shall we say, a favorable evaluation of 9 out of 10 USM professors. A follow-up post the next day got him newspaper coverage; he threatened to go on top of the Dome (the USM administration building) and take out a "high-powered rifle" if there were any further criticisms of USM's decision to recruit a football player with a manslaughter conviction on his record.
Now that his sponsor Shelby Thames has been relegated to lame-duckitude by the Mississippi IHL Board, McLaughlin is trying to mend fences. After some conversations with Dave Beckett, the President of the USM Faculty Senate, he agreed to write and publish a letter of apology to the Southern Mississippi faculty. The apology was announced yesterday at the monthly meeting of the Faculty Senate; today the letter was duly published in the Hattiesburg American.
Since the letter appeared only in the print edition of the American, I'm going to reproduce it here:
To: All Members of the USM Faculty
From: Robert Toy McLaughlin
It has been brought to my attention that a response that I made to two individuals in a message board exchange on Eagle Talk has been interpreted by some as an attack on the faculty as a whole. This is emphatically not the case, but I sincerely apologize for any misunderstanding that might have been read into those remarks.
In no way would I ever be critical of the hundreds of you that work so hard to educate our students and promote the welfare of The University of Southern Mississippi. I am very sorry that my words might have seemed to diminish your efforts in any way.
I am sorry that my remarks were taken out of the context in which they appeared. My remarks were directed specifically to the two individuals whose comments were inappropriate and confrontational in the dialogue in which they were stated. The remarks were not intended to be read outside of the Eagle Talk format amd were intended only as a response to remarks by the individuals with whom I had engaged on that message board. If the entire conversation and the conversations that led up to those remarks had been published, there would have been no controversy.
Even though the circumstances around which my comments were made public are unfortunate, the words are mine, and I apologize for any hurt they might have caused.
I hope that you will understand this situation and that you will accept this apology. I appreciate your labors, I respect your professionalism, and I will continue my efforts to support you in every way possible to help build a stronger and better university.
Sincerely,
Robert Toy McLaughlin
You can judge the adequacy of this letter, which occupies a little rectangle in the upper right hand corner of a page in the print edition, by comparing it with the extensive quotations from McLaughlin's EagleTalk missives in my previous Liberty and Power entry. I didn't include the comments by the two posters that McLaughlin was reacting to, but in essence both of them took the recruitment of Marcus Raines, the football player with the manslaughter conviction, as one more bad decision by a university president with a gift for making bad decisions.
I had a reason for not quoting the entire thread that McLaughlin was participating in (besides the fact that it would have been annoyingly tedious). Lanny Mixon, one of EagleTalk's owners, has threatened to sue the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors for copyright infringement, because some posters were cutting and pasting a series of posts from EagleTalk.
Interestingly, McLaughlin has not seen fit to post his letter on EagleTalk. But he has changed "Insomniac Eagle's" signature line recently. It used to refer to university professors as the only group without accountability; now it refers to educators as heroes.
The USM Faculty Senate has agreed to accept this letter. The decision is questionable; for my money, McLaughlin's advertisement is a poor excuse for an apology. McLaughlin never admits saying anything false; never admits derogating nearly every professor at USM; never admits that talk of shooting opponents with a "high-powered rifle" from the roof of a university building is unacceptable, even to those who have no personal memories of Charles Whitman. But McLaughlin did not invent the kind of pseudo-apology that is now endemic in American public life. He didn't start the practice of attributing "perceptions" to one's critics, while denying that they might have recognized facts. And while he has met no higher standard than the typical politician or corporate executive who gets into a jam, he is the first member of Shelby Thames' circle to so much as pretend to apologize for anything. That may well explain the Faculty Senate's decision.
Even so, it is most doubtful that Thames' successor will want to keep McLaughlin around.
Stay tuned.Tuesday, May 31, 2005
USM: Another Reason Why Thames Is a Lame Duck
A key reason that Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, has finally become a lame duck is his unique talent for finding those least suited for the job and installing them in positions of responsibility.
I put this particularly story off a couple of times; then it was displaced by the news that the Mississippi IHL Board had finally set a date for Thames to vacate the presidency of USM. But it has yet to get any attention outside of Mississippi, so I will recap it here.
The tale begins, not with the latest of Thames' lieutenants to attain infamy, but with an athlete that Thames gave USM's Athletic Department the go-ahead to sign.
On April 18, stories began running about USM's decision to offer an athletic scholarship to Marcus Raines, a linebacker at Pasadena City College in Southern California. Despite his unquestioned skills on the football field, Kansas State had quit recruiting Raines in early December, and other college football programs had refused to pursue him at all. The reason? In May 2000, Raines had gotten into a fight at a party in Palmdale, California. One of Raines' high school teammates punched Christopher O'Leary in the head, knocking him to the sidewalk. According to at least one witness, Raines then kicked O'Leary in the head, as though he were punting a football. O'Leary died. Raines pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, serving one year in a juvenile facility and two in a boot camp.
Shelby Thames obviously played a significant role in this decision; he interviewed Raines himself.
We can debate whether a university should be recruiting an athlete with Raines' past. In Raines' defense, we could argue that Kansas State and the other schools that passed on him were more worried about negative publicity in the present than about Raines' conduct in the future. Not so debatable is the fact that Thames, who has a substantial following in the thinly populated community of USM boosters and sports fans, and personally chews out coaches when USM's teams lose the big games, has been willing to take major risks in his pursuit of athletic glory. Under Thames, USM had previously picked up a men's basketball coach, Larry Eustachy, who resigned from his last job (at Iowa State) after it came out that he was an alcoholic. Indeed, since Thames has such an unerring knack for generating his own bad publicity, he may have figured that the local media would pay little attention when he green-lighted Marcus Raines.
If that's what Thames was counting on, he was wrong. Stories and editorials about Marcus Raines ran for a solid month in the Mississippi media after the decision was announced. Unless Raines lives up to an exemplary standard of behavior, on and off the field, there will be many more.
In any event, the decision to sign someone like Marcus Raines would have been controversial at nearly any university, not just one with a dysfunctional administration that was no longer getting favorable treatment from the local press.
As might be expected, Raines' signing was the topic of much discussion on EagleTalk, a message board for USM Golden Eagle sports fans. Some posters were critical of Thames for his role in recruiting Raines; more EagleTalkers, however, defended Thames and football coach Jeff Bower.
When the criticisms of Thames for recruiting Raines spilled over into other criticisms of his inept presidency, a regular contributor to the board took strong exception to them. In a post on April 19 (no longer accessible on the Web, except perhaps to EagleTalk subscribers), one Insomniac Eagle launched a ferocious denunciation of any and all critics of Shelby Thames. Having virtually memorized the recent output of Thames' public relations machine, Insomniac Eagle managed to work in most of the false or misleading statements that could be found in the newspaper advertisement taken out by the organizers of the pro-Thames rally at Warren Paving Company.
I want to say how much I resent the two guys in my thread below....... that took a thread about the Raines kid and tried to change it to an anti-Thames thread. Guys, this board is about USM sports. Take your petty and one sided little picayune gossip to the faculty lounge or somewhere where it will be appreciated.
Dr. Thames ran a couple of professors off that probably deserved some jail time. Did you notice how quickly that situation died down once it went before the judge?
He has also committed the cardinal sin of asking the professors to work a full work day. There just isn't any more to it than that.
I have talked with many professors on campus and you can easily tell the difference between the Thames supporters and the Thames detractors. The Thames detractors are consistently lazy, gossipy, and self centered.
The Thames supporters are consistently hard working, open minded, and dedicated to either their research or to educating the students.
I don't know where you clowns come up with some of this unfounded crap, but I'm good and damned tired of it. If you keep up this vicious line of unsubstantiated gossip, I'm going to start attacking your unfounded bull **** with great venom. You'd better do your homework before you start throwing your crap against this wall. I'm sick and tired of you do nothing idiots who continually try to tear everything down.
We have a great university, and the only thing wrong with it right now is that idiots like you think you can run your mouths about anybody you choose with total impunity. Not any more. This crap has to stop.
All you have to do is to come on the campus, get involved and learn first hand what is going on under the Thames administration,,,,.
Insomniac Eagle began to chant the Warren Paving Company litany. More construction projects on campus than ever before. 16,000 students enrolled (really it's 14,000, but Thames keeps double-counting students who take courses on more than one campus because the total sounds more impressive). Soon, according to Thames, that number will swell to 20,000. "We've won the battle to be the university of the gulf coast." (Tulane, which has opened a branch campus on the coast, is one of several that would beg to differ.) Then on to the growth of the Honors program (achieved by diluting it), and then a couple of boasts, one of which would surprise the beleaguered Nursing faculty: "Polymer Engineering is one of the tops in the world, and we are developing a world class medical facility on the coast." And, of course, the usual Thamesian reference to USM's Carnegie classification, as though it trumps the 4th-tier ranking that the institution got from US News and World Report, and keeps probation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools from mattering.
Then a little boosterism for USM's programs in the arts that seems out of character, considering the "consistently lazy, gossipy, and self centered" proclivities of nearly every arts professor:
Our fine arts programs are among the tops in the world and the USM Symphony is possibly the best College Symphony Orchestra in the country. The new dance and theatre building is a jewel and one of the best facilities in the country.
Insomniac Eagle concluded with this collegial exhortation:
I could go on and on, but it wouldn't do any good with negative little pipsqueaks like you. Just don't come on these boards running down our school or its administration. We have a lot to be proud of, and you're not going to detract from it.
Apparently this had little effect on the "negative little pipsqueaks." By the next evening Insomniac Eagle wasn't just angry at critics of Shelby F. Thames, he didn't want to hear about Marcus Raines either. Here's his post of April 20 in its entirety:
post one more word about raines, and i'm going to get on.............. top of the administration building with a high powered rifle and start shooting.
So who is this Insomniac Eagle? Some bigoted sports fan with an excessive fondness for draft beer and verbal bullying?
In fact, the Insomniac handle belongs to Robert "Toy" McLaughlin, a USM alumnus who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and runs Inverness Asset Management. He is on the Board of Directors of the USM Foundation, and currently serves as the foundation's president; before that, he was Chair of the foundation's Finance Committee for two years. McLaughlin is also on the Advisory Board for USM's College of Business.
The "high powered rifle" remark brought McLaughlin some unflattering coverage in the Hattiesburg American, and a couple of blistering letters to the editor. He apologized for it on EagleTalk, though why he wasn't kicked off that message board remains a mystery. Although it made the local newspaper, I don't think nearly enough attention was devoted to the spectacle of a major fundraiser for the University of Southern Mississippi running down nearly every professor on campus (at least 80% of the USM faculty is opposed to Thames; most informed estimates put the percentage well above 90%). And the College of Business appears to be 100% anti-Thames, from Dean Harold Doty on down; is McLaughlin resolved not to raise any more money for the College until every professor is replaced and the dean's office lies vacant?
When the moving vans finally arrive at the Dome (USM's central administration buidling) to carry Shelby Thames' belongings back to the polymer lab, the new president will no doubt be looking for some new directors for the university foundation. Until then, Toy McLaughlin will continue to embarrass the University of Southern Mississippi.
May 2007 seems a long way off. Stay tuned.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Just in from USM: Two Years of Lame-Duckitude for Shelby Thames
Once again the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees controls the element of surprise. Nothing pertaining to the University of Southern Mississippi was on the agenda for the Board's monthly meeting today. When the acrimonious 3-hour meeting on May 6 ended without the 4 more years that his cheerleader Roy Klumb wanted, it was clear that USM President Shelby Thames was in trouble. But his opponents appeared to have such a thin margin on the Board as to preclude prompt action against him.
Well, now it's official. One of the worst university presidents in American history is a lame duck. Shelby Thames is being given a one-year extension, until May 2007, at which point he will be required to return to the faculty. He has already devoted a whole lot of paragraphs to denying the obvious fact that he did not choose his exit date.
Lame-duckitude for university presidents rarely lasts more than one year. Obviously Thames had enough support remaining on the Board for a semi-protective deal to be brokered. The official rationale for the extra year leaves something to be desired:
The College Board, in a prepared statement, told Thames to spend the rest of his presidency working on the university’s accreditation problems. In December, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools put Southern Miss on a one-year probation.
We all know Thames is singularly ill-prepared to solve the accreditation problems that he brought on USM. It is the professors who will have to solve them, while working to neutralize the remainder of Thames' henchcrew, and remaining alert for spiteful and destructive presidential behavior.
So a hard road remains for the faculty, staff, and students at USM. But all who travel it will be buoyed by the good news. Despite his fervent efforts to the contrary, there will be life after Shelby Freland Thames.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
USM: Klumb Fails, Thames Thrashes
The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees has yet to decide the fate of Shelby Thames, the now infamous President of the University of Southern Mississippi. At a special closed meeting last Friday, the Board may or may not have heard the detailed report on Thames' performance painstakingly compiled over the last two or three months by IHL Commissioner Richard Crofts. (One would hope the Board saw it, but the published accounts of the meeting don't confirm that it was presented.) But clearly Roy Klumb, whose term as Board President effectively ended with the special meeting, was making one last attempt to rally support for Thames and keep him in office after his current contract expires in March 2006.
The meeting ended with no action being taken.
"The board felt we should sit down and talk about the issues at the University of Southern Mississippi," Klumb said. "It was a work session, a talk session, no action was taken."
Not quite. Since Klumb as President controlled the agenda, one may be sure that he permitted no motions to fire Thames, or relegate him to lame-duckitude. We can also be sure that a vote for extending Thames' contract would have been permissible. If the matter did not come to a vote, it's because Klumb knew he didn't have the numbers.
Klumb acknowledged that the closed meeting - which began with a private catered lunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and peach cobbler - was heated at times.
"You've got 12 pretty bright people, people with strong opinions," he said. "Sometimes they raise their voices. You shouldn't read anything into that."
Klumb's delivery doesn't come through in print, but when he appeared on the evening news on WDAM TV making similar comments, he looked as though his dog had been run over.
So what are the prospects? Thames is not on the agenda for the next regular Board meeting on May 19, the first to be presided over by his outspoken critic Virginia Shanteau Newton. Crofts has had the Interim dropped from his title, and his successor is not expected to be named until December. It may be that no action will be taken against Thames until the strong-commissioner system is fully in place (pieces of it will be voted on next week) and Crofts begins wielding the expanded powers of his office (most likely, after July 1). Klumb's pro-Thames faction probably now consists of himself, his long-time accomplices Scott Ross and Tom Colbert, and Stacy Davidson, who obligingly put in a plug for Thames before the special meeting. That gives him 5 if Robin Robinson, who joined the Board last year, is still supporting Thames (her initial public utterances showed tremendous bias in his favor; more recently she has gone silent).
Most likely, then, a slender majority of 7-5 now opposes Thames. Considering that Thames was chosen in 2002 by a 7-5 margin (the 11-1 vote was subsequently taken to reassure the public), it's downright frightening how much damage Thames has had to do just to lose two votes on the Board. But nothing is open to Klumb and the rest of the Thames boosters now except delay. Since Thames has averaged one boneheaded action per month since he was enthroned in May 2002, and he has no credibility remaining with the local newspapers (the Jackson Clarion-Ledger ran another editorial last Friday calling for his retirement), it does not appear that putting off the decision will assuage the other Board members' exasperation and get Klumb and crew 4 more years for Thames.
While the uncertainty remains, though, more faculty and staff are pouring out of USM. And as the entire state university system faces sharp budget cuts, Thames and what's left of his henchbunch ("Chief Operating Officer" Ken Malone, Chief Financial Officer Gregg Lassen, Special Assistant Joan Exline, and Associate Provost Cynthia Moore) will be using the cuts to punish their manifold enemies.
Now that Klumb has taken his best shot, Thames is relying on a a newly released brochure titled A Work in Progress to preserve his presidency. Printing and circulating the hard copies has cost the univesity nearly $14,000. Many of the contents were leaked by Thames' local boosters, the Paving Company Putschists, when they bought their full-page ad in the Hattiesburg American in March. In any event, a full analysis of the claims made in the brochure will have to wait for another post. But it's worth noting that at the meeting of Thames' President's Council, on Tuesday May 10, his obsessional assertions of increased enrollment were picked apart:
Mathematics professor Myron Henry said data in the document reflecting student enrollment is misleading.
While the document shows enrollment increasing by 7.1 percent in the past three years, Henry said the total number of credit hours students have enrolled in - and the accompanying tuition revenue - have not increased.
"Fall enrollment counting is not as accurate as three-term credit hour counting, which says we're completely even over a three-year period," he said.
But Joe Paul, vice-president of student affairs, said the increase in students is accurate and reflects an increasing number of part-time students.
"The 10-day head count we used is often referred to as a 'bragging number,' " he said. "There's no doubt a lot of our growth has been in part-time students at the Gulf Coast campus."
Not highlighted by Paul was an actual decline in the number of full-time students at the main Hattiesburg campus.
Meanwhile, a comment by a student government official indicates definite potential for a post in the Thames administration:
But Student Government Association representative Lyndsey Jalvia said she sees the information [in A Work in Progress] as appropriate for public relations.
"In the long run this does benefit the university," she said. "Balanced information is always the most accurate, but when it comes to the community, balanced information isn't always the best way solely from a (public relations) standpoint."
While many state university administrators believe it is necessary to lie to the public about the condition of the university, it is most unusual for them to admit this in front of reporters.
Because the Jackson and Hattiesburg newspapers have long since quit being compliant, Thames is placing press releases in such publications as The Wayne County News, which quotes extensively from a speech he made last Thursday. To the usual lies and half-truths, the speech adds a couple of wild fabrications. One pertains to extramural funding via grants and contracts:
"Because of those type of decisions and other moves made, Southern Miss now generates more external dollars than Texas A&M. We're currently No. 12 in the nation in external dollars generated while Texas A&M is No. 18."
Within the same state, Mississippi State brings in more grant and contract bucks than USM does...
Another is about freshman retention rate:
And our retention rate of first year students was 98 percent in 2004-2005.
I haven't the foggiest how Thames or anyone else could know how many of USM's current freshmen will return for the next academic year before August, when it begins.
Now that he has lost his private spokesperson (Lisa Mader has defected to a local hospital system), Thames is reduced to retailing desperate whoppers. These may not alienate any of his current backers on the IHL Board--but they seem even less likely to change the minds of those who have grown sick of him.
Thursday, May 5, 2005
USM Update: Is Roy Klumb Trying to Save Shelby Thames?
Tomorrow morning,
the Mississippi IHL Board will meet behind closed doors to discuss the fate of Shelby F. Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi.
This will be the last meeting that Roy Klumb gets to preside over before Virginia Shanteau Newton gets control of the agenda. It's pretty clear that Klumb, despite a significant reduction in his public cheerleading for Thames, is using it in one last effort to reaffirm his guy's reign and prepare the way for a 4-year contract extension.
Note how Klumb signals his debts to people he pretends to be independent of. (The State Legislature passed a resolution commending Shelby Thames just in time for the last Board meeting two weeks ago. The resolution sagely avoided mentioning his accomplishments as President of USM.)
"At some point, we're going to come to some sort of consensus, if we feel like we're on the the right track at the University of Southern Mississippi, despite the issues that are being played in the public forum down there pro or con for the president," Klumb said. "Ultimately, this decision rests with us — not the Legislature, the faculty or the business community."
There is, of course, no assurance that Klumb will get what he wants, but the fatuous comments by Board member Stacy Davidson suggest that Thames still commands a significant faction on the Board, despite the lousy publicity he keeps bringing them and the executive sessions (roughly one every 2 months) that they keep having to hold on account of his latest bit of boneheadedness.
Dr. Stacy Davidson Jr., a College Board member from Cleveland, said he has not made up his mind about Thames, but he thinks "things are going satisfactory" at USM.
"I'm going to look at it with an open mind ... the main thing I want to do is get the accreditation reinstated as quickly and as positively as possible," Davidson said. "None of us are perfect, including Dr. Thames and presidents of other universities, too."
It may well come down to a 7-5 Board vote for Thames (reportedly what got him put on the throne back in 2002) or a 7-5 vote that upholds the new strong-commissioner model by going against him. Very little now separates a Board that begins to correct itself from a body that solidifies its status as the worst system board of trustees in the history of state university systems. If it keeps sponsoring Thames, the IHL Board will have placed its bid to join Governor Theodore Bilbo in higher education history. In 1930, Bilbo fired over 100 faculty and administrators at universities in the Mississippi state system so he could make patronage appointments.
Meanwhile, the USM Faculty Senate meets tomorrow, in what promises to be an eventful gathering; official statistics show how under Thames USM's School of Nursing has dropped from first to worst in the state; and the next full Board meeting is just under two weeks away.
Stay tuned.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
USM: You Mean I Wasn't Supposed to Kill the Rest of the University?
On Sunday April 17, the Biloxi Sun Herald ran a lengthy interview with Senator Trent Lott on his "economic development" activities in Mississippi. What Senator Lott presents as economic development activity, others would see as pork barrel politics and the dispensation of privileges to the politically connected -- and there's plenty in the interview to support such interpretations. For instance, references to defense contractors that operate in Mississippi (particularly, to shipyards on the Gulf Coast) are sprinkled throughout the interview.
One relatively brief passage, however, is especially pertinent to those of us who have been following the USM saga. In it, Lott describes the Congressional appropriations he has secured for universities in the Mississippi state system:
One of the things I've worked on over the years - and I've talked about it and a lot of people didn't quite see it at first - but I tried to find niches at our universities, which I could support with federal funds, federal grants that were unique programs at those universities, which could then relate to the creation of jobs.
At the University of Southern Mississippi it's the polymer science center (and) the center for economic development and entrepreneurship; it's the technology programs at Mississippi State University; it's the physics acoustics program at Ole Miss and now with shipbuilding and with Northrop Grumman looking to polymers or composites for hulls of the future, University of Southern Mississippi is perfectly situated to collaborate.
Chancellor Khayat at Ole Miss hasn't taken Federal subsidies to the physical acoustics program as a signal to tear down the English program or run off the senior professors in Psychology. President Lee at Miss State hasn't seen any need to shut down the Math department or bring the ax down on the Business school so his university's technology programs will shine forth with greater glory.
But at the University of Southern Mississippi, Shelby Freland Thames has interpreted special appropriations for Polymer Science and Economic Development as commands to ruin Nursing, deaccredit Business, gut the Honors program, underfund Math till it collapses, run off 1/3 of the English faculty, and take periodic whacks at everything else.
While I would imagine that Trent Lott's understanding of universities is rather limited, I very much doubt that either he or anyone on his staff expected Thames to take a wrecking ball to the rest of USM. I doubt, too, that anyone in Lott's office thought that demolishing most of USM would help draw high-tech industry to the southern third of Mississippi.
Somebody forgot to tell Shelby Thames. D'oh!!!
Some Really Nasty Administrative Behavior at the University of Nevada Reno
News is breaking in the case of Hussein S. Hussein,
an Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Nevada Reno.
A story picked up and given wide circulation by the Associated Press suggests that Hussein has been targeted by the administration at Nevada-Reno for whistleblowing. An earlier AP story, dated April 20,
includes further details.
Among the ingredients of this witches' brew are a bogus tip from the university police to the FBI that Hussein, a native of Egypt, was involved in terrorism; a Kafkaesque application of hate crime legislation (to punish the victim of the alleged hate crime); and what looks like major abuse of the university's Federally mandated committee for reviewing animal research studies.
I'm actually surprised that more university administrations aren't manipulating Animal Research Committees (or Institutional Review Boards, their counterparts for research with human subjects) in order to get even with researchers whose statements or actions have displeased them. But then, I don't want to give anyone any ideas. At least Nevada-Reno's administration failed to convince a hearing panel that there was anything to its trumped-up charges of violations of animal research rules.
All indications are that this one is going to get much uglier before it's over.
(A hat tip to Jameela Lares at the AAUP-USM
message board.)
Saturday, April 23, 2005
USM: Wheels Are Coming off the Thames Machine
Last Friday, April 15, I had the honor and the pleasure to visit the University of Southern Mississippi campus, where I gave two talks to members of the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I'm particularly indebted to Amy Young, the President of the USM chapter of AAUP, as well as to Michael Forster, Mark Klinedinst, and Myron Henry for being my hosts during different portions of my stay. I got the chance to meet many other USM faculty members who have been working to rescue USM from the misrule of President Shelby F. Thames, as well as some sympathizers from the surrounding community. I ate lunch and drank coffee at Javawerks, known in Hattiesburg as the "center of the resistance." I was given a handsome plaque by the AAUP chapter, which I will display in a prominent place--while remaining fully cognizant that the other two recipients of the same award, Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer, ran major personal risks standing up to the Thames regime.
The faculty members I talked to, far from being the lazy whiners of pro-Thamesian apologetics, struck me as tired but determined. They were bearing all the responsibilities that professors normally bear when the Spring Semester is about to end. Many were close to buckling under 3 years' worth of administratively neglected reports and committee work for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits USM and has put the university on probation. The struggle to rid the university of Thames and his henchcrew has called forth whatever might be left in the reserve tank after they've attended to their primary responsibilities.
I wasn't there to rouse resistance against Thames by reminding everyone of the worst things he has done. I've done some of that in the past, and the audience scarcely needed reminding. Besides, a powerful three-minute video, apparently by the pseudonymous satirist See More, was played before both talks; it movingly (and sometimes hilariously) set images from the Thames era to "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. My talks were about the faculty's role in running the university (known as "shared governance" in academic circles). I'll get to the substance of them in a later post. Instead of focusing exclusively on the ways in which Thames and crew have undermined shared governance, I also talked about some areas, such as financial reporting, that faculty members have traditionally conceded to administrators, but that I thought USM professors would be well advised to pay attention to in a post-Thamesian era.
Confidence is slowly growing that there will actually be a post-Thamesian era. I wish I could say that Shelby Thames is no longer enthroned at USM. Or at least that lame-duckitude has descended upon him. For in that case everyone could get to work neutralizing what's left of his power to do harm, while counting the days till his contract expires in March of next year. But the monthly meeting of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees came and went largely as predicted. The communiqué that the Board issued after its meeting on Thursday April 21 indicated further movement toward a strong-commissioner model for the 8 univerisities in the Mississippi state system, while voting on the key components of the new system still won't take place for another month:
The Board also heard a subcommittee recommendation on annual performance goals to be used in evaluating universities and institutional executive officers. The goals, which will vary from institution to institution in order to take into account differences in universities’ missions, will be considered in final form in the May Board meeting. In addition, the College Board began considering a measure which would require annual evaluation of the institutional executive officers.
So May 19, when Thames opponent Virginia Shanteau Newton takes over as Board President from Thames cheerleader Roy Klumb, is the earliest that the Board can formally evaluate Thames' performance and decide whether his 4-year contract will be allowed to expire.
Action against Thames can still not be marked down as a done deal. Everything remains in the hands of an IHL Board that still has no formal channels of communication with professors or faculty bodies, and has made a whole series of incredibly irresponsible, high-handed decisions in his particular case. But the Board, seeking to recover from its biggest spate of bad press since the Civil Rights era, keeps grinding glacially toward internal reform, and desperation is rippling through Thames' supporters. This week, Shelby Thames lost a key component of his machine, and another has been discredited.
Yesterday, after months of rumors kept alive by her much diminished visibility in media stories about USM, the announcement came that Lisa Slay Mader is leaving the university on May 2.
Lisa Mader, who has served as spokeswoman for University of Southern Mississippi president Shelby Thames for more than two years, is leaving the university to join Wesley Medical Center, the hospital announced Friday.
The American even noted that she was Shelby Thames' private spokeswoman who only pretended to speak for the entire university.
Mader has ended up being loathed by just about everyone at the university, including those who doubt that she played any role in the decision-making. As noted in Reuben Mees' article, in today's Hattiesburg American:
Political science professor Joe Parker said Mader had a difficult role to fill in recent years and was not often well-liked by the faculty.
"I think she has been a spear-carrier for Shelby Thames and she collected a certain amount of hostility from the faculty," he said.
But he also said some of the tension could have been avoided by varying her approach to the issues.
"Her PR style is more political and more attack-oriented and it really showed up in the Glamser-Stringer incident, when she alluded to criminal charges and tried to put the faculty on the defensive," Parker said, referring to Thames' attempt to fire two tenured professors last year. "It really made her look more like a political flack than a public relations person."
Her move to Wesley Hospital, another Hattiesburg institution that is less prominent locally than the university, smacks more than a little of desperation. She will have to rebuild her credibility with the local media, all the way up from zero. Many observers had thought that she would prefer a job in a different part of Mississippi, if not in another state where her notoriety would be less likely to follow her.
Thames evidently feels some urgency about hiring a new spokesperson:
"But now we need to find an extremely competent person to replace her," Thames said. "We'll start meeting next week and then start advertising to find a top flight PR person."
But why would anyone want to step into that job, while Thames is still president but his days appear numbered? Failing to toe the Thamesian line will get the new PR person fired instantly. Toeing it faithfully it will insure that the PR person will be replaced as soon as Thames' successor arrives. There is a good chance that Mader's former position will lie vacant till next March.
The second wheel to fall off this week is a prominent Thames supporter who currently serves as the President of the USM Foundation. He has not resigned, but has discredited himself so badly that Thames would probably be better off without him. His is the kind of story, however, that deserves to be told in baroque and lurid detail; it would take up several installments of a soap opera, and deserves at least an entire Liberty and Power entry to itself.
To be continued.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
USM: Is Richard Crofts Building a Case against Shelby Thames?
On Thursday April 7, Richard Crofts, the interim IHL Commissioner, met with the officers of the three most important faculty committees at the University of Southern Mississippi. The purpose of his meeting with the leadership of the Faculty Senate, the Academic Council, and the Graduate Council was to seek comments on the performance of USM's president, Shelby F. Thames. No one is divulging what was said at the meeting, but we can take it to the bank that no one from the USM faculty delegation had anything favorable to say about Thames.
Crofts' official statement was distributed at the monthly meeting of the USM Faculty Senate on Friday April 8.
The Board of Trustees has a policy of evaluating Presidents during the mid-term of the President’s four-year contact. The Board also has a practice of evaluating a President as a prelude to a decision about renewing the President’s contact. Under the new governance model, it is anticipated that the Commissioner will be evaluating the Presidents and reporting on those evaluations to the Board of Trustees.
The Board of Trustees has asked me to prepare a report for their use in evaluating President Thames as part of the process of determining if his contract will be renewed. The new policy of annual evaluations of the Presidents includes a list of constituent groups that will be offered the opportunity for input into the evaluation. I am working off that kind of list to accomplish this task.
This may not seem like a big deal. Crofts is operating with a traditional "stakeholder" model for public institutions. That means he will be soliciting commentary from a bunch of constituencies, one of them the same local business interests that got Shelby Thames elevated to the throne in the first place. Another constituency is alumni, and the directors of USM's alumni association have been put in place to promote the Thamesian line.
What's more, while it seems unlikely, Crofts could choose to ignore anything he gets from faculty sources. Or a majority of the Board, displeased that he has been listening to faculty complaints, might still choose to ignore his final recommendation.
The fact remains that Crofts' procedure was endorsed on the editorial page of Saturday's Jackson Clarion-Ledger.
The proposed College Board plan to change the job performance evaluations of university presidents from one dominated by the board to one in which the higher education commissioner would conduct annual appraisals with significant input from faculty, administrators, students and community leaders is one that seems appropriate.
In an article in Friday's Clarion-Ledger, covering a meeting of university presidents in the Misssissippi state system that took place on April 6, there were complaints from 2 of the 8:
During a Presidents' Council meeting Wednesday, Claudia Limbert, president of Mississippi University for Women, said she was worried about how much weight each constituent would have.
She also was concerned about how having made hard decisions that haven't pleased everyone could come back to haunt her. "I don't know how that will play," Limbert said during the videoconference meeting. Mississippi Valley State University President Lester Newman expressed similar sentiments.
Meanwhile, Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat and Jackson State University President Ronald Mason Jr. confined their public comments to suggesting tweaks to the list of constituencies.
The president who is serving as its poster child has just enough sense remaining to know that he cannot criticize the new presidential review procedure in public. Here was Shelby Thames' response to response to Reuben Mees of the American:
Thames said he welcomes Crofts' report.
"I'm very comfortable with the idea that he is looking into this," Thames said. "As a matter of fact we were the first university in the state to invite him to come down and see all the things we've got going down here."
Sure, and Thames was also "very comfortable" with Crofts' decision to "look into" the Black Friday memo...
In the narrow little universe of the Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, Crofts' decision to consult faculty leaders while evaluating a president is nonetheless cataclysmic. There has never been any official line of communication from the professors at the universities in the system to the Board. The Board operates as though the only information it would ever need can be obtained from the university presidents or their designated upper administrators. And many other universities' governing boards still avoid communication with the faculty.
At Clemson, the Board of Trustees was prevailed on during the late 1990s to accept a nonvoting faculty representative--but only on condition that the Board select the representative! Clemson professors are now somewhat better informed about what's happening with the Board, but so far the faculty representatives have all been former Faculty Senate presidents with a track record of not confronting the upper administration. In fact, the Senate leadership appeased the administration on several major issues while the faculty representative was still in the proposal stage, for fear that otherwise the Board would torpedo the arrangement. Still, this is a much better system than has prevailed at the 8 state universities in Misssissippi.
Friday's Faculty Senate meeting also brought confirmation that Shelby Thames' enforcer-without-portfolio Ken Malone simply will not appear in front of any faculty body at USM. In the fall, after two months of false promises and excuses, Shelby Thames declared that Malone would not appear in front of the President's Council to explain his role in USM's Economic Development program and the decision to move it out of the College of Business. In the Spring the Senate has sought to question Malone about his decision to close the Continuing Education office in the middle of a semester. Last month, Malone was on the agenda, but ducked out with a purported last-minute schedule conflict. This month, Thames ruled that Malone need not appear because all appearances in front of the Faculty Senate must henceforward be made by Joan Exline, his special assistant in charge of accreditation issues.
Obviously, Malone does not want to say anything to faculty members in front of reporters. (Of course, when word gets around that you called for the public lynching of a senior reporter from the Hattiesburg American, the folks from the media do tend to become hostile.) For this very reason, the Faculty Senate leadership now needs to inform Malone that either he appears at the Senate's next meeting--or a resolution calling for his immediate removal from office will take over his spot on the agenda.
Another significant development at Friday's meeting was a report by Bill Gunther, Professor of Economics and former Dean of the College of Business. The Thames administration has repeatedly asserted that the Spring 2003 reorganization, in which Thames fired 9 academic deans and replaced them with 5, saved USM $1.8 million, which was redirected to the classroom. The alleged savings (which have expanded to $2 million in the retelling, most recently in the newspaper ad paid for by Thames' allies in the local business community) always lacked credibility. Gunther estimates that the actual net savings from replacing 9 deans with 5 at $287K and the additional amount reallocated to teaching at $467K, for a total of $755,000--over $1 million short of the figure trumpeted by Thames. When I am able to obtain the full report, which contains 5 data tables, I will post a further analysis here.
No one in the Thames administration has ever documented the alleged savings from the reorganization. Thames and his PR machine have just repeated an impressive sounding number, and media outlets have kept on printing it. Unfortunately, the media often uncritically print false or misleading information about university finances. Here, however, is a direct public challenge to a false and misleading financial report. I hope the Faculty Senate will follow with a demand that Thames and his Chief Financial Officer, Gregg Lassen, either substantiate the $1.8 million figure in detail, or issue a public apology for lying about the savings from the reorganization. And that if Lassen fails to do either, his very own personalized resolution of no confidence will go on the agenda for the next Senate meeting.
Lots could still happen between now and the third week of May, when the Board is expected to evaluate Thames for possible contract renewal. According to the article in Saturday's Hattiesburg American, Crofts is moving with all deliberate speed:
There is no timeline for when the report will be complete, Crofts said. Thames' four-year contract, however, will expire in March.
"It's hard to say when it will be finished," Crofts said. "It depends on when I can meet with everyone, but it's going slower than I thought."
Meanwhile, the Misssissippi state legislature has failed to pass a budget, because it could not agree on cuts to education, so it will have to return for a special session. And without official assurances of lame duckitude for one of the worst university presidents in American history, senior faculty are continuing to hemorrhage out of the University of Southern Misssissippi.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Economic Development, Southern Mississippi Style: The Hybrid Plastics Story
Bad things keep happening at the University of Southern Mississippi, though gradually. A whole week has gone by without sudden collapses or colossally boneheaded administrative maneuvers.
Better things may be on the horizon, but the new system that makes the IHL Commissioner the direct supervisor of university presidents in the Mississippi state system is still shaping up. Shelby F. Thames has yet to be told that he has become a lame duck, or that his health problems necessitate his prompt retirement.
I'll have more to say about both trends soon enough.
In the meantime, the momentary absence of flamboyant foolishness gives us an opportunity to appreciate the longer-term institutional dynamics of a badly managed state university.
USM's public relations apparatus has been desperate to place favorable stories in the national media. Six weeks, it got one. Or so the story might appear before you read it, and set to thinking about what you've read.
"Heading South, Looking for an Edge," by Barnaby J. Feder appeared in the Business section of the New York Times, on February 22. The article is no longer accessible electronically, except to those paying a fee, so I'll quote the key passage from it.
Hybrid Plastics, a nanotechnology firm founded 7 years ago in Southern California, moved to Hattiesburg in July of 2003. Its arrival was duly ballyhooed by Lisa Mader and the rest of Shelby Thames' publicity machine. And Shelby Thames didn't hesitate to "brag on" the Hybrid deal in his first self-congratulatory presidential letter, which came out on May 6, 2004.
The Times story speaks loosely of incentives that were provided variously by the University of Southern Mississippi, the Mississippi Development Authority, and the Area Development Partnership, plus earmarked Federal funds obtained by Senator Thad Cochran:
Besides offering a bargain-basement location, Hattiesburg lured Hybrid with the promise of a close relationship with the University of Southern Mississippi's highly regarded polymer chemistry department. Hattiesburg became irresistible when the state promised to make university equipment and laboratory space available at virtually no cost. Lower taxes were a factor, too.
"It's a sweetheart deal," said Joseph D. Lichtenhan, Hybrid's chief executive. "Trying to raise $25 million to duplicate what we get here didn't make business sense." And Dr. Lichtenhan realized that there would be other business benefits from leaving a region where nanotechnology companies "are a dime a dozen." Hybrid has just 14 employees locally and sales of under $5 million, but it represents the kind of small business Mississippians view as crucial to overcoming the state's reputation as a business backwater. "There's not a lot of folks here to steal your good employees away."
Feder goes to some length to explain why nanotechnology in general is considered too far from profitable applications to attract much in the way of venture capital, and how the development of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, the class of molecules in which Hybrid specializes, still requires substantial funds that Hybrid has had trouble obtaining from private investors. Hybrid is now looking for larger companies that are willing to pay it to use its molecules as additives to improve their products.
So a company that stands a long way from major success is getting $25 million worth of facilities and equipment out of the University of Southern Mississippi. Most of that equipment was ultimately paid for by the taxpayers of Misssissippi, or by taxpayers elsewhere in the United States (via Federal grants to USM's Polymer Science department). And nowhere in Feder's article is there a word about the revenues that USM expects to derive from its alliance with Hybrid Plastics.
The USM press release claims that the deal with Hybrid will increase USM's competitiveness for Federal research grants to its Polymer Science program. I'll review USM's performance in that area in a future post; suffice it to say that Thames' monomaniacal insistence on the pursuit of research grants hasn't paid off particularly well. The release also claims that Hybrid will add up to 25 new high-tech jobs at its Hattiesburg location by 2006. As of February 2005, the company's Hattiesburg-area workforce had grown from "about a dozen" to 14.
Now this is the same USM that has closed an anthropology professor's lab because water is leaking in and making the rooms unusable, while the administration is unable or unwilling to find money to pay for repairs. It is the same USM where the building that houses the School of Nursing is full of mold because the hot water pipes keep cracking, and no funds are available to renovate the former grocery store that Nursing was supposed to move into.
The Hybrid Plastics story provides an exemplary model for USM's "economic development" efforts. Economic development means making alliances with politically connected businesses that may not produce revenue for USM, while USM assuredly enhances the revenues of its partners. The net benefit to the university, let alone to the population of the southern third of Mississippi, is hard to substantiate, but the net benefit to the companies and their principals is undeniable. In public-choice parlance, the function of such economic development efforts is to offer major rewards to rent-seekers.
By contrast, USM's MA and PhD programs in Economic Development draw their own rent-seekers, and impair the institution's academic credibility, but everyone knows they will produce revenue in the form of tuition payments.
Oh, and while we're speaking of economic development, it's time to celebrate another Thamesian anniversary. USM's Van Hook Golf Course has been lying vacant and overgrown for a year. Deciding to turn it into an industrial park, to house all the companies that would flock to Hattiesburg in the wake of Hybrid Plastics, the Thames administration officially closed the course on March 31, 2004. It has yet to find a single company willing to build there.
Monday, March 28, 2005
USM, Where Boneheaded Behavior Never Ceases
No one outside the Mississippi IHL Board appears to know how much longer Shelby F. Thames will remain as President of the University of Southern Mississippi. But things have definitely not been going his way lately.
The Jackson newspaper has carried two editorials calling on him to resign; the editorial page of the daily newspaper in Hattiesburg has blasted the Board for failing to intervene when Thames' high-handed incompetence has threatened the survival of his institution; a pep rally for his continued reign, organized by his cronies in the local business community, has brought him a cascade of negative publicity; his most vocal enemy on the Board is about to take over as Board President; the Interim IHL Commissioner has overruled him in public; and the two of them are crafting new rules and policies that will make him easier to get rid of, by giving the Commissioner the authority to review university presidents in the Mississippi state system every year and fire them for inadequate performance. Today both the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Hattiesburg American ran editorials in favor of the proposed new system of annual presidential evaluations. The Clarion-Ledger editorial makes Thames and the turmoil he has stirred up into Exhibit A.
For example, when University of Southern Mississippi President Shelby Thames first encountered difficulties with faculty, then with terminating faculty, the evaluations possibly could have helped ameliorate the situation by catching potential problems early and preventing misunderstandings.
After which, the writer's disclaimer gives little reassurance.
But this should not be seen as a reaction to Thames. It's simply a professional way of ensuring that goals are set, progress is measured, and goals are met.
Meanwhile, taking account of Thames' customary rhetoric and his support in certain segments of the local business community, the American dryly notes that annual evaluations are the standard in the business world.
On Wednesay March 23, Thames and his inner circle called off the search for a new Provost. The alleged reasons? They didn't want to disrupt USM's efforts to emerge from the probation that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools imposed on it last December, and they didn't want to spend money on bringing in job candidates when USM is shelling out $600 a day for a SACS consultant and incurring other expenses connected with accreditation.
As with nearly everything that comes out of the Dome (USM's central administration building), the stated rationales are short on credibility.
The current Provost, Jay Grimes, who now gets to excise the "Interim" from his title, has played no visible role in helping the university get straight with SACS. Indeed, he could be fired and his position abolished, and the impact on USM would be minimal. Shelby F. Thames is too intent on concentrating power in his own hands to allow anyone else to carry out the duties of a Chief Academic Officer; USM will have no real Provost until Thames is history. Grimes' only visible action with regard to accreditation was to issue the Black Friday Memo to the College of Business, which blatantly threatened USM's accreditation, and was retracted after direct intervention by Richard Crofts, the interim IHL Commissioner. But no one on or near the scene thinks that the Black Friday Memo was Grimes' idea.
USM is actually saving some money by discontinuing with Thames' old eccentric system of two Provosts, an extremely weak one for the Hattiesburg campus and a total fifth wheel for the Gulf Park campus (which is completely controlled by Thames' lieutenant, Ken Malone). Grimes was the Gulf Park Provost before Tim Hudson, the Hattiesburg Provost, left last July to become president of the University of Houston-Victoria.
Besides, saving money, even in the face of a dire budgetary situation, is no priority with Shelby Thames. As noted in a story in the Hattiesburg American for Saturday March 19 (no longer available online unless you pay a fee), he recently acquired an airplane for himself and USM's Athletic Director to fly around in. At its March meeting, which was a long way from a Thames-fest, he still got the IHL Board to approve paying its pilot's salary ($63K a year) out of state funds. Granted, USM holds just a one-third share of the propeller plane, whose other owners are a local lawyer and a dentist, and they will have to cover their shares of the pilot's salary. But if Thames genuinely wanted to save travel expense money, he would require himself and all of the other administrators to use commercial aviation and and fly coach. The plane is just a presidential status symbol. It enables Thames to assert his parity (or so he vainly imagines) with the top administrators at Ole Miss and Mississippi State, who already have access to private aircraft.
So why was the Provost search really called off? One possibility: because Thames has been unofficially warned by the Board, or by the Commissioner, that he has very little chance of remaining President of USM after May 2006. A Provost hired over the next couple of months would not last more than a year after a new president takes over. That's because university presidents normally insist think the position is of vital importance, so they insist on hiring their own provosts.
But if any of this is so, it's being kept under wraps. Other behavioral indicators, such as Thames' growing impatience with the questions he keeps getting asked at meetings of his President's Council, do not particularly suggest that Thames thinks he is a lame duck, or has been warned he is about to become one. Thames has been spacing out the meetings of the President's Council farther and farther. The meeting on Wednesday March 23 ended early when Thames decided he didn't want to answer questions about his inner circle's role in organizing the pep rally over at the Warren Paving Company, and his failure to respond to attacks on the liberal arts by his backers in the Hattiesburg area business community.
Rumor has it that Thames will disband the PC after its next meeting in early May. He has acquired the habit of deflecting the tough questions from the faculty and staff representatives, claiming that they can make an office appointment any time to ask him in private.
"If you have a question to ask me, come to my office," Thames said. "How many times am I going to have to ask y'all to do that?"
Appointments with Thames aren't all that easy to book. Maybe it's time, though, for every remaining tenured faculty member at USM to request an individual half hour with him. If Thames made good on his promise, he would get one earful after another... and there wouldn't be a whole lot of time left over for him to damage the university.
In a story yet to be picked up in the print media, Thames took another hit last week when he was compelled to accept the College of Business's choice for Chair of the Hospitality Management program. The faculty there, and CoB Dean Harold Doty, had lined up behind a candidate who apparently was completely unacceptable to the former chair of that department, who got the support of Thames and his crew. So no one was hired. But the candidate threatened to sue USM for sex discrimination. Now the word is that she will be hired--and given a financial settlement by the Thames administration.
Only a complete fool would accept that Chair position, in a college that Thames is already targeting for the big nuke, without good reason to believe that he won't be around much longer. But again, while the incoming Hospitality Management chair may know something, the rest of us don't. In fact, the Chair of Marketing and Management, a veteran of the College of Business, just announced his resignation from that administrative post; supposedly his reasons include disgust at upper administrative interference with hiring in the college.
Still another possibility, as far at the Provost search goes, is that Thames has not been told he is running out of time, but has been explicitly ordered not to make Grimes the fall guy for the Black Friday Memo. After all, everyone knows that the memo was Thames' idea, and he, not Jay Grimes, was the one who was publicly ordered to retract it.
Whatever exactly is going on behind the scenes, you would think that Thames would be keeping a low profile just now. The last thing he needs is still more negative publicity before the Board and/or the Commissioner give him his annual performance evaluation, which is most likely coming in May. In particular, you would expect him to avoid any further actions that could be seen as endangering USM's accreditation.
But if you thought that, you would be wrong. Thames just keeps doing one boneheaded thing after another.
A story in Saturday's Hattiesburg American discloses that the Thames administration cut a deal with local school district officials, paving the way for USM to offer sections of some entry-level courses at Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg. Such arrangements are not unheard of, though they are more often made by community colleges than by national-level universities. And at its February meeting the IHL Board approved an "articulation" agreement with Mississippi's public K-12 system that allows all universities in the state system to offer such courses.
But there is more than a little awkwardness about the deal. You see, Thames and his crew drew USM's director of recruitment, Matt Cox, into the push for course offerings at the high school. Recently the recruitment staff circulated flyers to students at the high school, asking whether they would take Intro to Psychology or Intro to Sociology courses from USM if offered on site. But they didn't bother to tell anyone in the Psychology department or the Sociology department what they were doing.
In fact, they started making plans in Fall 2004, before the IHL Board approved such arrangements with high schools, and they intended to start offering courses in Fall 2005 if there was evidence of sufficient demand. They completely circumvented USM's curriculum process, as well as departmental scheduling. Class scheduling in academic departments is done at least a semester in advance--more often a year in advance--and USM has just gone through its pre-registration advising for students who plan to enroll in fall courses.
So in the hunger for enrollment at any cost, Thames and his henchcrew have launched a stealth initiative to teach these courses at a high school without asking any of the people at USM who are supposed to be consulted about such matters. The director of recruitment insisted to the Hattiesburg American that the relevant deans had been clued in, but Elliot Pood, the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters (which includes Sociology) says no one had bothered to tell him. Psychology is housed in the College of Education and Psychology; it will be most interesting to find out whether Thames et al. included CoEP's Dean, Willie Pierce, in the loop.
A bigger piece of awkwardness is that courses taught at a high school constitute "distance education," and USM is on probation for failing to document its distance education offerings to SACS. Joan Exline, Thames' point person on accreditation, told the Hattiesburg American that SACS officials had assured her that the initiative was OK. But Exline has developed a huge credibility gap. The SACS consultant told USM not to start any new programs--particularly not any distance education programs--while on probation. And offering Soc and Psych 101 for the first time in a local high school constitutes... a new distance education program.
It is also highly doubtful that any SACS official would give the green light to a distance education program that has not gone through USM's curriculum process, or any of the other relevant governance procedures--and obviously wasn't intended to go through them, before it became a fait accompli in Fall 2005. Did Exline neglect to mention that the new program was going to be imposed by presidential fiat?
It's worth noting that Exline, firmly ensconced in Thames' inner circle, is now regularly speaking to the press as his representative. (His private spokesperson, Lisa Mader, is making herself scarce again, lending further credence to rumors that she is in search of a job elsewhere.) So much for Exline's sincere commitment to getting USM out of trouble with its accrediting bodies. Her public support for the secret plan to offer USM courses at Oak Grove High School has put her on a collision course with the Academic Council, the Faculty Senate, curriculum committees, and the other faculty bodies that are working feverishly to resolve USM's problems with SACS.
What Thames and Exline and other members of his crew are doing with the high-school social science offerings is almost exactly what Thames and Ken Malone were trying to do with the new Executive MBA program (or the "hybrid" MBA program) just a couple of months ago. It was the College of Business's refusal to accept the imposition of Malone's new program that led to the Black Friday Memo; it was the Black Friday Memo that led, in turn, to direct intervention by Interim Commissioner Richard Crofts and public humiliation for Shelby Thames. The difference is that while Joan Exline was not implicated in the Black Friday Memo, her fingerprints are all over the high school social science scheme.
What is going to happen if Thames' accreditation czar gets a vote of no confidence from faculty bodies at USM, while the university is on probation? Over the next month we may all find out.
Stay tuned. For more boneheaded behavior is sure to follow.
USM: Faculty Senate President Responds to the Paving Company Ad
USM Faculty Senate responds to business leaders
The University of Southern Mississippi Faculty Senate wishes to respond to topics and comments made prior to and at the meeting of "business leaders" held at Warren Paving on March 10.
In an article appearing in the March 3 issue of the Independent, Mrs. Bonnie Drews, one of the meeting’s hosts, is quoted as stating that "the issue is whether USM will continue primarily as a liberal arts university or whether it will focus on technology." She is further quoted as stating that the liberal arts and liberal arts