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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.

Posted on Thursday, May 5, 2005 at 7:54 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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