Given the steadfast support for Shelby Thames from a majority on the IHL Board, the Board's gross lack of accountability, and now the Hattiesburg American's incipient realignment with members of the Thames cabal, is there anything that USM faculty members can do, besides find work at a better institution elsewhere, or accept worsening working conditions under worsening administrators at a university that is being steadily torn down?

I don't really know... but here a couple of suggestions.

1) The "conspiracy theory," as Invictus and others have called it, has been much discussed on this board, and I have publicized it on Liberty and Power.  But I see no evidence that it has entered local political discourse.  What are the prospects of getting an op ed into the Hattiesburg American that summarizes the destructive moves that Thames has made and openly charges the Board with putting him in place to tear down USM and impair the future economic development of Hattiesburg and points south?

I do not know how much effect making this charge publicly will have on regional political dynamics.  But surely if the charge is not made publicly, in a local media outlet, it can have no effect.

2) Here is a way that the flummoxed, outmaneuvered USM Faculty Senate might recover the initiative.  

Suppose the appropriate FS committee drafts a post-tenure review procedure that meets the Board's requirements (i.e., specifies conditions under which tenured faculty who have failed a post-tenure review can be fired).  Then the FS leadership informs the Board that they would love to see this policy enacted, but unfortunately neither average Senator nor the average Senator's average constituent trusts Shelby Thames and his underlings to abide by the rules and procedures contained in this policy.  If, on the other hand, the Board were to replace Shelby Thames with a president that the faculty can trust... the Senate would endorse the new PTR rules in a heartbeat.

Again, this might fail to drive a wedge between what the Board says it wants, and what it appears to really want.  But what kind of downside does it have, when the baseline is continued destruction of the university by the Goths and the Vandals, as Stephen Judd recently called them?

Robert Campbell