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Originally posted by: Reporter
"Hattiesburg American Update http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041120/NEWS01/41120004 Campus to put emphasis on online classes, non-traditional students"

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"The University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Park campus will place greater emphasis on online instruction, recruiting older non-traditional students and classes where students attend once a month, according to Jay Grimes, USM’s provost and vice president for academic affairs.

Southern Miss won’t stop recruiting traditional 18-year-old college students to attend classes in their drive to enroll 6,000 students by 2006 on the Gulf Coast, Grimes said."

1. Greater emphyasis on online instruction?

2.  Classes where students attend once a month?

3.  USM's drive to enroll 6,000 students by 2006 on the Gulf Coast?

I have no problem with the non- traditional students thing. During WWII many returning veterans enrolled in America's colleges and universities as non-traditional students. But the other things are an embrassment to USM and to the academic community in general. If things continue in this direction, USM Hattiesburg would be much better off if the Gulf Coast campus were spun off unto itself.

 

Did we ever hear the upshot of that story? What happened?

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Originally posted by: Bagger Up
" Anyone who lets the cat out of the bag too soon will be scratched. "

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You speak the truth. My scratch took place in Hattiesburg, not on the Coast. I am still bleeding. I often wonder if my wound will ever heal.

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Originally posted by: Reporter
" I heard the Faculty Senate discussed the incident at their last meeting.  A Senate committee is preparing a resolution concerning this issue for consideration at a special called meeting of the Senate in December.  The special called meeting was to approve a revised the Post-Tenure Review Policy, but the resolution concerning the coast incident has been added to the agenda. "

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Yes.

And there is NO discussion at present about the implications of al this online teaching for a definition of what constitutes a university.

A university is not simply a place for the exhange (or dissemination) of information but an site of specific kinds of experience that are unique.  "University learning" is a complex set of experiences that are primarily embodied. The idea of a university is not that it is just a place for classrooms.  It is also the cultural life, and social life of an embodied community. It is the social interaction of professors and students in a complex matrix of personal and group relationships. The truth is that the university as an embodied community of SCHOLARS  (meaning people on a quest for knowlege and wisdom as well as jobs) has always depended on the vitality that erupted from the physical as well as intellectual encounter of young and old; of newly emerging knowlege and experience as against the bulwark of past knowlege and experience; in the physical and mental energy of young minds pushing at the resistence offered by their elders; in the suprise of the elders at the new insights the young bring with them. We are vital because we strive together -- because we anger one another, we seduce one another; we enchant with the beauty of youth or the all -too visible and yet well-earned physical marks of experience that impress themselves on the body.  

You cannot talk of the university as some abstract, cerebral object. The university exists to the degree that it is a real space occupied by bodies with real urges, desires, fears, loathings, and hopes. To the degree tha we can read those things in the langiuage of the body as well as in the utterances of the mind, the university lives. It is a matrix of thought and desire; of the permitted and the forbidden. You cannot have a university that is safe. You cannot have a university that is not volatile and dangerous. You cannot have a university where people are afraid to ask questions, cross lines; defy conventional thinking. And it is in the bodies that inhabit the university where those conflicts take place, where they manifest themselves, where they become visible to the comunity as a whole.

The on-line university is an oxymoron. It simply doesn't exist. It isn't a university.

So . . . to the pertinent question. What is maximum amount of online experience a university should accept for its student body? Which is another way of saying exactly how present should every student be as a member of the university community?

(I except those for whom online learning is the only alternative, for whom online is actually a path to freedom from isolation.)

But as a definition of the university?

We are changing. But we are acting as though change itself is monolithic -- when in fact there are alternatives which we have the ability to see, and to choose.

History is made by those who see its course not as a river, but as a series of streams leading to alternative destinations. The public square is presently controlled by those who suggest that the course of the university's future history is inevitable, and that it is our job to see that inevitability and shape ourselves to it. I'd suggest instead that chnage is inevitable, but the course of change is not - and we should never give up our ability to shape change to the ideals that we believe make our community distinct, unique, and irreplacible. 

 

The former USM professor, still dazed and confused at a Tier 1 university, recently found himself at a new faculty lunch next to an upper-level administrator involved in undergraduate education. The talk turned to the state college board as well as to "distance education." The administrator said, "About ten years everybody thought they needed to get into online education, before everybody else did it, but we quickly found out how difficult and expensive it was." She went on to describe one or two programs that had an online component, but largely dismissed the phenomena as a thing of the past, a fad that had quickly played itself out since it was unfeasible.

The former USM professor wondered if he'd been beamed ten years into the future. In Mississippi, he had been told by his chair that this was the wave of the future, and that we had to get into it before Jackson State did.

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Originally posted by: Fair play
""

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The former USM faculty member is deeply, deeply grateful for his current position. When his new colleagues complain about the aging photocopier or insist that there have been horrific intrigues regarding . . . the watercooler, he suggests that they apply for his newly established fellowship.
The whiniest application letter from a faculty member at a Tier 1 school will result in that ungrateful academic being awarded a year's employment at USM (with the appropriate pay cut and all the removal of rights and priviledges that goes with the position).

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Originally posted by: insurgent x
"  Unless I'm mistaken--could somebody check me on this?--USM-Gulf Coast no longer recruits in the high schools, despite what the "Provost" says in the American. This practice was done away with earlier this year. Instead, as  I understand it, all such outreach recruiting is done by the recruitment division on the main campus, and it is done so without any special reference to the Gulf Coast campuses. And, yes, the remarks about on-line classes that the "Provost" made in the American are very much like the ones he was purported to have made in early October before the Stevenson incident on 12 October. The numbers are the same as were reported to me back then: 6000 students, of whom half will be on-line and distance ed. Since the current enrollment on the Coast is about 2000, this means that considerably more than half of the projected growth will be on-line. Given those figures, USM-Gulf Coast can legitimately be said to be emphasizing on-line instruction over face-to-face. Dr. Stevenson was right if she said anything at all that was critical of such a scheme, especially since nobody on the Gulf Coast faculty had been consulted about such a plan at all. And, related, here's another couple of items to add to the administration's already appalling record of fumbling incompetence and putrid mendacity. A couple of weeks back, Elliot Pood told a group of concerned CoAL faculty that Jay Grimes denied ever having made any remarks about extensive on-line enrollment growth. At the same meeting, he assured that faculty group that the initiative for all on-line instruction would have to come "from the departments" and that there was currently no general strategy to pump up on-line enrollments on the Coast. USM faculty (and students?) ought to demand that a formal apology be tendered to Dr. Stevenson by the administration. "

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The Provost may have both the brains and backbone of the Cephalopods that are studied in the Gulf, but understand that these are NOT his words (no question that he said them - just that he's been told to say them).  Academic decisions are primarily being driven, once again, by the president's business model advisors (the chemical industry product manager and the on-line education executive).  The president has one goal - 20,000 students - making USM the largest university in the state.  Everything else is secondary to that goal and every poorly thought out and implemented scheme can be traced to it. 

The Hattiesburg American reporter Kevin Walters seems to have done his homework very well.  This is an A+ effort.  Maybe we now have an investigative reporter that can uncover what goes on at USM under this administration.

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Originally posted by: Paper Grader
"The Hattiesburg American reporter Kevin Walters seems to have done his homework very well.  This is an A+ effort.  Maybe we now have an investigative reporter that can uncover what goes on at USM under this administration."

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Great minds and all that...

Since I'm somewhat "outside" maybe I've just missed something here, but . .

I STILL don't understand where Dr. Malone is in Dr. Stevenson's chain of command that gave him the privilege of entering her classroom uninvited. Her Chair, Dean, or Provost, maybe. But what is his position and how does it give him this privilege??

In other words, he's the COO COO of Shelby Thamesworld.

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Originally posted by: Emma
"In other words, he's the COO COO of Shelby Thamesworld."

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And Cuckoo too!

Thanks for the pseudonym idea Turkey Lurkey - the difference is I've got layers!!!

 

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Originally posted by: Dumb Down
" If things continue in this direction, USM Hattiesburg would be much better off if the Gulf Coast campus were spun off unto itself.  "

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Most coast faculty dread this idea of a quasi-University of Phoenix model.  In fact, I know of none who support it.  You could write us off, as you suggest.  Or, perhaps you could support us as we supported you during the Glamser/Stringer/Dvorak crisis. 

Don't just throw us to the wolves.  Help us stop it.     

 

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Originally posted by: foot soldier
" Tell us what to do. I'm happy to write complaining letters, but none of the complaining letters I have written in the past have done much good. I find on-line courses imposed on faculty members to be a gross violation of academic freedom (not to mention an inferior form of education, at least in my discipline)."

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I agree that it's inferior.  This is especially so in my discipline, as well.  I think many coast faculty feel the same way.  They'll find it completely humiliating to be part of the "online" branch, and they'll move on.

You make a good point.  The letter campaigns have had limited, if any, success.  I think our only chance of avoiding this shift to "distance ed" is through VERY vocal opposition from the Faculty Senate, by senators from both campuses.