I've stayed out of the debate about USM's recent contracts with Starbucks, Aramark, and Barnes and Noble almost entirely.

But at this point I have to say that I agree with several posters who regard it as a dangerous distraction.  USM faculty who choose to focus on these particular deals (unless they actually involved kickbacks or sweetheart contracts for politically connected persons in Mississippi...) are going to get their lunch eaten by the Thames administration.  And this is true despite the Thames administration's failure to provide complete or accurate financial figures that would show how the university benefited financially from the contracts.

In fact, lots of other state universities have privatized these particular functions and benefited from doing so.  Clemson made a deal with Barnes and Noble to take over the bookstore nearly a decade ago.  CU got a much better bookstore out of it--the old store, managed and staffed by state employees, was so inefficient that many of my colleagues on the faculty had stopped sending it their texbook orders, giving them exclusively to a private bookstore located off-campus.  Now the bookstore gets everyone's book orders, and there are very few complaints.

Over the summer, I recall there were some allegations about how Barnes and Noble was going to jack up textbook prices as soon as it was established at USM and no one was paying attention.  The prices of new textbooks are not controlled by Barnes and Noble or by any bookstore, but by the textbook publishers, and any store's margin on textbooks is very thin (which is why only stores that expect to move a lot of textbooks want anything to do with them).  B and N annoys publishers because it aggressively stocks up on used copies of textbooks (including copies that it buys back from students) whenever it sees a market for them.  Textbook prices are a real problem for our students... but maybe it's incumbent on us professors to assign or adopt textbooks as little as possible, since we don't seem to have any other leverage with the publishers.

Why USM didn't contract with some local businesses to provide food service, coffee, etc., I don't know.  It may simply have been that Starbucks et al. bid lower.  If the contracts were made without competitive bidding, then the lack of competitive bidding should be the focus--not the fact that USM made the contracts with private companies.

We may argue about whether state universities do the best job of delivering education.  But there is no reason to think that state universities are going to do the best job of providing coffee, or selling books.  In fact, there are lots of reasons to conclude that they won't.

Robert Campbell