More and more, events like this invention contest ("Invent the Future") make me think I'm caught in some sort of zone of perpetual travesty, perpetual irony. How did Marx put it? History happens twice. First as tragedy, the second time as farce? 

Case in point: when Horace Fleming came on board back in the 90's he put together a group called, as I remember it, "The Commision on the Future of the University"(COFU). The "invention contest" is a sort of faint, ironic echo of this earlier moment. Chaired by Dr. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, the COFU organized a number of public hearings--I went to two on the Coast--publicly solicited ideas in writing and on e-mail from anyone who wanted to contribute to what was billed as a "visioning" process, and issued a report based on its findings.  Wonder where it is now? Has anybody seen the future of the University? Has anybody done any visioning lately?

In other words, anyhow, the administration back then invited the whole University community to participate in reinventing itself for the future and made ample provision for participation by anyone who wanted to be part of the process. The current attempt to fashion a "strategic plan" for USM offers an amazing contrast to the COFU's visioning. 

For instance, one of the findings of the COFU was that USM-Gulf Coast needed to move towards "appropriate autonomy" if it were to effectively serve the needs of its community. A reason for this finding was the strong argument made for expanding and improving USM-Gulf Coast made to the COFU by members of the USM-GC faculty and the Coast business community. The COFU made a rational appraisal of the situation and found accordingly.

To anyone who knows this history, it comes as no surprise that SACS has cited the USM-GC centers as a cause of USM's accreditation woes. This charge validates COFU's findings that only through the attainment of appropriate autonomy could USM-GC's instructional quality be raised and maintained. One of the major changes wrought by SJT's reorganization of the Colleges, of course, was to severely limit the Coast's autonomy, mainly by placing all control over hiring, scheduling and academic planning in the hands of H'burg chairs, deans and administrators with a less than immediate understanding of Coast conditions and history. It's no great leap to conclude that SACS probation is, in part, a direct result of that loss of autonomy.

Further, the current "strategic planning" process, in stark constrast to the COFU, has no provision for "visioning", no public hearings, no earnest invitation for formative input from the community, certainly none at all from the Coast community. The SJT "strategic plan," was presented as an accomplished fact to the community, a community that's now trying hard to even remember if it was invited to help shape the damnable thing in any venue at all. Worse, with its banal fiscal and economic goals, its crude equation of higher learning with job training, the SJT "plan" reeks of backroom deals and smalltown venality of the very sort that any real university should find utterly repugnant. Instead of inviting students, citizens and faculty to imagine a viable future, the current administration puts forward more and more public relations--in this case a puerile "Invent the Future" contest--as it feverishly attempts to paint over the deep, deep fault lines inflicted on USM by almost three years of despotic, short sighted and incompetent adminstration.

With this "Invent the Future" contest, it's almost as if the Dome is mocking us, mocking our inablity to shape our own future as a University, as a community of scholars and learners, mocking our powerlessness, our lack of political clout. Meanwhile, the real, and realy sinister invention of the future goes forward in the cloistered chambers of the Dome, far removed from public oversight and community input.

Somewhere the Chrisitian scripture says, "Without vision the people perish." Fellow workers, fellow citizens, colleagues and comrades, if we do not want to sink defeated into that great dark, if we want a future, if we want a living University that transcends the merely ironic, parodic version foisted on us by SJT and his mob of syncophants, we must act out of a sincere belief in our ability to make history, not just suffer it. We need a vision. We need to invent the future ourselves. We need not just to dump SJT but to forge the University anew, not just long for some nostalgic former time.

One way do this would be to disrupt the squalid slide towards approval of the Dome's "strategic plan." We should call for a series of public hearings on the future of the university, hearings to which the entire community is invited. We need to move the planning process out of the backrooms into the clear light of public scrutiny. Should the Dome refuse to comply wit requests for such hearings, job actions and civil disobedience will be our next, and only possible steps. To do otherwise . . . would be to persish.