1) Students: whatever else anyone says the grim reality is that your education is tanking, and tanking fast. The library cant buy materials; your profs are demoralized and thus no longer as effective as teachers; the super well known profs have left or are leaving in all colleges, all fields. take a look at babbs' list from last year and the one from this year and see how many profs who would have been able to teach you and who intended to stay here have instead decided to leave. Look how long they had been here. The loss of that kind of experience, knowledge, and talent directly affects you dear students. It is ultimately your loss because, after all, it is your education. Your education is leaving and is not being replaced. You can look forward now to overcroweded classrooms, and far less experienced professors than those who have left.

So what can you do? Fight back. Don't mourn. Organize. Form a group and call yourselves "Concerned Students" or whatever you want. Once you have the group CALL A PRESS CONFERENCE. I have a feeling the press will come; The independent, american, clarion ledger, WDAM contact them. After all, in mississippi activist students always make news. It is time to be constructive and assert your anger in a way that will matter. Dont hold a demonstration but instead get a petition going with as many names as you can get from fellow students. Present that petition along with a statement about your disgust with the IHL destroying your school in polite but vigorous and fact ladent statements to the press in a press coference. Are you working a job and are busy PAYING FOR this education? Are you happy to know that all that effort is being destroyed by the IHL?. Students, dont take that destruction as an act of God over which you have no control. For many of you, its your money and for all of you its your degree program and your education at stake. You can save it. Organize a group. Hold a press conference. Read your statement to the press. Present your petition in the conference. All the while, write letters to the media. What have you got to loose? So far this administration has not found a way to fire the students. Clearly, you have more power than you know: isnt it time you begin to use it?


2) Alumni, Parents, and friends of USM: All of you who belong to these groups who are reading this. Get on the phone. Call one another. Organize yourselves into an actual group: give yourselves a name. Pool fifty dollars each and buy a giant ad in the CL. In that ad state your case. Are you glad your alma mater is now ranked dead last in the nation? That it is on probation making history as the only school in the state in over thirty years to have that happen? Are you glad at the loss of so many skilled teachers? Of course not. So please take out an ad. Maybe you could direct it to the IHL as a letter? Maybe you might recommend painful as it is to do so that given present circumstances you dont think students should attend this place any more. Whatever you do, do it in public: Publicize your discontent in a press confererence, an adverstisement, and in a letter writing campaign. By all means call a press conference. This administration has yet to find a way to fire the parents of students; it has not yet found a way to fire its alumni either. Silence will guarrentee one thing: the continued denigration of your own degree and its value and the loss of any sort of quality education for your child.

So, if you are a student, parent, alumni, or friend it is time to organize. Form a group, draw up a list of issues, hold a press conference. By all means it is time publicly to call the IHL whose constitutional charge it is to serve the citizens of this state to account.

Good luck.