Oh. My. God.

    Sangria is ready when you are!

    xxoo

By the way: a brief comment on the "slanted reporting" of the American and its tendency to focus on the negative things at USM instead of the postive.

The "positive"  examples cited at the meeting:  I know that many of these examples HAVE been published in the paper already. It is no secret about the Placido concert. It is no secret that the school of music has been bringing in "world class" artists for years. I've seen laudatory articles about those events, about Jay, about the Opera and many other aspects of the music school besides the concert -- praised in the very same Hattiesburg American that was condemned in the meeting. I've seen articles and anouncements about many of those examples of USM's "good" side.

Very few things on this list are secrets. Very few things have not received their due attention. But you can't blame the newspaper if it continues to follow news -- and the primary news from the campus since the Deans were fired has been the conflict between the faculty and the administration. And a reminder: it was the administration that called the press and created a press conference when the Dvorak affair started. Up to that point all contact between AAUP, faculty Senate and the administration had been private. It is the administration in almost every case that has fed the news itself, used the news to get its side of the story out. It is the administration that has a press office -- the faculty have almost always been in the position of responding to news events created by the administration. It is not now the fault of the faculty that the American, knowing this administration's tendency to keep doing stupid things, now habitually sends a reporter (often the much to be missed Mr. Walters)  to Faculty Senate meetings and the AAUP meetings in the anticipation that there will be some new response from faculty to a new crisis precipitated by the administration.