Dear Cox-Purvis,

I lurk & read the AAUP Board to stay in touch with happenings at USM.  I also support try to do my part to support academics and athletics at the university.  I like the AAUP Board, as it offers introspective opinoins, not found in the news media.

I've read your sports updates, and I have to ask...what is your point?  I don't see the correlation between athletics at Ole Miss, DSU, and USM, or how the Southern Miss chapter of AAUP would be interested.  Also, the information you provide, save the baseless rumour-mill stuff, is readily available in any sports section for anyone interested. 

I'm not suggesting you stop posting, as I guess some folks are interested...I'm just asking  you to explain the purpose, if there is one...or are your sports updates to be taken only for entertainment value?  I thank you, in advance, for any response.

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Originally posted by: Only slightly annoyed
"I lurk & read the AAUP Board to stay in touch with happenings at USM.  ...  I don't see . . . how the Southern Miss chapter of AAUP would be interested. . .  I guess some folks are interested..."

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Wait a minute, annoyed. You're looking for general information about "happenings", but only those that are specifically of interest to AAUP? But you do understand that some folks are interested? As long as someone is interested, why should CPR stop posting or justify to you the rationale for posting?

Coming here to "stay in touch with happenings at USM?"  I never would have thought of that as a purpose for this board.  Seems as though the official USM site would be better.  Nor does it seem to me that this is a board limited to the interests of the "Southern Miss" (!?!) chapter of AAUP.  In fact, does the AAUP have anything to do with this board other than giving it a "home"?

If I were head of the AAUP, I'd tell this board it was time to go solo.  Ever since Amy Young was kind enough to host this board after Fire Shelby retired, the Shelby-Knows-Best crowd have used this message board as justification to disparage the organization.  Even Lanny Mixon at Eagle Talk wants to make AAUP Big Brother the board.

Oddly enough, those same critics have used their circular logic to marginalize all posters on this board as somehow part of the lunatic fringe just because of the association with the sponsoring organization.  Seems that anyone who assocates with an advocacy group (whether it's the Sierra Club or the Sons of the Confederacy) is automatically assumed to be something of an extremist.  If you care enough, you must care too much.

End of rant.

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Originally posted by: Orphan
" ... You guys are going to have a very hard time convincing anyone that this is not the official message board of the USM Chapter of the AAUP. "

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Originally posted by: Increasingly defensive
" Where in the world do you get the idea that Amy Young is trying to do this.  I said "I would, if..."   Why put words in her mouth? And just who is the "you guys" to which you refer?  You are a poster here just like me, JoJo, Seeker and Son of Bubba.  All us AAUP arrogant pinheads?"

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I also want to note that as a proud, card carrying member of the AAUP (well, I need to get my dues paid up actually)  . . . that the AAUP does not have closed meetings or forbid members of the general public from attending. It operates as a public organization in which press and public are free to be present. This is also true of the senate, the academic council, or any other elected body in the university. This is manifestly NOT true of meetings of the President's cabinet (although I will add that I canunderstand, from a management perspective, why this is true) nor, apparently, of the group of supporters that met out at Warren Paving.

This Board is open to all participants -- not all participants are members of the AAUP. Obviously, not all participants support the AAUP. Not all people who oppose the administration support the AAUP. The AAUP offers this forum as a place where people interested in issues of concern to the faculty and members of the USM communty, and particularly issues touching on academic management, shared governance, etc., can exchange ideas. While the executive committee of AAUP has expressed, on behalf of its membership, public statements which take a position on issues pertaining to the university, this board is not an organ for making those kind of statements -- it is a debating society of individuals of varying opinions --  nothing less, and nothing more.  

 I will defend anyone's right right to disagree with the AAUP -- but I also think it only fair to say that if you take statements made on this board to be official AAUP policy then you misunderstand the nature of the Board. And if you truly want to learn anything about AAUP, you should come to an open meeting and you should also read the AAUP Redbook in which the AAUP's positions are quite clearly laid out. Neither the administration nor the Warren paving people will extend this kind of invitation to members of the public -- but the AAUP does so, has always done so, and will continue to do so. Frankly, you will probably be suprised at how boring much of the meeting is -- far from being a bastion of incendiary rhetoric, most AAUP meetings up until the last year have been about problem solving  . . . . not simply trying to defend academics from attack, but actually trying to focus on educational improvement -- which is the real mission of the organization. But it is also true that when academics are under attack, when the university is being mismanaged; when the relationship between the political machinery of the state and the management of a university become too cozy, then the AAUP like any professional organization in any field, will point out dangers and problems that are of concern to its membership and to the academic community as a whole.

This is such a "radical organization" that the AAUP principals are been adopted as guiding principles by most major colleges and univerisities in the nation. This is simply a fact -- and most of the great universities in this country embody some language in their mission statements that refelct this dept to the history of the AAUP and its role in shaping university governance and education in the classroom. T

his is an organization founded, among others, by the American pragmatist philospher and educator Thomas Dewey -- a man who espoused public education as a necessary route to developing good citizenship. Dewey, incidently, is also associated with such radical educational institutions as Columbia University, where he helped found the School of Education.

The AAUP, far from being a radical organization, has been a mainstream organization in higher education for decades. It is only recently, as American univerisities have become more and more corporatized, as the tenure system has come under attack by those who not only misunderstand it but actually distort both its purpose and its process in a way that has managed to mislead the American public, and as those who want to look to "business" as an appropriate metaphor for organizing the university have come into power, that the AAUP has become viewed as "radical, "fringe" and "far left."  Like many professional organizations in recent years, including the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, and American Psychiatric Association, etc. -- the AAUP has come under attack for maintaining the ideals of the academy in the face of political culture that wants to use education as a political battlefield in order to divide the public from institutions that it formerly respected.

So if you think you know something about the AAUP or its local chapter and you have not been to a meeting  -- then you don't. But you can certainly -- easily -- find out. All it takes is walking through the door and being willing to listen. And I believe that you will find the members open to disagreement -- something you wil discover when you realize that the members of the AAUP, far from being in lockstep with one another, far from being on one end of the political spectrum, are a much more diverse group of people within the academy than you can ever imagine.

The irony of all this is that some of the strongest and most vocal and active people that I have known here in the AAUP have also been among the most ardent and powerful conservative voices. I'd make a case that the AAUP (at least our local chapter) far from being the product of a fictionalized and monocular point of view, is actually one of the few places in our community where people of genuinely divergent points of view come together, unified under one goal -- the continued improvement of academic instruction, the preservation of academic integrity, and the fostering of a collaborative community of students, scholars, and administrators all of whom have a stake, and a role in governing the university.

It is interesting to know that the original midevil univerisities were loosely organized confederacies of scholars to whom students came. It is certainly clear that as universities became more complicated, the need for administrative managers grew, and has continued to grow. But it is the scholars, teachers, researchers who, together with students, are the heart and soul, the necesssry ingredent, without which there would be no entity known as the university. Too many admnistrators now assume the CEO role much too seriously - a role in which they have become the stars of the show rather than understanding that their best role is to provide support that will make that work most effective.