Southern Justice wrote:

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 I didn't think USM had a full presence on the coast anymore. I thought the IHL created a universities center and let universities from all over the US bid to teach courses there.

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I somehow can't believe the original query is in earnest, but will try to respond so.

The USM-GC operation has about 600 fewer students than it did a year ago, and is offering a proportionally smaller schedule of courses with a slightly diminished faculty, this last because numerous departments in H'burg offered asylum to Coast faculty who'd lost their homes or who were otherwise displaced. USM-GC classrooms at the ex-Garden Park hospital building are filled to capacity at night and well used during the day. In my college there were some class cancellations for under enrollment, but by and large the schedule seems to have "made".  The feeling one gets in the classrooms this semester is that students are very glad to be back in school because it provides them with a sense of "things being back to normal."

While the Garden Park facility is hardly what one could call comfortable, it is a viable classroom environment, and has been expanded by the addition of four large trailer classrooms, dubbed "Golden Eagle Village" by the administration. There is even a faculty lounge trailer, right next to the student lounge trailer. Classrooms are airless, windowless and cramped, but usable, as I said, and many of them have been wired for LCD projection. Also on the technology front, the Library has replaced the wireless laptops it had last term with hard-wired desk tops, although the Library facility itself is cramped into three tiny rooms. There is however a daily shuttle to the Gulf Park library for requested materials and there has been no diminution or delay in the processing of intra and interlibrary loan requests. Course are also being offered as normally at Keesler AFB and on the MGCCC-JC campus in Gautier, although I can't claim to know about enrollments there.

The biggest problem for Coast faculty is the lack of office space. Meetings with Pat Joachim and other adminstrators have yielded little in the way of results. At one point it was discovered that space that had been set aside for offices for CoAL faculty had instead been dedicated to housing vending machines, a sort of new low in operational prioritizations. But lower level administrators have readily admitted that the problems of faculty trying to operate in such an environment seem to have played little role in the upper administration's calculations. One member of the CoST told me that the CoST Dean even went so far as to promise that because the fabled "Huckleberry Hill" trailer park for displaced faculty/staff would be ready in time for the beginning of the abbreviated Fall term--the trailer park was never even begun--he felt there was no reason to expect that Coast faculty would be any less productive in grants and publication because of the storm. SNAFU.

I know of several promising junior Coast faculty who are on the market, and there has been what looks like a substantial increase in the number of adjuncts teaching Coast courses, although about this last I don't know for certain.

The Coast faculty leadership council won a promise from Pat Joachim that she would forward any proposal for faculty incentives or rewards that the council could draft--things like release time, special raises and other financial incentives, recognition that coast teaching constituted extraordinary service--but there has been no announcement from that council of whether or not such a proposal has gone forward or what it proposed.

Finally, the University provided counselling services for free to University employees by drafting one of the Coast faculty who has a clinical psychology credential of some sort. A friend of mine with a clinical psychology practice tells me that the university's action--however well intended--constitutes something of an ethics violation. The professor who was tapped as campus counsellor, by the way, was also given charge over the university's attempt top house displaced faculty and staff, certainly not an easy service load, to say the least. But a number of such faculty and staff were, in fact, housed in a trailer park on the grounds of the Long Beach school district administration due to this prof's efforts.

All in all a pretty mixed bag on the Coast, eh?