All the news that's fit to print - USM Forum -- Message Board

First Ant at the Picnic · Status: Offline

All the news that's fit to print

Curmudgeon · Status: Offline

All that's missing is the story about how 85% of the faculty voting found Thames to be an unacceptable candidate for president before the IHL made the appointment.

Southern Belle · Status: Offline

Don't forget that the staff and students voted against Thames, also.

asdf · Status: Offline

Southern Belle wrote:
Don't forget that the staff and students voted against Thames, also.

When?

Southern Belle · Status: Offline

To refresh everyone's memory:

During the on-campus interview process during the last search for a university president, faculty, staff, and students were allowed to vote on each of the candidates. All three groups voted the same way regarding Dr. Thames. He did not receive support for the position from any group.

I was a member of Staff Council during the last search. We distributed opinion surveys, collected them, and tallied the votes after each interview. The results were presented to the IHL members who were on campus shortly after the interview of each candidate. All of our work was for nothing and in vain.

stephen judd · Status: Offline

This is a really good time for anyone who had a part in the last search to come forward and discuss problems/issues with the last search that may be of concern. We will have sveeral opportunities to put these concerns out to the board and to Tom Meredith before the search process is finalized --

thanks southern belle, for this tidbit of very specific information.

Southern Belle · Status: Offline

I know faculty were upset with the last search for a university president in Mississippi and the closed door policy IHL used for the process. But given what happened during the last search for a Southern Miss president, will the faculty, staff or students voicing their opinions or concerns be heard by anyone???? I seriously doubt it based on previous experience.

I like to think that working at the university and with IHL would be an "open door policy" and IHL members would listen to what all concerned have to say. Unfortunately that did not happen during the last Southern Miss presidential search. Even though faculty, staff and especially the students voiced their concerns which were passed along to IHL, they did not appear to hear any of us. I know that Staff Council spent a lot of time developing the surveys, passing them out and collecting them, and especially compiling the information in a very short tme period to pass along to IHL. It seemed, to me, that all of our efforts were for nothing.

Personally speaking, if IHL has someone in mind for the position, I would rather save the money required to do a "national search" and have them go ahead and name the incoming president. It would save all of us a lot of stress and frustration with the process.

I would like to know if Dr. Don Cotten would be interested in returning to Southern Miss.

Don't laugh too loud, what about Dr. Horace Fleming? Pardon me, I forgot. Dr. Fleming tried to step over the "good ole boys" network and do things his way. He fought for Southern Miss to gets its "fair share" of state funding with no success, but at least he tried. However when staff became upset with the changes in our payroll (from monthly to bi-weekly), at least he listened to our concerns and developed a way to ease us into the new payroll. I remember this very well because I am the individual who figured out how it was going to affect our average monthly bring home pay and brought it to the other staff members' attention. During the meetings, Dr. Fleming held with staff about this issue, he listened to everything staff had to say.

Interested onlooker · Status: Offline

Two points:

First, it is instructive to look at Curmudgeon's missing headline. As has been said before on this board, the faculty's fate (and perhaps that of the staff) was sealed with the vote taken shortly before Thames's appointment. He had to make the point that only a bunch of lazy, unimaginative, good-for-nothings would find him unacceptable.

Second, history shows little contact between faculty and the members of the IHL board. The occasional meetings I knew of were always on the sly--dark corners, sworn to secrecy, etc. Surely it is time for the faculty of all the universities to have designated face time with the board.

Cossack · Status: Offline

Southern Belle wrote,

I know faculty were upset with the last search for a university president in Mississippi and the closed door policy IHL used for the process. But given what happened during the last search for a Southern Miss president, will the faculty, staff or students voicing their opinions or concerns be heard by anyone???? I seriously doubt it based on previous experience.

You are quite correct about the last search. It was not a search. We had an inside candidate whose resume was such that no serious Head Hunting Operation would shop his resume around to universities searching for a president. His resume did not contain any evidence of experience or ability to a college president. It was a blatant political move by his backers, coupled with a weak Broad composed of low character people that led to the outcome. I have no doubt that Meredith will use the same closed door policy he followed at Mississippi State. If we end up with a qualified person who thinks and acts like a college president, we will be fortunate indeed. What we do not know is how much power the cabal who got SFT in office will have this time around. If we get another incompetent person with a dictator management style, it will add great credibility to those who hold that, from the governor on down through the Board there is a "plot" to destroy USM.

Incredulous · Status: Offline

stephen judd wrote:

This is a really good time for anyone who had a part in the last search to come forward and discuss problems/issues with the last search that may be of concern. We will have sveeral opportunities to put these concerns out to the board and to Tom Meredith before the search process is finalized --

thanks southern belle, for this tidbit of very specific information.

During the last search, the surveys that were collected went directly to the IHL with explicit instructions that the results would not be released to the faculty, staff, or students. Also, once all three interviews had been completed, there was no official channel for a comparative evaluation of the three candidates nor any time for discussion. Surveys were completed immediately after each candidate departed. Everything was structured to ensure that no comparison or input was possible.

Seeing this charade in advance, the AAUP set up a faculty wide ballot which included all three candidates. Each candidate was to be rated strong, acceptable, or unacceptable. SFT came out unacceptable and a distant third. The faculty clearly saw what was to come.

asdf · Status: Offline

Southern Belle wrote:
During the on-campus interview process during the last search for a university president, faculty, staff, and students were allowed to vote on each of the candidates. All three groups voted the same way regarding Dr. Thames. He did not receive support for the position from any group...

There were more groups that did evaluations, including the alumni and the CAC. The student evaluations supported Thames, with Hart a close second and Hickey a distant third. I don't know, but I bet the alumni supported Thames as well. There were many groups involved in the selection process and for good or bad, faculty and staff were just two voices among many. Also, the AAUP vote just plain made the board mad since they asked that no other evaluation process be conducted. Once again, for good or bad, it backfired on the AAUP.

Incredulous,
You are technically correct about no time allotted for comparisons by the board, in fact, it was actually discouraged. But, in reality, after the third visit, the main topic of discussion was about who out of the three would do best.

stephen judd · Status: Offline

Southern belle:

It is poor trusteeship when a board appoints a president over not just opposition, but the widespread opposition of the faculty. Students are obviously important -- but they come and go. The faculty and its work of teaching and research are not simply one componant of the university, it is the major componant. It was never a question what kind of relationship Dr. Thames would have with the faculty -- the history was already clear. That the Board chose to ignore that history was perverse, at best.

The Chronicle of Higher Education devoted a number of major articles last year to Presidents and Boards, Presidents and faculties. Every article acknowledged that if a President loses a faculty -- whether he/she is right or wrong -- the Board needs to act because the faculty are too critical to the university.

Dr. Thames had a "honeymoon." I remember it well. Despite the grumbling, everyone sucked it up, wished him good luck and hoped for the best. The campus was relatively quiet until the day he fired the Deans and publically humiliated them. The issue was not simply "change." It is the way "change" is effected. This administration chose to effect change by posturing, by using humiliation, intimidation, and the whip. It rought the pillars down on itself -- and on the rest of us as well.

Magnolia · Status: Offline

The faculty evaluations of Thames were terrible and all that documentation was passed directly to the IHL board. There were a very few positive comments and evaluation scores from faculty, but if you examined the faculty audience during that presentation, you might have noticed quite a few of Thames' graduate teaching assistants. There was no way to block entrance to the room for those who weren't full time faculty and nobody thought that he might do something so underhanded as to put his TAs in there to stuff the ballots. Really nasty business that.

Incredulous · Status: Offline

asdf wrote:

.

There were more groups that did evaluations, including the alumni and the CAC. The student evaluations supported Thames, with Hart a close second and Hickey a distant third. I don't know, but I bet the alumni supported Thames as well. There were many groups involved in the selection process and for good or bad, faculty and staff were just two voices among many. Also, the AAUP vote just plain made the board mad since they asked that no other evaluation process be conducted. Once again, for good or bad, it backfired on the AAUP.

asdf,

Do you honestly think that anything would have been different if the AAUP had not had that faculty vote? The IHL and SFT were going to beat up on USM and the faculty no matter what. It's what they do. The fix was in.

ram · Status: Offline

You can call me Pollyanna, but I take some heart in the fact that no one named "Dumb" Klumb or "Crony Carl" is on the IHL Board now. Maybe -- just maybe -- the current board will be a little less likely to be steamrolled, sandbagged, or blindsided by the powerbrokers.

Or maybe I'm just an optimistic idiot.

'Scuse me, I meant "idot." (I do like this edit feature.)

-- Edited by ram at 20:19, 2006-09-07

-- Edited by ram at 20:21, 2006-09-07

stephen judd · Status: Offline

Actually, I think there is very good reason to hope that this will be a good search. Although we need to be vigilant, I think there are good reasons for cautious optimism. The faculty Senate's meeting with Robin Robinson went very well -- she was quite candid and listened well. We have some good reason to believe that the Board is looking at the MSU search and may be willing to "tweak" this one to find a beter balance between transparency and the preservation of confidentiality that the commissioner obviously wants to protect. One thing we learned from the mSU search -- by maintaining a high level of secrecy he was able to circumvent the influential power brokers who certainly made a mess of the last state search. I'm normally reluctant to put my fate into the hands of one person, but I'm inclined to try to work out a bsis for the best search possible in terms of our own needs for openess and input as far up the search process as we can get . . . and then at the end of the day trust (and hope) that the commissioner will fulfil his promise to have a fair search, put together the best pool of candidates possible and get us a good president. He has certainly used words like "healer" in some of his conversations . . . . anyone with half a brain knows we are hurting down here.

I agree that the Board itself has changed -- a feel a lot better about the new appointees than a few of the dearly departed of recent memory (Nicholson and Klum take note.)

I don't think we should cave in to the commissioner -- but we need him in our corner. We'll have several chances to express our concerns . . . we should use them wisely.

asdf · Status: Offline

Incredulous wrote:
asdf,
Do you honestly think that anything would have been different if the AAUP had not had that faculty vote? The IHL and SFT were going to beat up on USM and the faculty no matter what. It's what they do. The fix was in.

If you mean would Shelby still be president, no, nothing would have changed. The alumni hated Hickey and Hart was going to UNH. Shelby had the job even without the inside deals (and if you want to know where the inside deals took place, don't look to Hattiesburg, look to Jackson, Shelby put his years as legislative liaison well to use to get this job...sitting on the steps of the capital spitting peanuts as he use to say).

I think the backfire part came after Shelby came to office. Vengeance against the rebel rousing faculty became job #1 instead of job #9

and probably more importantly, I think it set back relationships with the board. I honestly think they thought they were doing the right thing, but being so out of touch with the people in the trenches, they failed. From their perspective, there were others out there trying to undermine the process. They felt that there was no pleasing the faculty. The faculty didn't like Flemming (yes, they thought they were doing a favor to the faculty by getting rid of Flemming), then didn't like it when they fired him, and then already did not like their new choice, before it was even announced.

In other words, I don't think IHL wanted to directly beat up the faculty, at least not the way Shelby did. I think some of them wanted a bit more whip cracking, but not murder. As for Shelby, I think some things would have been different. He definitely would have tried to settle individual scores with certain people and departments, but I think the general war on faculty came from the vote and G&S were direct casualties from this.

The flawed processes come from a flawed board system. Maybe the new model with Meredeth with help, but until there is a faculty representative sitting on the board (which will never happen), I believe all of higher ed in Miss is in trouble.

stephen judd · Status: Offline

The old hack that "faculty didn't like fleming" keeps reappearing and it is frequently used by the anti-faculty folks to justify the idea that faculty can't be satisfied.

I remember faculty reaction to fleming as being more mixed -- clearly the issue of growth of the technology sector (in terms of funding and centralization) was a big one, and there were others as well. But my memory of my own colleagues at that period was that the feeling about flemng was decidedly mixed . . . he met personaly with the college of the arts faculty three times in the course of his last two years here to field questions about the status of the college, the place of the arts in the university, and issues of funding. He took some fairly major criticisms in public during those forums. But he showed up.

I believe that history has conflated the "faculty" dislike of fleming with the dislike of many prominent alums who were actually the folks raising most of the rukus. Someone managed to sell the board on the idea that no president would ever satisfy this faculty . . .

Which isn't far from the truth. When you become president of a university, you are heading up a community which isn't constituted to march on command. It is by nature a community of skeptics. The different between a good and bad president is often not that the policies may differ greatly -- but that a good president knows the kind of community it is and can work the community to generally get (most of the time) what he or she believes to be in the best interests of the university. Good presidents know how to make sure that every faculty member feel important and needed so that when times get tough paranoia is minimized. Good presidents try to share their reasoning as much as possible for decisions they need to make -- because they understand that faculty are equipped to deal with a rational approach to problem solving -- even one they may disagree with. They are not equipped to deal with decisions that seem arbitrary, without foresight or reason, or may smack of the petty, the personal, or the self-aggrandizing.

This administration has broken every rule in the book on good management and good leadership -- but it should have been no secret that the style of leadership by this administration would be provacative, confrontational, secretive, manipulative, and at times, deliberately cruel.

Songbird_ · Status: Offline

I've added 70 more headlines to Shelby's Regret-Me-Not Page, mostly from 2002/03, to help jog Pres. Thames' memory.

stephen judd · Status: Offline

Songbird_ wrote:

I've added 70 more headlines to Shelby's Regret-Me-Not Page, mostly from 2002/03, to help jog Pres. Thames' memory.

This is excellent -- and the Edith Piaff is pure genius.

Curmudgeon · Status: Offline

Have we hit bottom yet?