Bower - USM Forum -- Message Board

Date: Aug 23, 2004

Bower

Date: Aug 23, 2004

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040822/COL0504 /40822009/1173/SPORTS

Date: Aug 23, 2004

I've often accused Rick Cleveland of being more Ole Miss centric than the son of USM's former sports information director ought to be. But an editorial like this plays in the court of public opinion & even UM & State fans know how loyal Bower is, how good a coach he is & what a "clean" program he runs. That's why some of them want to get rid of him so badly.

A great quote: "Bottom line: If the state were to allow lifetime contracts, Bower should be first in line to get one. He's been that good."

Now, consider how SFT does business. Personnel who are indeed "that good" & who perform with honesty & integrity seem to be the ones he most wants to can.

Sad to say this because I think the G&S debacle was really more academically important, but if SFT attempts to fire Bower, he might as well have his own suitcase packed, because I don't think the people of Hattiesburg would wait for IHL to act before they ran him out of town.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

The comments about USM that I have heard since SFT took office was that he would turn USM into a polymer technical school with a good football. With the recent 4th teir ranking he has accomplished the first part but it looks like you can scratch the second part if Bower left.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Invictus
"A great quote: "Bottom line: If the state were to allow lifetime contracts, Bower should be first in line to get one. He's been that good."

Invictus,

You present a good reason why you, Mal, & Miss Information should consider establishing, as a companion to your Nom d'Aplomb award, a Creme de la Creme award (by whatever name) for the best off-the-message-board statement or event which advances the cause. At least somebody should consider doing it. This week alone we already have Eric Stringfellow's marvelous Klumb editorial and Rich Cleveland's insightful Bower editorial - but no place on the message board to formally recognize such extramural contributions.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: The entire Mr. Wonderful Organization
" Invictus, You present a good reason why you, Mal, & Miss Information should consider establishing, as a companion to your Nom d'Aplomb award, a Creme de la Creme award (by whatever name) for the best off-the-message-board statement or event which advances the cause. At least somebody should consider doing it. This week alone we already have Eric Stringfellow's marvelous Klumb editorial and Rich Cleveland's insightful Bower editorial - but no place on the message board to formally recognize such extramural contributions."

Not the Mr. Wonderful Organization, not the Nom d'Aplomb committee - time for someone else to rise to the challenge!

Mal

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Mal
"
Not the Mr. Wonderful Organization, not the Nom d'Aplomb committee - time for someone else to rise to the challenge!"

I agree with Mal on this. It's bad enough having to clean up Miss Information's parlor after the weekly Nom d'Aplomb deliberations, what with all the antimacassars scattered about & the dewberry brandy snifters that have to be washed.

Might I suggest that the Web Master create a pinned thread for "Creme de la Creme" nominations? I don't know if we should be selecting the best more than recognizing all support we may find in the press or elsewhere.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Invictus
"Might I suggest that the Web Master create a pinned thread for "Creme de la Creme" nominations? I don't know if we should be selecting the best more than recognizing all support we may find in the press or elsewhere."

Some way of recognizing all of the best extramural support rather than identifying just one sounds like a good idea to us. It should be totally independent of the Nom d'Aplomb or the Citation de la Semaine awards. There may some weeks when nothing significant is identified. There may be some weeks when there are many (e.g., Eric Stringfellow and Rick Cleveland thus far this week). Maybe someone will step forward to do this.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Invictus
" Might I suggest that the Web Master create a pinned thread for "Creme de la Creme" nominations? I don't know if we should be selecting the best more than recognizing all support we may find in the press or elsewhere."

A pinned thread would do it! If there were abuses the Webmaster could simply delete the entire thread.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Mr. Wonderful
"A pinned thread would do it! If there were abuses the Webmaster could simply delete the entire thread. "

This is warning not just for Jeff Bower but for us all --

In the Brave New USM world your history will not matter. Neither will loyalty, honor, nor integrity. It will not even be enough to be a consistent winner ("producer.") Despite how well you do with limited resources, you will be held to an impossibly high standard. If you can't live up to that standard, you are out.

Let's see how that same standard works in reverse if applied to this administration and its appointees. And let's ask a really big question:

Isn't it true that everyone from staff to faculty is being pressured to generate money because the administration isn't? It might be true that grants might generate some income; it might be true that commercial returns on research might produce some income:

but great universities flourish on endowments produced by giving (corprorate and private). To get that you have to be willling to ask, to talk to people, to sell people on your vision . . . my feeling is that all of us who already have full time jobs teaching and researching have already been drafted into doing more and more of the clerical work formerly done by other university admin offices; and now we are also being asked to take on part of the admin's job of fundraising as well. But many of those upper level folks make a hell of a lot more than those of us in the trenches so why are we paying them so much?

By the way, did anyone notice that the article announcing Grime's ascension to Provost Nemero Uno was "more than doubling" his workload? Think that involves more than doubling his pay?

Back to Bower: this is really shabby treatment for a career of loyalty and success. It isn't like he has had two or three less than five hundred seasons; it isn't like the athletic department has gotten a sudden increase in funds and upped the quality of recruiting without upping the number of wins. You can't ask someone who has already stretcheed a program to its maximum abilities using available resources to stretch more unless the resources increase.

This is bossism at its worst -- once factories turned workers out after they had worn their bodies out in service of the company. The new "factory" isn't about muscle: it is about mind. The mind can wear out too -- people can just as easily get used up in an office as a shop floor. We are living in an intellectual sweatshop where the values of the university are turned topsy turvey: once universities were considered a product themselves (as in the gathering of teaching, researching and learning minds created a unique environment for thought and creativity in which the payoff was the undergirding of the intellectual and creative life of the community and nation. That is no longer enough to justify their existence : now universities must themselves produce in the same way factories produce. Our administrations, no longer cut in the mold of the Clark Kerr's or the Derek Bok's or the Brustein's, rather than offering a spirited and enlightened defense of the university's traditional role - instead roll over like intellectual wimps.

So at the new USM it doesn't matter if you are a faculty member; a staff member, -- or a football coach. The only thing of interest is "what have you done for me lately."

As I have said previously -- just because it has a sheepskin doen't mean it still isn't a barbarian at heart.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

stephen--i remember a colleague of mine 20+ years ago say "it's what you've done for me recently" in response to the raise situation then. i found the recent discussion on raises, how they should be given, etc. to be a repeat of this 20+ year ago discussion. I had hoped the university had changed, but maybe it hasn't.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

I remain a Stephen Judd Fan!!!! Great insights, once again. The "standards" that the admin. tout are of the lowest in nature. They go right along with selling your soul to the devil (take it literally if you so choose). Here's to seeing an end to all of this Southern Mess!!!!

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: stinky cheese man
"stephen--i remember a colleague of mine 20+ years ago say "it's what you've done for me recently" in response to the raise situation then. i found the recent discussion on raises, how they should be given, etc. to be a repeat of this 20+ year ago discussion. I had hoped the university had changed, but maybe it hasn't. "

Well, I admit that some of that is always around. But there is a false dichotomy here. I have found that faculty members who are accused of "not producing lately" are not unproductivel at all. But they may be producing differently in a differentstage of their professional lives. I believe that one thing the university has always theoretically offered is that it honmors the journey of the individual scholar/teacher/artist. That is what makes a university interesting -- we are not all the same, we do not all take the same journey and we do not end in the same place. It is the ideas generated by those individual journeys of faculty and students that creates the discourse that so marks the university as a place separate from the rest of society. I wonder that many people sense the need for that kind of sepasrateness when it comes to religion but seem afraid or envious when it comes to intellectual life.

I think the standards of "productivity" should change as a faculty members mature. My story to Dean Pood was when I was at SUNY New Paltz there was a faculty member of long service in my program and at first I didn't think he was pulling his weight. But I noticed in faculty meetings that other faculty members listened to him respectfully, even when they disagreed with him. And what I disovered is that his knowlege of the school, of the ins and outs of the program, the departmemnt -- and his speciality .. the people he had known and worked with were a kind of living history that undergirded all of us and acted as a kind of glue. I also learned that though he didn't do cmmittee work any more he was down in the city auditioning all the time and got frequently cat for film shoots (you've probably seen himin some pretty nice roles on Law and Order) . . . and his experiences and the poeple he met in that world he brought back into our program. His contributions were now still siginificant but also different . . . and in fact I learned he had paid his dues in service on many committees early in his career, in teaching many overloads; in creating a program that had not existed before . . . so many contributions lost in time as administrations and collegues change. "What have you done for me lately" often means "I'm the new boss -- I don't care what you've done before I came. Only about what you are doing now and only as defined by me."

I have posed the question to a number of our administrators about how this kind of faculty member should be regarded -- and I didn't particularly like the response since I think ithe answers I got consigned this faculty member to the same role as a racehorse not retired to stud, but to the glue factory.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

i agree that faculty change their research / teaching / service interests and commitments over time. i do different research than i did 20 years--for example, i'm asked to write book chapters, something as a newly-minted PHD i wasn't. there is no longer the sense of urgency there was as an asst. prof. i don't have tenure and promotion deadlines hanging over me. i'm still productive--but i don't feel compelled to "pump" out the research to meet a tenure standard. however, i don't find any diffference in the "what have you done for me lately" philosophy from what it was years ago. i came when the university was making its transition from a teaching university to a research university. boy, what a change for some who were not hired here to conduct research. and many of those hired only to teach felt they were disenfranchised by the university.

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote: "

Originally posted by: stephen judd
" This is bossism at its worst -- once factories turned workers out after they had worn their bodies out in service of the company. The new "factory" isn't about muscle: it is about mind. The mind can wear out too -- people can just as easily get used up in an office as a shop floor. We are living in an intellectual sweatshop."

My wife has discovered this board. Today she quietly walked away from the computer and said "Why did you ever go there?"

Date: Aug 23, 2004

i've been here 20+ years, i've been through lots of changes, and i've tried to "keep on the sunny side," but i'm beginning to wonder why i spent so much time here. and i'm not even from the south. i have no "family connections" that drew me here or would keep me here. oh well, i'll still teach, research, and serve like i have in the past. i don't have much of a choice, do i?

Date: Aug 23, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: stinky cheese man
"i've been here 20+ years, i've been through lots of changes, and i've tried to "keep on the sunny side," but i'm beginning to wonder why i spent so much time here. and i'm not even from the south. i have no "family connections" that drew me here or would keep me here. oh well, i'll still teach, research, and serve like i have in the past. i don't have much of a choice, do i?"

I stayed but that was a mistake. That's why I am in shock and awe. More shock than awe. Contrary to your situation, I am from the south and I love the south but reflecting back on things I would have been better off anywhere except USM. Surely this dark cloud over USM will pass. But the cloud did not develop overnight.

Date: Aug 24, 2004

quote:
Originally posted by: Shock and Awe
"I stayed but that was a mistake. That's why I am in shock and awe. More shock than awe. Contrary to your situation, I am from the south and I love the south but reflecting back on things I would have been better off anywhere except USM. Surely this dark cloud over USM will pass. But the cloud did not develop overnight."

It didn't -- but I have only been here six years and I have seen the imnebsity of the chnage in that short of a time. However, to be fair -- these are not just USM issues. They are cultural issues as well. The workplace environment has changed as we have moved from industrial to information technology production. What has not chnaged is that there are workers and there are bosses. The problem is that it is harder to tell the difference in this new culture -- after all, bosses and workers all deal with information; use similar processes -- even dress similaraly. Workers are tempted to believe the generally false notion that all of them can move up the supervisory ladder to become the CEO one day . . . and business in general has become much more adept at using a "softer" language.

The truth is that there are still people at the top who make immensely more money than they are worth (I realize that this is a perception and marketplkace issue but who, after all, shapes the terms of the marketplace?); who claim credit for the good a company does and shift blame to others when things go badly; who are looking for mobility and network to achieve it rather than stability and long range planning. The ethos at the top (mobility, looking out for oneself at the expense of other values like company loyalty, etc.) have now also been shifted onto the worker who is encouraged to act as a kind of mini "entrepreneaur" -- including now increasingly having to find his/her own health care and retirements package in the open market. The prpblem is the average worker doesn't have the resources to do this nearly as well as upper management with its access to insider networks, lawyers, and professional financial advice.

I