USM: Newspaper Article on Black Friday
Kevin Walters of the Hattiesburg Americanhas done it again. The memo that Provost Jay Grimes of the University of Southern Mississippi sent to College of Business Dean Harold Doty is now available here. Because Doty read portions of it out loud to a College faculty meeting on Friday February 4, it has come to be known as the Black Friday memo.
The memo nets out a meeting that took place on January 21. Among those present was multiple officeholder Ken Malone, the top remaining enforcer for USM President Shelby F. Thames.
Doty read two passages from the memo out loud on Black Friday. One pertained to the MBA program that Thames and Malone are insisting on:
I said we must quickly move forward with a proposal to expand the delivery format of our MBA program, so as to better compete with William Carey [College], University of Phoenix, and others. You responded that your faculty were working on an alternative delivery or hybrid program and hoped for a pilot program in Fall 2005. I informed you that we must have it by then.
Between this"hybrid" (partly in class, partly online program) and the Executive MBA program that has figured in Thames and Malone's secret plans recently, there looks to be a distinction without a difference. The expanded MBA program would be taking over the exact same portion of the library on the Gulf Park campus that the Executive MBA program was slated to, as per the secret plans. The Hattiesburg American article notes that:
Current plans call for the program to be located at Southern Miss' Gulf Park campus in Long Beach where students might use a portion of the library's third floor for classrooms, Grimes said. Plans are being made for that classroom project and classrooms could be disassembled to make room for more books if need be, Grimes said.
The MBA programs at William Carey, a small college with campuses in Hattiesburg and Gulfport, and at the University Phoenix are not accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Although it is not mentioned in the memo, Grimes also wants USM's MBA program to compete with the program offered by Troy State, an Alabama-based university,
The second passage in the Black Friday memo is titled"College of Business Focus":
I reminded you that we are not a PhD granting College of Business and as such should not be concerned with theoretical/basic reasearch; rather, our focus should be on applied research -- research that is of interest to our local and regional customers. I asked you to grow our CoB in this direction and to be absolutely certain that all new hires have relevant private sector experience. I further said that new hires could and would be expected to procure applied research grants and contracts.
This item is more extreme than I initially realized, for it employs the idiosyncratic language of USM's inimitable President. To translate back out of Thames-speak,"applied research" means the same as"economic development"--i.e., contract work for businesses run by backers of Shelby F. Thames;"theoretical/basic research" means anything that the researcher would be so foolish as to try to publish in an academic journal; what the rest of us call"basic research" is so outlandish and nefarious that no one would dare to conduct it anywhere near the campuses of USM.
In any event, the reference to Business programs at USM not granting PhD's is pretextual. The College of Arts and Letters has been repeatedly pounded on precisely the same issue--despite its PhD programs.
Doty might as well have read out the last item,"AACSB Update":
This agenda item was not discussed.
For despite his feeble efforts at bafflegab, it is clearly Grimes' intent to get the College of Business deaccredited by the AACSB. See the Hattiesburg American article:
"He's always thrown up the accreditation roadblock," Grimes said of Doty.
Grimes said he told Doty"What do we need it for?" in discussing the college's accreditation.
"I did that as somewhat of a shock to him," Grimes said."'Harold, what's wrong here?'"
Grimes said he does not want the College of Business to lose its accreditation. Instead, he wants to energize Doty and the college.
Sure. Grimes and his superiors, Thames and Malone, want to"energize" Doty out of his administrative post. They want to"energize" the USM College of Business out of existence. Once it is gone, it can be replaced by an Economic Development College run by Malone and staffed by adjunct faculty without training from AACSB-accredited programs.
Not yet sufficiently emphasized is the impact on USM's overall accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Since the Thames administration views AACSB accreditation as a"roadblock" to its plans, Doty and the Business faculty need to emphasize how starting a new program with a substantial distance learning component, when SACS has taken USM to task for failing to document and assess its distance-learning programs, verges on suicidal. And it remains to be seen how SACS will respond to a Provost ordering the entire Business faculty to do"economic development" and hang up the academic research.
On-campus opinion holds that Grimes is about to be relieved of his post and given a one-way ticket back to USM's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, which he used to run. But the force behind the MBA expansion is Ken Malone. Malone is the one who needs to be held accountable for Black Friday. And as an administrator who holds no documented tenured faculty position, Malone will be gone from USM as soon as he is fired.