USM: IHL Commissioner Sides with the Business Faculty

In today's news, Richard Crofts, the interim commissioner of higher education in Mississippi, has openly condemned the two key passages in the Black Friday memo. This was the memo that Provost Jay Grimes wrote to Business Dean Harold Doty last week, ordering the College of Business to launch a"hybrid" MBA program in August, and insisting that the business faculty quit doing"theoretical/basic research."

Crofts called the two paragraphs"risky and misguided."

"It was directives of a nature that are not normal in my understanding of the way you run a university, and they did involve serious consequences with SACS - or the potential serious consequences - and certain serious consequences with AACSB," Crofts said about Grimes' letter.

It turns out, in fact, that Crofts, who was already formally monitoring the University of Southern Misssissippi's progress in getting out of trouble with its accrediting body, had to order USM President Shelby Thames to issue yesterday's two-paragraph repudiation of the Black Friday memo. Thames simply wasn't smart enough to reverse course on his own.

"I told [Thames] that I thought he had two choices. He either agreed with the sentiment of those two paragraphs - and obviously I would disagree with that - or I strongly urged him to disavow himself of those two paragraphs," Crofts said.

And Crofts made it clear that Shelby Thames will have a lot of explaining to do, in front of the IHL Board of Trustees when it meets next Thursday.

With Crofts on the record condemning major actions taken by the Thames administration, Jay Grimes will obviously be vacating the office of Provost. What is still not clear is whether the Board will keep protecting"Thames-by-proxy" Ken Malone, who instigated the Black Friday memo, or Thames himself.

USM will not recover unless the Board cuts Thames and Malone loose as well.

Stay tuned.