USM: From Coca-Cola Cabal to Paving Company Putsch?

This evening, as many as 300 members of the Hattiesburg area business community will be trying to save the beleaguered presidency of Shelby Thames, and trying to promote their vision of the University of Southern Mississippi as a trade school.

When The Independent, a Hattiesburg weekly, broke the story one week ago, the spokeswoman for the meeting's organizers was Bonnie Drews, a local Republican party activist, and the location was to be the local Coca-Cola bottling plant. The agenda explicitly included getting rid of the liberal arts at USM.

To quote at somewhat greater length from the article than I was able to do in my last post,

Focus of the meeting, said Drews,"will be the direction in which the university is moving."

She added,"the issue is whether the faculty or the President is going to determine the direction in which the university needs to move."

And the issue, she continued,"is whether USM will continue as a primarily liberal arts university or it will focus on technology."

Dr. Thames, Drews said,"is giving the University outstanding and courageous leadership and he knows we need to change direction to refocus."

Liberal arts and the liberal arts faculty"has set the direction of USM for the past 25 years," she continued."Now we have to change direction and Dr. Thames is attempting to do so despite opposition from the liberal arts faculty."

Bonnie Drews hasn't accurately described the pattern of destruction that Thames has wrought. True, he has pounded the stuffing out of the liberal arts and driven out many professors in those fields. But he has also torn the School of Nursing to shreds (supposedly no article about the abrupt decline of the nursing program has yet appeared in the Hattiesburg American because the Thames administration has ordered Nursing faculty and students not to talk to the press). Only the intervention of the interim IHL commissioner has prevented him from destroying the College of Business, which will remain on his hit list so long as he retains the power to do it harm. In fact, only a few pet programs (Polymer Science, Economic Development, a couple of other applied science programs that pull in grants, and certain crony-infested Education programs controlled by Thames' daughter, Dana) have escaped the wrecking ball.

What's more, faculty opposition to Thames comes from everywhere on campus except the favored few programs (and even in those precincts, Thames is not very popular). The Faculty Senate votes against Thames have gone 40-0 and 39-2; the general faculty vote of no confidence, just under a year ago, was 430-32.

Nonetheless, Drews' hatred of the liberal arts is shared by other Thames supporters, including at least two members of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board, Roy Klumb and Scott Ross.

Ross was quoted in the Independent, to the effect that state universities must become entrepreneurial, and that Thames was leading the way. (Of course, the kinds of"entrepreneurial" activities that Thames, as the president of a state university, likes to engage in are rather like the kinds of"entrepreneurial" activities that trial lawyers engage in, when after more deep pockets to plunder.)

Meanwile, in a story that ran Tuesday in the Hattiesburg American, Klumb, who claimed he had nothing to do with the Coca-Cola convocation, took his own shots at the liberal arts:

Yet it and the state's other public universities could lose more state funding if Gov. Haley Barbour and lawmakers pare appropriations. So the mindset of how Southern Miss and other state public universities are run must change, Klumb said.

"The notion that we're going to run in that 1950s style liberal arts school, that just can't happen," he said.

Klumb doesn't know his history--in the 1950s, USM was a mildly pumped-up teachers' college under the iron rule of General William D. McCain. Bonnie Drews knows hers a little better. She complained about"the past 25 years" because Aubrey Lucas, who replaced McCain as President in the late 1970s, made USM into a national university. It is the Lucas legacy that Thames has been destroying.

In the high-tension atmosphere of the last few weeks, the announcement of the pro-Thames posse at the Coca-Cola bottler has brought an avalanche of letters to the editor. Both the Hattiesburg American and the Biloxi Sun Herald have been publishing them, and they are all strongly anti-Thames. The Sun Herald, which maintained a protective news blackout for several months, has yet to weigh in editorially against the Thames regime, but it is now offering respectable news coverage of the crisis at USM.

In USM's College of Arts and Letters, Dean Elliott Pood, who was hired by Thames and up to now has shown no resistance to the Thames administration on anything, convened a faculty meeting yesterday, with the express purpose of countering the Coca-Cola cabal. Pood read a statement to the meeting, defending the educational value of the liberal arts; it is slated to appear on the American's op-ed page soon.

And, lo and behold, those who put the meeting together are back-pedaling furiously. Bonnie Drews is no longer talking to the press. The meeting site has been moved, from the bottler to the Warren Paving Company. There are cover stories galore:

More than 300 business leaders in Hattiesburg are meeting tonight to discuss the University of Southern Mississippi's accomplishments, not its mission or the future of President Shelby Thames, organizers said.

They also said the idea for the meeting came from a group of people who attended a Southern Miss function; no one from the university asked them to hold it.

This runs counter to the Independent's story. The fact that several of the meeting's 10 sponsors were involved in getting Thames made President of USM in 2002 lends credence to the Independent.

But the meeting is open only to business leaders; no one from the university, the College Board or the media were invited.

In fact, Myron Henry, a Professor of Mathematics who is a former Provost and a former Faculty Senate president, was initially invited, then his invitation was rescinded.

The meeting was changed from the Coca-Cola plant to Warren Paving to accommodate the number of people expected to attend.

The Coca-Cola plant has a big auditorium. Local sources suggest that the Warren Paving Company location is harder to picket.

Jan Lacy owns Copy Cat Printing in Hattiesburg. She said several business people recently went to an athletics department dinner, where many of the university's successes in academics and athletics were highlighted.

Lacy and several others decided more people needed to hear about Southern Miss' achievements, so they formed a committee of 10 to organize the meeting.

"What we're trying to accomplish is pretty innocent," Lacy said."The main purpose of the meeting is to disseminate information about USM's accomplishments."

There haven't been a whole lot of accomplishments, under Thames' watch. And the USM public relations machine, operated by Lisa Mader, has been energetic sending out press releases. The problem is that the local media no longer believe much that comes out of the Mader machine.

She said she has heard rumors that the group wants to discuss changing the university's mission, as well as Thames' future, but said"it has absolutely nothing to do with that."

Those"rumors" must be why Bonnie Drews won't return phone calls from reporters. And why in a story that ran Tuesday in the American, another organizer was a little franker:

Brad Brian, vice president of Hattiesburg Coca-Cola Bottling Co., said Tuesday the meeting isn't about redefining the university's mission or against faculty members who have spoken out against Thames and his leadership since he became president in 2002.

"I wish that had not been said because we've got enough friction now," Brian said.

Going back to the Sun Herald account:

Carl Nicholson, a former College Board member and a business owner, agreed. He said the group also wants to discuss the state's financial situation and how that will affect Southern Miss.

"This is not about Shelby," he said."It's about the fact that we're in a crucial situation in higher education in Mississippi right now. It's about external funding and where the university goes from here."

Keep in mind that during his term on the Board, Nicholson was the kingmaker who got control of USM for Thames.

Lisa Mader, university spokeswoman, said a member of the committee asked her for a list of USM's accomplishments, and she provided it. She said she did not ask anyone to host a meeting.

"The only involvement my office has had was to provide information, which we would do for any group that asked for it," Mader said.

Actually, no. Mader's office won't provide information to any group that asks for it. Otherwise, it would have turned Angie Dvorak's vita at the time of hiring over to the USM Faculty Senate. And the Independent stated that"The invitation to Drews to host the meeting was extended by Lisa Mader, spokesperon for the university."

The depth of the desperation among Thames' supporters can be gauged from comments that Roy Klumb, IHL Board President and, until now, Thames' top public cheerleader, made to Kevin Walters of the American. Klumb despises the liberal arts, and publicly supports the Thames program of ramping up grant funded research while diverting the resources that help to make USM competitive. Making a truly off-the-wall comparison between Thames and Jackie Robinson, Klumb rambled:

"How do we move these universities forward? What set of ideas is going to win at the end of the day? As a university president tries to reshape a university and move it off in a different direction, I don't know who is the Jackie Robinson to sit in that presidential chair without having to fight through a mindset that doesn't want to (change)," Klumb said.

Thames was hired by the board to increase the Southern Miss enrollment and"refocus" its finances to make it financially stronger, Klumb said.

He said Thames has made positive steps but also mentioned the setbacks he's faced. But he stressed the need for change."Is Dr. Thames our Jackie Robinson? I don't know," Klumb said.

Shelby Thames may be too impervious to negative feedback to gauge how tenuous his position has become. But his supporters are surely feeling the shock waves.

A communiqué from the Coca-Cola Cabal should be available tonight or tomorrow. Till then, stay tuned.