USM: A Nursing Program on the Precipice
It's Spring Break at the University of Southern Mississippi--a week when you'd expect students to be on vacation, and faculty to at least be taking a breather. But the struggle to replace one of worst university presidents in American history doesn't give anyone a whole lot of time off.
Today subcommittees of the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees are meeting in Jackson; tomorrow, the full Board gets together. USM's accreditation consultant, Margaret Sullivan, has been summoned to deliver a report on the university's efforts to get off probation with its main accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. But USM president Shelby F. Thames isn't being formally evaluated at these meetings, and the best guess is that he won't be until May.
Still, evidence keeps rolling out about the destruction that Thames has wrought.
Yesterday, Kevin Walters of the Hattiesburg American finally broke the sad story of the USM Nursing program.
The University of Southern Mississippi School of Nursing is toughening its grading standards in order to improve falling state test scores that could jeopardize the school's accreditation....
Peter Fos, dean of the College of Health, said he hopes tougher standards at Southern Miss will result in better scores on the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX), the standardized test all students in the program must take to become professional nurses. He said the change was made this semester so it would be in place by the fall.
"We want to challenge the students to achieve more and, hopefully, that will be translated to the pass rate on the exam," Fos said.
At issue in the nursing school are students' scores on the test. Scores dropped from a 78.8 percent pass rate to a 75.3 percent pass rate in 2004. That is the lowest score on NCLEX tests for Southern Miss nursing students in 11 years.
The bright line for NCLEX passing rates is 75%. Two years below 75% and the IHL Board is required to put the program on probation.
To put things in perspective, the national average for passing the Nursing board exam has remained in a band between 84 and 87% for some years. In 2000, the USM program achieved a passing rate of 91%; it's been downhill ever since. Under Thamesian rule, the pass rates have been 78.8% for 2003 and now 75.3% for 2004. And this is at the program that educates more nurses than any other in Mississippi--in fact, about half the total. Meanwhile, in the IHL Board's domain, programs at University of Mississippi Medical Center, Alcorn State, Delta State, and even Mississippi University for Women all had higher success rates than USM last year. Two private insitutions, Mississippi College and William Carey College, also did better (both over 90%). William Carey, a small college right in Hattiesburg, has been substantially increasing its enrollment at a time when USM's (despite the constant boasts by Thames' publicity machine) has been scarcely moving up.
So how did this all happen? The American article exclusively quotes Peter Fos, Dean of the College of Health, the only person anywhere near this mess who dared to go on the record. Fos may not know some things about the Nursing program; other things he surely does know, but dares not tell the press about.
Informed sources tell me that the program got into serious trouble in January 2003, when Shelby Thames fired 9 deans and replaced them with 5. The Nursing dean, Marie Ferrell, a highly regarded nursing administrator who had been in Hattiesburg for just a year and a half, was one of those canned; she left USM altogether in May 2003. Nursing was consolidated into a College of Health. The first search for a new Dean failed (it didn't help that the"faculty" representative was none other than Angie Dvorak, the notorious and now-departed VP for Research); Joan Exline, who had been on the search committee, was made Acting Dean. A year later, Fos was hired and Exline was moved into a Special Assistant position reporting directly to Shelby Thames; she now frequently shows her complete ignorance of accreditation procedures, which she is supposed to be in charge of.
What became the School of Nursing in the reorganization has had three directors in three years; the assistant director of the undergraduate program retired last year; and senior faculty have either retired or taken jobs elsehwere. Out of roughly 35 Nursing faculty, only 3 Full Professors and 5 Associate Professors are left; more and nore of the teaching is having to be entrusted to Instructors with Masters degrees.
The loss of professors was so severe that students stopped being admitted to the Ph.D. program in nursing last fall. The School wanted to cut the number of freshman nursing students from 60 to 40, but Thames reportedly ordered Dean Fos to admit 50, while falsely promising to allow the program to hire new faculty.
On top of that, Nursing is physically housed in Harkins Hall, one of many crumbling buildings on the USM campus. As noted in a companion story in yesterday's American, Thames has falsely promised on more than one occasion that he would find the program new quarters. In 2002, USM paid $1.2 million to construction company owner (and local Thames booster) Ray Sims, for a former Albertson's grocery store. The building was supposed to be converted for use by the nursing program, but Thames' CFO, Gregg Lassen, couldn't come up with any money for the renovations, so the building has been sitting empty (except for a few months when Hudson's, a Mississippi-based furniture outlet, needed extra space to display and sell its goods.) Now the Thames regime is admitting that USM can't afford to renovate it.
The empty Albertson's store isn't the only the sizable property standing idle under Thamesian management. In the spring of 2004, Thames and crew announced that the Van Hook golf course was being closed to make way for an industrial park, whose tenants were to be recruited by Thames' administrator-without-portfolio, Ken Malone. Van Hook is now vacant; no one has moved in yet. Apparently Malone has been too busy trying to ruin the College of Business to concentrate on finding tenants.
Thames and his crew are well aware that public revelations about the state of the nursing program will hurt them. Kevin Walter's article about the program's woes includes this unusual passage:
Seven current nursing students contacted by the Hattiesburg American said they feared reprisals from Southern Miss nursing faculty and other students if they spoke on the record about concerns they had over changes in the nursing program.
Fos said he had not heard of any threats and did not condone them.
But of course Fos has heard of the threats. And they did not originate from professors in the program, or even from his office. They came from Shelby Thames and his immediate underlings. So nursing professors at USM face a dilemma. If they speak out against Thames, they could be fired, they will certainly be punished, and he will get revenge by further destroying the nursing program. If they don't speak out against Thames, they could end up losing their jobs because of deaccreditation or major cuts in state appropriations to higher education, and Thames will keep"having fun"--destroying the nursing program.
And, needless to say, redefining a C from 70 out of 100 to 77, as the School of Nursing just did, is a mere bandaid. The measure was taken in a program that can't hire the professors it needs at a university that has adopted open admissions for most undergraduate programs and is retaining many of its undegrads through grade hyperinflation. A 3.0 grade point average is now below the mean in many programs at USM.