USM: Shelby Thames on a Short Leash
Today, the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning Board took another step back from its biggest failed project. It adopted new rules, modeled on the Georgia state system, whereby the presidents of each of the 8 state universities in Mississippi will report directly to the IHL Commissioner. Although the framework adopted today is a draft, if it is filled in along the the lines suggested at a recent Board retreat, future presidential contracts will be year-to-year--no more of those 4-year terms that have been granted up to now. The Commissioner will evaluate the presidents' performance every year, and will have the authority to fire them.
"This is a significant reform in higher education in Mississippi," said Virginia Shanteau Newton of Gulfport, the board's vice president and chairwoman of the commissioner search committee.
"Our goal is to be a more effective board and again recognize that we're lay people."
According to Amy Young, the current President of the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who was at the meeting, the Board specifically renounced micromanagement of the affairs of the 8 universities in the system. It also declared an end to Board members showing allegiance toward particular universities in the system (easier said than done, but it's never been said before).
There is absolutely no doubt which president brought so many headaches on the Board that it became willing to delegate that much power to the Commissioner (who is really the Board's head staff person). Choosing Shelby F. Thames for the top position at the University of Southern Mississippi, and keeping him in office for nearly 3 years, may be the worst personnel decisions that the Board has ever made.
The change will keep Interim Commissioner Richard Crofts in office until August. By strengthening Crofts' hand, the Board has made it much easier for him to restrain Thames when he pulls his next maneuver that will threaten USM's accrediation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
The downside is that Crofts won't be available to replace Thames as president until August. And since Crofts came out of retirement to take the Commissioner job, he may well be planning to retire permanently by the end of the summer.
Still, the tide is now running swiftly against Thames and his political backers. The Hattiesburg-area business leaders who organized the Paving Company Putsch (the complete prepared speech by their spokesperson, Bob Mixon, has been made available; I'll post it soon) now have cause to regret going public with their efforts to prolong Thames' reign.
No signal could have been clearer than the complete absence of Roy Klumb, the Board President, who until last month's meeting had been serving as Thames' personal cheerleader. Presiding over the meetings was Virginia Shanteau Newton, the only Board member to cast a public vote against making Thames president of USM in 2002, and an outspoken critic of his performance ever since. Newton takes over as Board President at the May meeting.
What's more, according to Young, the Board's new rules call for electing its President and Vice-President, instead of rotating through the membership. The President will now the sole public spokesperson for the Board--a change that was already informally in effect a month ago. Newton had to keep quiet after Feburary's meeting--even though the Board was tilting more in her direction than was publicly apparent at the time-- but starting in May it is Klumb who will have to keep quiet.
It now appears that only three Board members could be counted on to support keeping Thames past the expiration of his current contract in May 2006. Apart from Klumb, who may be having second thoughts, Scott Ross and Tom Colbert are still identified as rabidly pro-Thames. Whatever the other Board members think of USM (and we can be sure that some of them are ill-disposed toward the university), they are sick of Thames and the bad press he never fails to bring them.
Even with Thames most likely gone in May 2006, and closely supervised till then, USM is in plenty of trouble. If Thames retains any power, he will be sure to abuse it; if kept on such a short leash that it puts him in danger of choking, he will merely be ineffective. The university still has to deal with its accreditation problems and prepare for a sharp cut in its appropriation from the state legislature. Most state university administrations handle budget cuts maladaptively; Thames, if left in charge of such matters, will use a budget cut to eliminate as many faculty positions as possible, while preserving every bit of the administrative padding that he has added. In addition to those who have already given up, and will be leaving USM for other jobs this May, a large number of professors are going to seek employment elsewhere so they can leave by May of next year--unless they are sure that Thames will be gone. By contrast, there would be a huge upsurge of support for any new president who meets modest standards of competence and decency.
The Board also heard a report from Margaret Sullivan, the SACS consultant who has been working with USM faculty and administration to deal with probation. Sullivan, who is paid by USM, was upbeat about its prospects of resolving the probation, while refraining from criticizing any constituency. But then, she has only been on campus a total of 5 days since she began working for USM in early January, and isn't due back till May 9. She has never met with a single faculty member individually; all of her encounters have been with faculty committees, such as the Academic Council, where upper administrators were always present. I suspect, too, that paid consultants don't make public mention of such matters as direct intervention by the Commissioner, ordering the president to retract an order that threatened the univesity's accreditation (as happened in the wake of the Black Friday memo). Nor do they bring up such matters as passing out SACS report forms to a university committee, only to find that the administrator supposedly in charge of accreditation has never seen that form before, or mentioned it to the faculty participants.
USM is hurting badly; it hasn't been saved yet. But the end of the Thames regime is becoming visible.