USM: The Paving Company Advertisement
Yesterday's Hattiesburg American carried a full-page ad, printed in color, from the folks who brought us the Paving Company Putsch. Since the ad was not included in the paper's electronic edition, I'm going to include the full text of it here (as transcribed by Amy Young). What look like scare quotes in the headline were intended for emphasis. My comments appear under each section.
"Paid for by citizens supporting The University of Southern Mississippi"
Good things"Are" Happening
Enrollment- Exerienced an increase in enrollment again for the 2004-05 academic year
- 2004-05 is the largest Freshman class in the history of the school
- Enrolled 8 National Merit Finalists in 2004-05 (record number)
- Have the largest number of Presidential scholars in our history
In fact, the number of students enrolled at the two campuses of USM rose from 14,092 in Fall 2004 to 14,191 in early Spring 2005. The rate of increase from Spring 2004 to Spring 2005 is well under 1%.
The Thames regime has been obsessed with enrollment; despite its blatant disdain for undergraduate teaching, it insists on an enrollment of 20,000 as one of the institution's five main goals. In Fall 2003, efforts to inflate USM's enrollment by several hundred so as to make USM appear to have moved past Mississippi State (they involved the creation of a phony graduate course) led to public scandal. Thames was behind the efforts, but it was an under-administrator reporting to the Provost who took the fall for the bogus course.
Since Thames became President, enrollment growth at USM has actually been below average for universities under the control of the Mississippi IHL Board. (And its little local competitor, William Carey College, posted a 7% increase in enrollment this last year. Administrators at the small private college are said to be thanking Shelby Thames for driving more students their way.) Since around 69,000 students are enrolled in the 8 universities in the Mississippi state system, and USM is already responsible for over 20% of the total figure, Thames' target of 20,000 looks out of reach, even it were otherwise desirable at a university as strapped for resources as USM. Thames' public relations machine routinely pads the figures by publicizing what is called"duplicated" enrollment (e.g., students signed up for courses at both the Hattiesburg main campus and the Gulf Park satellite campus get counted twice). The customary published claims of over 16,000 students at USM refer to duplicated enrollment.
The increase in the number of Presidential scholars is not sustainable, because even with tuition fully paid and other benefits, the students who are eligible for such scholarships will become less and less interested in USM as word gets out about Thames' wholesale destruction of such programs as Nursing, Business, most of the Liberal Arts, and even non-grant-getters in Science and Technology such as mathematics, or about the major overall dilution of academic quality in the Education programs since he became president. Under Thames, the brochures that USM gives out to high school students now mention athletics and"student life" items, with nary a word about academics.
Honors College- Honors College opened 2004-05 with an enrollment increase from 17 to 31 freshmen students with ACT scores of 31 or higher
- Students on the Gulf Park Campus now eligible for the Honors College
- 17.9 percent increase in number of students in Honors College this year
The Honors College was made substantially less rigorous last year, by deleting the Freshman Colloquium. Since the Colloquium was offered only on the Hattiesburg campus, this is the change that brought Gulf Park students into the program. Shelby Thames is no fan of Honors, by the way; he has pulled the plug on the Honors Forum, a popular series that brought several well-known visiting speakers to Hattiesburg each year.
It could be that more freshman Honors students with ACT scores of 31 or above were brought in in Fall 2004, on a one-time basis. Data for the entire 2004-2005 academic year are not yet available. The total number of students admitted to USM with ACT scores above 30 has been going down since Thames took over the presidency; according to the Fact Book on the USM website, the number of students admitted to USM with ACT scores over 30 declined from 2001-2002 (58 students) to 2002-2003 (52) to 2003-2004 (43 students). Meanwhile, the total number of students with ACT scores of 15 or below doubled from 2002-2003 to 2003-2004, and has increased by a factor of 7 since 2000.
In 2000-2001, the average ACT score for incoming freshmen at USM was 21.6. Over the three academic years from 2001-2002 to 2003-2004, it's gone from 20.9 to 20.8 on down to 20.2. (By contrast, the average ACT scores in 2004 for incoming freshmen at Mississippi State and Ole Miss were around 23.)
Construction on Campus- International Center - opened 2004
- Student Life Center - opening 2005
- Trent Lott Center - grounbreaking February 24, 2005
- Sorority Village - groundbreaking soon
Big building projects take time to come to fruition. The first two were well under way before Thames took office in 2002. The Trent Lott Center is a porkbarrel edifice most of whose funding was secured by a certain former Majority Leader of the US Senate; additional fundraising was mostly done by local civic leader Bobby Chain, whose public complaints about her lack of commitment to obtaining USM's share of the funding helped to drive Thames' one-time protegee Angie Dvorak off the university payroll. (If Thames and his enforcer-without-portfolio get their way, the entire Trent Lott Center, which will include two large lecture halls, will be occupied by the Economic Development program, most of whose students will be taking their courses over the Internet.) The Sorority Village is a genuinely Thamesian initiative; part of an apartment complex for students who have children will soon be torn down to make way for it.
Federal Funding- Sixth consecutive year of growth - up $1.9 million from 2003-04
- 15% increase in projects and grants funded this year
- Faculty submitted 712 proposals, an 11 percent increase
- $100 million comprehensive campaign goal reached July 2004
- More than $2.5 million was allocated to faculty and staff based on merit
- An additional $800,000 was allocated across-the-board to all faculty and staff - at the suggestion of faculty senate
- USM faculty and staff are receiving pay increases totaling more than $3.6 million this year
- Reorganization allowed reallocation of $2 million from administration costs into the classroom
- Outsourcing - bookstore (Barnes and Noble - guaranteed commission of $1.2 million/year) and food services (Aramark - 1.5 million/yr.)
That grant funded research has increased under Thames is not in doubt, though the trend began before him, and the rate of increase is down. The real question is how much longer the increase can continue; as Thames has progressively defunded so many academic areas, USM's competitiveness for grants is being undermined.
The fundraising campaign, with its target of $100 million, was another Fleming initiative, launched in the late 1990s. It was nearly 90% of the way to its goal when Thames took over, and by most accounts, his lack of attention to donor relations and his poor choice of chief fundraiser slowed its progress substantially.
The merit raises during 2003-2004 were awarded to a small minority of the faculty, mostly to people with strong connections to the Thames regime. (His daughter Dana, who chairs the department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education, received the highest raise in percentage terms.) The $3.6 million pool of money for raises this year is of uncertain provenance--most likely it was obtained on a one-time basis when Chief Financial Officer Gregg Lassen raided departmental reserve accounts throughout the university. The CFO has changed his story more than once, but if he and Thames paid for raises with one-time money, the consequences will be felt late this fiscal year, when departments run out of money, or early next, when USM's state appropriation is cut once again.
Both outsourcing agreements were concluded in the summer of 2004. Many other state universities did comparable outsourcing 5 to 10 years ago; others may have done even earlier. (Clemson outsourced its food services over a decade ago, and its bookstore in the mid-1990s; the arrangements, which also happen to be with Aramark and with Barnes and Noble, have worked well for CU.) The USM administration has yet to provide comprehensible estimates of the savings for outsourcing, even though they are rather easy to do, and the media have asked for them.
The purported savings from reorganization (this refers to the firing of 9 deans in January 2003 and their replacement with 5) were originally said to be $1.8 million. The figure has grown a little in the telling. In fact, the fired deans who did not leave USM or retire held tenured faculty positions, and their pay was not reduced. Overall, Thames has presided over a net expansion of the USM administration, adding several new positions with salaries in excess of $100K a year. Even if we do not factor in the extra person-hours required to adjust to the reorganization (curriculum changes alone have consumed a lot of faculty members' time, and more reporting to the accrediting agencies is also required), there is no credible evidence of net savings from the reorganization, or of more dollars reaching the classroom.
Growing. Succeeding.
Of course, there is no reference to the tierdrop in the US News and World Report rankings; the probation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools; the looming accreditation difficulties for the School of Nursing or the College of Business (still endangered by Thames' pet program, Economic Development, even though it is no longer in that College); the exodus of over 200 faculty members since Thames took office; the extreme difficulty recruiting qualified faculty in some areas... because none of those could be counted as evidence of growing or succeeding.
The ad bears the seal of the University of Southern Mississippi, suggesting that it was authorized by the administration. The cost of running the advertisement (over $3000 to reach a Sunday circulation of 26,000) was put up by participants in the Paving Company meeting. Many at the university believe that Thames and his private presidential spokesperson, Lisa Mader, were responsible for the ad's content, though this has not been verified. What can't be disputed, however, is the inability of Thames' cheerleaders in the local business community to spread news about USM that is both positive and consistent with the available evidence about the university's condition.