USM, Where Boneheaded Behavior Never Ceases

No one outside the Mississippi IHL Board appears to know how much longer Shelby F. Thames will remain as President of the University of Southern Mississippi. But things have definitely not been going his way lately.

The Jackson newspaper has carried two editorials calling on him to resign; the editorial page of the daily newspaper in Hattiesburg has blasted the Board for failing to intervene when Thames' high-handed incompetence has threatened the survival of his institution; a pep rally for his continued reign, organized by his cronies in the local business community, has brought him a cascade of negative publicity; his most vocal enemy on the Board is about to take over as Board President; the Interim IHL Commissioner has overruled him in public; and the two of them are crafting new rules and policies that will make him easier to get rid of, by giving the Commissioner the authority to review university presidents in the Mississippi state system every year and fire them for inadequate performance. Today both the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Hattiesburg American ran editorials in favor of the proposed new system of annual presidential evaluations. The Clarion-Ledger editorial makes Thames and the turmoil he has stirred up into Exhibit A.

For example, when University of Southern Mississippi President Shelby Thames first encountered difficulties with faculty, then with terminating faculty, the evaluations possibly could have helped ameliorate the situation by catching potential problems early and preventing misunderstandings.

After which, the writer's disclaimer gives little reassurance.

But this should not be seen as a reaction to Thames. It's simply a professional way of ensuring that goals are set, progress is measured, and goals are met.

Meanwhile, taking account of Thames' customary rhetoric and his support in certain segments of the local business community, the American dryly notes that annual evaluations are the standard in the business world.

On Wednesay March 23, Thames and his inner circle called off the search for a new Provost. The alleged reasons? They didn't want to disrupt USM's efforts to emerge from the probation that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools imposed on it last December, and they didn't want to spend money on bringing in job candidates when USM is shelling out $600 a day for a SACS consultant and incurring other expenses connected with accreditation.

As with nearly everything that comes out of the Dome (USM's central administration building), the stated rationales are short on credibility.

The current Provost, Jay Grimes, who now gets to excise the"Interim" from his title, has played no visible role in helping the university get straight with SACS. Indeed, he could be fired and his position abolished, and the impact on USM would be minimal. Shelby F. Thames is too intent on concentrating power in his own hands to allow anyone else to carry out the duties of a Chief Academic Officer; USM will have no real Provost until Thames is history. Grimes' only visible action with regard to accreditation was to issue the Black Friday Memo to the College of Business, which blatantly threatened USM's accreditation, and was retracted after direct intervention by Richard Crofts, the interim IHL Commissioner. But no one on or near the scene thinks that the Black Friday Memo was Grimes' idea.

USM is actually saving some money by discontinuing with Thames' old eccentric system of two Provosts, an extremely weak one for the Hattiesburg campus and a total fifth wheel for the Gulf Park campus (which is completely controlled by Thames' lieutenant, Ken Malone). Grimes was the Gulf Park Provost before Tim Hudson, the Hattiesburg Provost, left last July to become president of the University of Houston-Victoria.

Besides, saving money, even in the face of a dire budgetary situation, is no priority with Shelby Thames. As noted in a story in the Hattiesburg American for Saturday March 19 (no longer available online unless you pay a fee), he recently acquired an airplane for himself and USM's Athletic Director to fly around in. At its March meeting, which was a long way from a Thames-fest, he still got the IHL Board to approve paying its pilot's salary ($63K a year) out of state funds. Granted, USM holds just a one-third share of the propeller plane, whose other owners are a local lawyer and a dentist, and they will have to cover their shares of the pilot's salary. But if Thames genuinely wanted to save travel expense money, he would require himself and all of the other administrators to use commercial aviation and and fly coach. The plane is just a presidential status symbol. It enables Thames to assert his parity (or so he vainly imagines) with the top administrators at Ole Miss and Mississippi State, who already have access to private aircraft.

So why was the Provost search really called off? One possibility: because Thames has been unofficially warned by the Board, or by the Commissioner, that he has very little chance of remaining President of USM after May 2006. A Provost hired over the next couple of months would not last more than a year after a new president takes over. That's because university presidents normally insist think the position is of vital importance, so they insist on hiring their own provosts.

But if any of this is so, it's being kept under wraps. Other behavioral indicators, such as Thames' growing impatience with the questions he keeps getting asked at meetings of his President's Council, do not particularly suggest that Thames thinks he is a lame duck, or has been warned he is about to become one. Thames has been spacing out the meetings of the President's Council farther and farther. The meeting on Wednesday March 23 ended early when Thames decided he didn't want to answer questions about his inner circle's role in organizing the pep rally over at the Warren Paving Company, and his failure to respond to attacks on the liberal arts by his backers in the Hattiesburg area business community.

Rumor has it that Thames will disband the PC after its next meeting in early May. He has acquired the habit of deflecting the tough questions from the faculty and staff representatives, claiming that they can make an office appointment any time to ask him in private.

"If you have a question to ask me, come to my office," Thames said."How many times am I going to have to ask y'all to do that?"

Appointments with Thames aren't all that easy to book. Maybe it's time, though, for every remaining tenured faculty member at USM to request an individual half hour with him. If Thames made good on his promise, he would get one earful after another... and there wouldn't be a whole lot of time left over for him to damage the university.

In a story yet to be picked up in the print media, Thames took another hit last week when he was compelled to accept the College of Business's choice for Chair of the Hospitality Management program. The faculty there, and CoB Dean Harold Doty, had lined up behind a candidate who apparently was completely unacceptable to the former chair of that department, who got the support of Thames and his crew. So no one was hired. But the candidate threatened to sue USM for sex discrimination. Now the word is that she will be hired--and given a financial settlement by the Thames administration.

Only a complete fool would accept that Chair position, in a college that Thames is already targeting for the big nuke, without good reason to believe that he won't be around much longer. But again, while the incoming Hospitality Management chair may know something, the rest of us don't. In fact, the Chair of Marketing and Management, a veteran of the College of Business, just announced his resignation from that administrative post; supposedly his reasons include disgust at upper administrative interference with hiring in the college.

Still another possibility, as far at the Provost search goes, is that Thames has not been told he is running out of time, but has been explicitly ordered not to make Grimes the fall guy for the Black Friday Memo. After all, everyone knows that the memo was Thames' idea, and he, not Jay Grimes, was the one who was publicly ordered to retract it.

Whatever exactly is going on behind the scenes, you would think that Thames would be keeping a low profile just now. The last thing he needs is still more negative publicity before the Board and/or the Commissioner give him his annual performance evaluation, which is most likely coming in May. In particular, you would expect him to avoid any further actions that could be seen as endangering USM's accreditation.

But if you thought that, you would be wrong. Thames just keeps doing one boneheaded thing after another.

A story in Saturday's Hattiesburg American discloses that the Thames administration cut a deal with local school district officials, paving the way for USM to offer sections of some entry-level courses at Oak Grove High School in Hattiesburg. Such arrangements are not unheard of, though they are more often made by community colleges than by national-level universities. And at its February meeting the IHL Board approved an"articulation" agreement with Mississippi's public K-12 system that allows all universities in the state system to offer such courses.

But there is more than a little awkwardness about the deal. You see, Thames and his crew drew USM's director of recruitment, Matt Cox, into the push for course offerings at the high school. Recently the recruitment staff circulated flyers to students at the high school, asking whether they would take Intro to Psychology or Intro to Sociology courses from USM if offered on site. But they didn't bother to tell anyone in the Psychology department or the Sociology department what they were doing.

In fact, they started making plans in Fall 2004, before the IHL Board approved such arrangements with high schools, and they intended to start offering courses in Fall 2005 if there was evidence of sufficient demand. They completely circumvented USM's curriculum process, as well as departmental scheduling. Class scheduling in academic departments is done at least a semester in advance--more often a year in advance--and USM has just gone through its pre-registration advising for students who plan to enroll in fall courses.

So in the hunger for enrollment at any cost, Thames and his henchcrew have launched a stealth initiative to teach these courses at a high school without asking any of the people at USM who are supposed to be consulted about such matters. The director of recruitment insisted to the Hattiesburg American that the relevant deans had been clued in, but Elliot Pood, the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters (which includes Sociology) says no one had bothered to tell him. Psychology is housed in the College of Education and Psychology; it will be most interesting to find out whether Thames et al. included CoEP's Dean, Willie Pierce, in the loop.

A bigger piece of awkwardness is that courses taught at a high school constitute"distance education," and USM is on probation for failing to document its distance education offerings to SACS. Joan Exline, Thames' point person on accreditation, told the Hattiesburg American that SACS officials had assured her that the initiative was OK. But Exline has developed a huge credibility gap. The SACS consultant told USM not to start any new programs--particularly not any distance education programs--while on probation. And offering Soc and Psych 101 for the first time in a local high school constitutes... a new distance education program.

It is also highly doubtful that any SACS official would give the green light to a distance education program that has not gone through USM's curriculum process, or any of the other relevant governance procedures--and obviously wasn't intended to go through them, before it became a fait accompli in Fall 2005. Did Exline neglect to mention that the new program was going to be imposed by presidential fiat?

It's worth noting that Exline, firmly ensconced in Thames' inner circle, is now regularly speaking to the press as his representative. (His private spokesperson, Lisa Mader, is making herself scarce again, lending further credence to rumors that she is in search of a job elsewhere.) So much for Exline's sincere commitment to getting USM out of trouble with its accrediting bodies. Her public support for the secret plan to offer USM courses at Oak Grove High School has put her on a collision course with the Academic Council, the Faculty Senate, curriculum committees, and the other faculty bodies that are working feverishly to resolve USM's problems with SACS.

What Thames and Exline and other members of his crew are doing with the high-school social science offerings is almost exactly what Thames and Ken Malone were trying to do with the new Executive MBA program (or the"hybrid" MBA program) just a couple of months ago. It was the College of Business's refusal to accept the imposition of Malone's new program that led to the Black Friday Memo; it was the Black Friday Memo that led, in turn, to direct intervention by Interim Commissioner Richard Crofts and public humiliation for Shelby Thames. The difference is that while Joan Exline was not implicated in the Black Friday Memo, her fingerprints are all over the high school social science scheme.

What is going to happen if Thames' accreditation czar gets a vote of no confidence from faculty bodies at USM, while the university is on probation? Over the next month we may all find out.

Stay tuned. For more boneheaded behavior is sure to follow.