USM: Is Richard Crofts Building a Case against Shelby Thames?
Crofts' official statement was distributed at the monthly meeting of the USM Faculty Senate on Friday April 8.
The Board of Trustees has a policy of evaluating Presidents during the mid-term of the President’s four-year contact. The Board also has a practice of evaluating a President as a prelude to a decision about renewing the President’s contact. Under the new governance model, it is anticipated that the Commissioner will be evaluating the Presidents and reporting on those evaluations to the Board of Trustees.
The Board of Trustees has asked me to prepare a report for their use in evaluating President Thames as part of the process of determining if his contract will be renewed. The new policy of annual evaluations of the Presidents includes a list of constituent groups that will be offered the opportunity for input into the evaluation. I am working off that kind of list to accomplish this task.
This may not seem like a big deal. Crofts is operating with a traditional"stakeholder" model for public institutions. That means he will be soliciting commentary from a bunch of constituencies, one of them the same local business interests that got Shelby Thames elevated to the throne in the first place. Another constituency is alumni, and the directors of USM's alumni association have been put in place to promote the Thamesian line.
What's more, while it seems unlikely, Crofts could choose to ignore anything he gets from faculty sources. Or a majority of the Board, displeased that he has been listening to faculty complaints, might still choose to ignore his final recommendation.
The fact remains that Crofts' procedure was endorsed on the editorial page of Saturday's Jackson Clarion-Ledger.
The proposed College Board plan to change the job performance evaluations of university presidents from one dominated by the board to one in which the higher education commissioner would conduct annual appraisals with significant input from faculty, administrators, students and community leaders is one that seems appropriate.
In an article in Friday's Clarion-Ledger, covering a meeting of university presidents in the Misssissippi state system that took place on April 6, there were complaints from 2 of the 8:
During a Presidents' Council meeting Wednesday, Claudia Limbert, president of Mississippi University for Women, said she was worried about how much weight each constituent would have.
She also was concerned about how having made hard decisions that haven't pleased everyone could come back to haunt her."I don't know how that will play," Limbert said during the videoconference meeting. Mississippi Valley State University President Lester Newman expressed similar sentiments.
Meanwhile, Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat and Jackson State University President Ronald Mason Jr. confined their public comments to suggesting tweaks to the list of constituencies.
The president who is serving as its poster child has just enough sense remaining to know that he cannot criticize the new presidential review procedure in public. Here was Shelby Thames' response to response to Reuben Mees of the American:
Thames said he welcomes Crofts' report.
"I'm very comfortable with the idea that he is looking into this," Thames said."As a matter of fact we were the first university in the state to invite him to come down and see all the things we've got going down here."
Sure, and Thames was also"very comfortable" with Crofts' decision to"look into" the Black Friday memo...
In the narrow little universe of the Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, Crofts' decision to consult faculty leaders while evaluating a president is nonetheless cataclysmic. There has never been any official line of communication from the professors at the universities in the system to the Board. The Board operates as though the only information it would ever need can be obtained from the university presidents or their designated upper administrators. And many other universities' governing boards still avoid communication with the faculty.
At Clemson, the Board of Trustees was prevailed on during the late 1990s to accept a nonvoting faculty representative--but only on condition that the Board select the representative! Clemson professors are now somewhat better informed about what's happening with the Board, but so far the faculty representatives have all been former Faculty Senate presidents with a track record of not confronting the upper administration. In fact, the Senate leadership appeased the administration on several major issues while the faculty representative was still in the proposal stage, for fear that otherwise the Board would torpedo the arrangement. Still, this is a much better system than has prevailed at the 8 state universities in Misssissippi.
Friday's Faculty Senate meeting also brought confirmation that Shelby Thames' enforcer-without-portfolio Ken Malone simply will not appear in front of any faculty body at USM. In the fall, after two months of false promises and excuses, Shelby Thames declared that Malone would not appear in front of the President's Council to explain his role in USM's Economic Development program and the decision to move it out of the College of Business. In the Spring the Senate has sought to question Malone about his decision to close the Continuing Education office in the middle of a semester. Last month, Malone was on the agenda, but ducked out with a purported last-minute schedule conflict. This month, Thames ruled that Malone need not appear because all appearances in front of the Faculty Senate must henceforward be made by Joan Exline, his special assistant in charge of accreditation issues.
Obviously, Malone does not want to say anything to faculty members in front of reporters. (Of course, when word gets around that you called for the public lynching of a senior reporter from the Hattiesburg American, the folks from the media do tend to become hostile.) For this very reason, the Faculty Senate leadership now needs to inform Malone that either he appears at the Senate's next meeting--or a resolution calling for his immediate removal from office will take over his spot on the agenda.
Another significant development at Friday's meeting was a report by Bill Gunther, Professor of Economics and former Dean of the College of Business. The Thames administration has repeatedly asserted that the Spring 2003 reorganization, in which Thames fired 9 academic deans and replaced them with 5, saved USM $1.8 million, which was redirected to the classroom. The alleged savings (which have expanded to $2 million in the retelling, most recently in the newspaper ad paid for by Thames' allies in the local business community) always lacked credibility. Gunther estimates that the actual net savings from replacing 9 deans with 5 at $287K and the additional amount reallocated to teaching at $467K, for a total of $755,000--over $1 million short of the figure trumpeted by Thames. When I am able to obtain the full report, which contains 5 data tables, I will post a further analysis here.
No one in the Thames administration has ever documented the alleged savings from the reorganization. Thames and his PR machine have just repeated an impressive sounding number, and media outlets have kept on printing it. Unfortunately, the media often uncritically print false or misleading information about university finances. Here, however, is a direct public challenge to a false and misleading financial report. I hope the Faculty Senate will follow with a demand that Thames and his Chief Financial Officer, Gregg Lassen, either substantiate the $1.8 million figure in detail, or issue a public apology for lying about the savings from the reorganization. And that if Lassen fails to do either, his very own personalized resolution of no confidence will go on the agenda for the next Senate meeting.
Lots could still happen between now and the third week of May, when the Board is expected to evaluate Thames for possible contract renewal. According to the article in Saturday's Hattiesburg American, Crofts is moving with all deliberate speed:
There is no timeline for when the report will be complete, Crofts said. Thames' four-year contract, however, will expire in March.
"It's hard to say when it will be finished," Crofts said."It depends on when I can meet with everyone, but it's going slower than I thought."
Meanwhile, the Misssissippi state legislature has failed to pass a budget, because it could not agree on cuts to education, so it will have to return for a special session. And without official assurances of lame duckitude for one of the worst university presidents in American history, senior faculty are continuing to hemorrhage out of the University of Southern Misssissippi.