USM: A Thames Ally Apologizes to the Faculty

Robert"Toy" McLaughlin, an alumnus of the University of Southern Mississippi who runs an investment company and serves as the President of the USM Foundation, has been in hot water lately.

Back in April remarks McLaughlin made on EagleTalk, a message board for fans of the USM Golden Eagles, dismissed anyone on the faculty who criticized President Shelby F. Thames. Using his handle"Isomniac Eagle," McLaughlin declared that you can tell which professors support Thames because they work hard, while"The Thames detractors are consistently lazy, gossipy, and self centered." This was not, shall we say, a favorable evaluation of 9 out of 10 USM professors. A follow-up post the next day got him newspaper coverage; he threatened to go on top of the Dome (the USM administration building) and take out a"high-powered rifle" if there were any further criticisms of USM's decision to recruit a football player with a manslaughter conviction on his record.

Now that his sponsor Shelby Thames has been relegated to lame-duckitude by the Mississippi IHL Board, McLaughlin is trying to mend fences. After some conversations with Dave Beckett, the President of the USM Faculty Senate, he agreed to write and publish a letter of apology to the Southern Mississippi faculty. The apology was announced yesterday at the monthly meeting of the Faculty Senate; today the letter was duly published in the Hattiesburg American.

Since the letter appeared only in the print edition of the American, I'm going to reproduce it here:

To: All Members of the USM Faculty

From: Robert Toy McLaughlin

It has been brought to my attention that a response that I made to two individuals in a message board exchange on Eagle Talk has been interpreted by some as an attack on the faculty as a whole. This is emphatically not the case, but I sincerely apologize for any misunderstanding that might have been read into those remarks.

In no way would I ever be critical of the hundreds of you that work so hard to educate our students and promote the welfare of The University of Southern Mississippi. I am very sorry that my words might have seemed to diminish your efforts in any way.

I am sorry that my remarks were taken out of the context in which they appeared. My remarks were directed specifically to the two individuals whose comments were inappropriate and confrontational in the dialogue in which they were stated. The remarks were not intended to be read outside of the Eagle Talk format amd were intended only as a response to remarks by the individuals with whom I had engaged on that message board. If the entire conversation and the conversations that led up to those remarks had been published, there would have been no controversy.

Even though the circumstances around which my comments were made public are unfortunate, the words are mine, and I apologize for any hurt they might have caused.

I hope that you will understand this situation and that you will accept this apology. I appreciate your labors, I respect your professionalism, and I will continue my efforts to support you in every way possible to help build a stronger and better university.

Sincerely,

Robert Toy McLaughlin

You can judge the adequacy of this letter, which occupies a little rectangle in the upper right hand corner of a page in the print edition, by comparing it with the extensive quotations from McLaughlin's EagleTalk missives in my previous Liberty and Power entry. I didn't include the comments by the two posters that McLaughlin was reacting to, but in essence both of them took the recruitment of Marcus Raines, the football player with the manslaughter conviction, as one more bad decision by a university president with a gift for making bad decisions.

I had a reason for not quoting the entire thread that McLaughlin was participating in (besides the fact that it would have been annoyingly tedious). Lanny Mixon, one of EagleTalk's owners, has threatened to sue the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors for copyright infringement, because some posters were cutting and pasting a series of posts from EagleTalk.

Interestingly, McLaughlin has not seen fit to post his letter on EagleTalk. But he has changed"Insomniac Eagle's" signature line recently. It used to refer to university professors as the only group without accountability; now it refers to educators as heroes.

The USM Faculty Senate has agreed to accept this letter. The decision is questionable; for my money, McLaughlin's advertisement is a poor excuse for an apology. McLaughlin never admits saying anything false; never admits derogating nearly every professor at USM; never admits that talk of shooting opponents with a"high-powered rifle" from the roof of a university building is unacceptable, even to those who have no personal memories of Charles Whitman. But McLaughlin did not invent the kind of pseudo-apology that is now endemic in American public life. He didn't start the practice of attributing"perceptions" to one's critics, while denying that they might have recognized facts. And while he has met no higher standard than the typical politician or corporate executive who gets into a jam, he is the first member of Shelby Thames' circle to so much as pretend to apologize for anything. That may well explain the Faculty Senate's decision.

Even so, it is most doubtful that Thames' successor will want to keep McLaughlin around.