USM: Presidential Foolishness Is Expensive
Just under a month ago, on May 19, the Mississippi IHL Board of Trustees announced that Shelby Thames would be stepping down in two years from the presidency of the University of Southern Mississippi. Buried in the minutes was an item not reported by any media outlet that day:
Payment of legal fees for professional services rendered by Adams & Reese (Statement dated 8/31/04) from the funds of The University of Southern Mississippi. (This statement represents services and expenses in connection with the Thames v. Glamser case.)
TOTAL DUE....................................................$107,589.05
So when Shelby Thames called Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer into his office on March 5, 2004, and told them they were fired, he ended up costing his university $107K in legal fees alone. The settlement that the Board imposed on April 28, 2004 cost USM an additional two years of salary and benefits for each senior professor. Both are now working for other universities; neither has taught or done research at USM since he tried to fire them.
Also telling was the delay in reporting the payment. The IHL Board often reports payments to law firms a month or two after billing. But this item was kept out of the minutes for nearly 9 months. (Some other legal bills for USM were also held back longer than usual. But those items, date October and December 2004, were a good deal less pricey.)
The most plausible explanation: Roy Klumb, who served as Board president until the May 19 meeting, was trying to get 4 more years for his guy Shelby Thames, and wanted to keep embarrassing details away from the media.
The delayed announcement smarts all the harder, coming at a time when the USM administration has announced a freeze on hiring to faculty positions. To save money, any openings for professors that were not yet filled at the beginning of June will remain that way, at least for the next year.
Meanwhile Klumb, who lost out when the Board voted to strengthen the IHL Commissioner's role, then had to settle for 2 years and out for Thames, skipped the most recent meeting of the IHL Board (which took place on Thursday June 16). Klumb was upset that his colleagues on the Board were planning to raise tuition at the 8 state universities (the largest increases came in at 5%, a modest percentage compared to what has been happening in some other state university systems). Today, Klumb's letter to the editor appeared in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. Besides calling on the Mississippi state legislature to cap tuition, he bemoaned
the utter futility of a state like Mississippi having eight free-standing universities, two mostly separate statewide agriculture programs, 15 community colleges, all with unnecessary, duplicative program offerings, [and] two completely separate coordinating boards, that rarely talk to one another
By implication, Klumb wants Mississippi State to absorb Alcorn A&M (currently, they maintain the separate Ag programs). But he also seems to be calling for the elimination of the University of Southern Mississippi--or, at the very least, cutbacks extensive enough to keep USM from competing with Ole Miss, or with Mississippi State (which just happens to be his alma mater).
Shelby Thames thinks he was installed on the throne to make USM over into a cluster of opulent industrial research labs, plus a college of econonic development that would bring in tuition revenue while forging advantageous alliances with local officials and politically connected business interests. He will almost certainly go into retirement without ever realizing that his sponsors actually wanted him degrade USM's capabilities and insure that it would no longer constitute a threat to the two top universities in the state system.