The University of Southern Mississippi, after two and a half years of misrule by President Shelby F. Thames, has been hit with a one-year probation by its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Thorough coverage by the Hattiesburg American and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger is well worth a read.

Stunned by the outcome, Thames is hastily denying responsibility but has yet to recover the presence of mind to designate a scapegoat. He will need one, particularly since SACS officials have now told the press that the probation was two years in the making. Soon we will know which of Thames' remaining administrative henchpeople has all of a sudden become expendable.

Everyone will want to know how the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees is going to react to the latest fiasco; the Board meets later this month.

My admittedly cynical prediction is that Thames' chief sponsor, Roy Klumb, and his allies on the Board will publicly deplore the probation and declare that of course Thames will succeed in getting it lifted--while privately rejoicing, and fully expecting Thames to finish the job by getting USM deaccredited.

Further breaking news: the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors has formally requested an investigation of USM's administration by the national AAUP.

The best way to follow these breaking stories is to visit the revived AAUP-USM web site and check out the message board.

A great many alumni from the University of Southern Mississippi cared little about Shelby Thames' attempts to fire Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer. Consequently the public controversy, which raged for about two months, died down after the Institutions of Higher Learning Board, which controls the state universities in Mississippi, imposed a settlement on both sides, and kept Thames on as president of USM.

Since the Board reaffirmed its sponsorship of his regime in May of this year, Thames has not exactly gotten a free ride in the media. But overall he has sustained little further damage, despite regular embarrassing revelations about the condition of the university under his rule. Even the announcement in August that USM had sunk from the 3rd to the 4th tier among national universities in the US News and World Report rankings posed no apparent threat to his job security.

Now, however, Thames is reaping the consequences of putting a low institutional priority on the academic assessment efforts, the academic strategic planning, and the detailed report writing that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools expects to see during every 10-year reaccreditation cycle. Add to that his propensity to fire or reassign or drive off just about every administrator with any real competence in these areas, his utter disregard for any knowledge or expertise that faculty members might be able to bring to bear on them, and his narcissistic refusal to register any and all negative feedback, and Thames may really have gotten himself into trouble at last.

Because USM has been put on one year of probation by SACS--after Thames was given a warning 2 years ago that he apparently believed superior beings do not need to heed-- alumni are waking up to the threat that Thames' total mismanagement is posing to the value of their degrees. Even those who care about little more than the fortunes of the USM football program have to acknowledge that the threatened loss of accreditation will make it harder to recruit athletes.

Meanwhile, Thames is still unable to decide who to offload the repsonsibility onto:

Though Thames said he did not want to place the blame for the probation on any single person - or name that person - he said he had been reassured by staff members that there wasn’t a problem.

Thames has tentatively renominated former Provost Tim Hudson for the scapegoat position. But Hudson was not in charge of the main campus of USM during the entire two-year period. Besides, Thames has already blamed Hudson for the August tierdrop, and for an embarrassing episode in which USM sent an unauthorized report on the performance of certain tenured professors to the IHL Board and tried to pass it off as the result of a formal post-tenure review. Out of sheer desperation, Thames has even tried to push the blame all the way back to Horace Fleming, who was the president of USM from 1997 to 2001. (A timeline being circulated by Thames' immediate dependents in USM's upper administration seems intended to transfer responsibility to Fleming. But even if the account given is historically accurate--and there is no reason to believe that, when it comes from a source with no credibility remaining--it does a better job of chronicling the ineffectuality of Thames and his henchcrew than of exonerating them.)

Eventually Thames will try to staple the blame to his Special Assistant, Joan Exline, or to the current provost, Jay Grimes (who was in charge of the Hattiesburg campus during part of Thames' term in office), or to someone else who is still employed by USM.

But naturally all of the obstacles in the path of reaccreditation will remain, so long as Thames is in charge. SACS is not likely to make his removal from office a condition of reaccreditation--accrediting agencies routinely ignore blatant mismanagement at the universities they evaluate. But Thames can be counted on to devalue and obstruct any serious efforts on the part of administrators or faculty members to do the planning and assessment and produce the reports that will be needed to get the probation lifted.

Members of the IHL Board, which will meet December 15 and 16, are either keeping silent or temporizing with Thames. But making light of the probation is not an adaptive strategy, as SACS' own official in charge of the USM case has made clear:

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools monitored the University of Southern Mississippi’s failure to comply with reporting standards for two years prior to putting the school on a one-year probation this week, a SACS official said Thursday.

"In terms of the procedure itself, they had run the string out,” said Gerald Lord, SACS associate executive director who is the accrediting group’s liaison to Southern Miss. “They had exhausted the maximum two-year monitoring period and had not come into compliance."

But of course the Board can't just call a press conference and proclaim that deaccreditation is what its ruling faction was shooting for all along. IHL Board members are now, finally, in danger of forfeiting their credibility with USM alumni, and convincing the wider public that their true agenda is demolishing the institution. The only way they can dispel the impression that they are out to ruin the university is to remove Thames from office at their next meeting.

If today's editorial in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger is any indication, in getting USM put on probation, Thames and his henchcrew have now exhausted the patience of the local media:

This problem lies squarely at the steps of the president of the university. It's embarrassing. The College Board should intervene and send in personnnel to ensure corrections are made. The board also should be discussing Thames' future with him, or whether there should be one.

And don't miss Marshall Ramsey's cartoon on USM's postseason bowl prospects.

As always, check the message board of the USM chapter of the AAUP for breaking news.

Julian Sanchez over at Hit & Run has picked up on a piece in Psychology Today that I read awhile back and had thought about blogging on, but never got to. The article is called "A Nation of Wimps" and explores the multiplicity of ways in which parents of young people today are so over-involved and over-protective that kids are simply not used to failing and coping with that failure. I can't really capture all the nuance of the piece, but I heartily recommend it for anyone who deals with adolescents and college-aged students. You will find much in this piece that explains the behavior of your students, and especially some of the changes that those of us teaching for a decade or more have seen. It certainly helps to understand the heightened demand for counseling services and mental health medication by this generation of students.

One of the more interesting observations in the piece is the role played by cell phones (and I would add Instant Messenger and text messaging) in keeping a sort of digital umbilical cord between students and parents. As the author says:

Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"

I would further add that it also provides an excuse for first-year students to not have to get out and make new friends and new connections on campus. Between the cell and IM, they are still in touch with their friends from home and in touch with them through the same media as they were when they were geographically closer. The effects of this technology on their ability to adjust and deal with the realities of college life, especially on a residential campus, are just beginning to be felt. (Add to this the problem that the vast majority of incoming college students have never had to share a bedroom before college, and you can only imagine how hard it is for many students to adjust to life in a college residence hall.)

The Psychology Today piece is long, but well worth the effort. Share it with your friends, especially those who are parents.

As we head into the next meeting of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board, which runs the 8 universities in the Mississippi state system, the University of Southern Mississippi is under the most intense media scrutiny it has gotten since April.

USM's President Shelby Thames and his public relations machine keep on thrashing. On Sunday, Thames' hastily concocted guest editorial ran in the Biloxi Sun-Herald. (Today, it was picked up by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.) At no point does Thames' article suggest that he has learned one thing about the requirements that universities need to meet for reaccreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. But the events of the last few days have convinced Thames that, for some inexplicable reason, a lot of other people think accreditation matters, so from now on he has to pretend that he does, too.

Thames can't even keep his own lies straight. In his op ed, he declares that,"We take our SACS accreditation seriously. In 2002, when we became aware of the concerns of the commission, we began working immediately to address them." Just three days before, Thames was assuring the media that from the day he took office in May 2002 until shortly before the probation was announced in December 2004, no one at SACS or in his own administration had told him that there were any obstacles to reaccreditation.

The Sun-Herald, I might note, is the only Mississippi newspaper to come out editorially in favor of the Thames regime during the probation crisis. On Sunday, it weighed in with an editorial about poor Shelby who always does the wonderful things he promised to do, yet is being picked on by critics who are blowing the probation issue all out of proportion. The Sun-Herald has done no original reporting on the probation crisis, and carried as little from other sources as possible, even though USM's Gulf Park satellite campus is practically in the newspaper's backyard.

Meanwhile, the Hattiesburg American continues to do what newspapers can so rarely be counted on to do: it is asking questions. An editorial that ran today makes far too much of the supposed "four-year gap" in communications with SACS on file at USM. Those four years (1997-2001) happen to coincide with the administration of Horace Fleming, a predecessor whom Thames despises, and it has yet to become clear how much needed to be on file during that portion of the 10-year accreditation cycle, which began in 1995. Barring evidence to contrary from the accrediting agency, the most plausible interpretation is that SACS was largely satisfied with the information it was getting from USM during that period. It is also possible that there was material on file, but it was lost during the mass firings and games of administrative musical chairs that Thames indulged in after taking office in May 2002. But if the American keeps digging, there is a chance that we will learn the truth in a little while. In any event, if Fleming's administration dropped the ball on reaccreditation, that would have made it Thames' responsibility to give the accreditation process top priority in 2002. We already know that he did the exact opposite.

For an eloquently unvarnished assessment of USM's plight, see today's letter to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger by Noel Polk. Polk, an internationally renowned expert on William Faulkner, is the professor who was fired by USM's Dean of Arts and Letters Elliot Pood on September 2. Pood's gesture was a little late and more than a little superfluous, as well as gratuitously mean-spirited, since Polk, after accepting a position at Mississippi State, had written a letter of resignation two days earlier and mailed it to Pood. But Polk had been a thorn in Pood's side, as well as Thames', and that's all that counted. No wonder many insiders at USM are sure that Pood will be the next Provost, should there continue to be a Thames administration.

USM faculty members face a dilemma. Their university will not emerge from probation without their contributions to a masive program assessment effort, which will involve huge amounts of data collection and report writing. But such activity is categorized as"service," which means that to nearly any university administration it is far less worthy of reward than published research (especially grant-funded research). Thames, in fact, has deep contempt for any faculty activity that is not grant-funded research. Yet, since Thames neither understands the accreditation process nor respects the accrediting agency, he and his remaining underlings will not be able to do the job themselves. In fact, should Thames remain in power, he will actively impede the work of the faculty, and of those administrators who actually know something about accreditation.

But what if, despite it all, everyone perseveres, and pulls together to save USM from deaccreditation... Thames will appropriate the credit for their work, declare victory, and demand another four-year contract from the IHL Board. Which means that from 2006-2010 he will continue to tear pieces off USM and spit on its faculty, while declaring that he alone, in his infinite sagacity, saved the university from the ruin that a horde of lazy, whining professors was sure to inflict on it.

At its meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, the IHL Board can release USM's professors, and the competent members of its administration, from their dilemma. But to do that it has to fire Thames immediately, and hire an accreditation expert as interim president. More deeply, it has to turn its own complacent assumptions upside down, realizing that the faculty of USM are the ones who can get the job done, while the man it put in power in 2002 will never be up to it.

We will have a much better idea what is going to happen to USM on December 16, when the Board makes its announcements to the press.

As always, check the AAUP-USM message board for breaking news and discussion.

A little more has emerged about the Director of Assessment that the University of Southern Mississippi just hired.

According to sources in the USM community, the position was created (and briefly advertised on the Web) in early to mid-November.

Was the new Director of Assessment, Joy Hamilton, chosen on account of her expertise in dealing with the accreditation process mandated by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools? Well, she holds two Masters degrees from USM, and in early 2003, she was managing the Center for Community Health at USM, where she reported to the center's director, Joan Exline. And now, as Director of Assessement, she will report to a Special Assistant to the President for Accreditation, Articulation, and Planning, whose name happens to be... Joan Exline.

So all we have here is a cozy internal hire. Hamilton may be a whiz at evaluation research, but she was chosen in the expectation that she will obey Exline, who in turn will obey Thames.

It's pretty clear now that the position was not created to deal with SACS problems, as I incorrectly concluded yesterday. It was crafted in October to pump up the upper administration, which has been shorn of a few Thames loyalists over the past few months. When the probation hit on December 8, a new rationale for the position was hastily retrofitted for the benefit of the media. Apparently, Hamilton hasn't received her full set of marching orders, so Thames and his PR machine don't want her in front of the media just yet:

The position was posted and advertised in November. Asked why officials did not introduce Hamilton at last week's news conference, Exline said both parties were still in negotiations. Hamilton will earn $72,000 annually.

If USM is to have a prayer of emerging from probation, it needs to do what universities in trouble over accreditation often do: hire someone from the SACS Consultants Network. But, of course, an experienced SACS consultant isn't going to jump when Shelby Freland Thames says,"Jump!"

In another item of breaking news today, the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors will be issuing a concisely worded, highly effective statement of the case against entrusting Shelby Thames with the reaccreditation effort. For now, you can see it on the AAUP-USM message board.

Today USM's infamous President, Shelby Thames, made his belated appearance before the Insitutions of Higher Learning Board in Jackson, Mississippi. (Still unexplained is his absence yesterday, and the Board's last-minute summons to Provost Jay Grimes to stand in for him.)

Although Thames was called before the Board to explain how he had allowed the University of Southern Mississippi to go off course in its efforts to secure reaccreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Board dealt with the entire matter in executive session. Apparently, the mere fact that many were calling for Thames' prompt dismissal converted accreditation into a personnel matter.

Unfortunately, there is no such danger. Instead of firing Thames for failing to inform it about two and a half years of trouble with SACS, the Board toothlessly announced that it was going to develop a policy requiring that the universities in the system keep it informed.

The Board's President, Roy Klumb, acted as though everything would have been fine had the media not revealed that USM was in trouble over accreditation:

The rapid spread of news about the probation disappointed Klumb.

"If this is not USM or this is not Dr. Thames, you guys (the media) might not have even heard about this or learned about it until January when the actual written report came out," he said.

Perhaps Klumb, who is said to have preferred an appointment to the Mississippi Fish and Game Commission over a place on the College Board, simply does not grasp the importance of accreditation. Or perhaps, as I have suggested in some past entries, he and his allies are secretly bent on demolishing USM--in which case they are actually looking forward to the day in September 2005 when it could very well lose its accreditation.

Two members of the Board did criticize Thames in public. Virginia Shanteau Newton blasted Thames' failure of leadership on accreditation:

"I am deeply disturbed we find ourselves in this situation," she said."I find it deplorable."

Newton continued:"This is the worst possible situation for USM to be in."

Board member D.E. Magee also questioned Thames. He compared SACS to the IRS.

"If this was the IRS you would have been on it," he said.

But Newton, who was the only Board member to vote against hiring Thames in 2002, and McGree are in the distinct minority. The rest of the Board either defers to Klumb or is actively allied with him.

Has Thames learned anything? Here is a quote from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:"'I'm the guy who's ultimately responsible,' Thames said after the sometimes-tense meeting. 'I'll fix it.'" After this reassuring declaration, Thames and his special assistant in charge of accreditation, Joan Exline, jetted off to Atlanta to talk to Gerald Lord, the SACS official who serves as a liason to USM.

Of course, Thames will not fix the problem, precisely because it was his managerial incompetence that brought it about in the first place. His assertion of responsibility cannot be trusted when he kept making excuses all the way through the Board meeting:

Thames reiterated earlier statements that while he was aware there was a problem, his staff didn't tell him how serious it was.

The Hattiesburg American remains on the case, doggedly ripping up one version of Thames' excuses after another. (In some versions, he has denied knowing that there were any difficulties with SACS at all.) Another one of today's articles by Kevin Walters shows that Thames was notified by letter on two occasions that USM was in trouble with SACS. Both letters were addressed to him personally, not to the Provost or some lesser functionary.

The first was dated January 10, 2003. It specified what USM needed to do to be in compliance with SACS' requirements and warned that in less than two years, the university could be on probation or worse. Thames must have been too busy planning to fire all of his deans and hire more hatchetpeople to take note.

A second letter, dated January 16, 2004, repeated exactly where USM was deficient and demanded a report by September 22 of this year. Apparently Thames was preoccupied with reading intercepted emails from Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer and attending vitally important meetings about getting rid of tenured professors who dared to criticize him or his top administrators.

The fact that both of these letters were presented to the entire IHL Board during today's meeting by the Interim Commissioner of Higher Education--yet Thames kept his job--is proof that the fix is in. The Board seems determined to back Thames no matter how much damage he inflicts on USM.

Faculty members at USM, staff people, and administrators not initiated into the Thames henchcrew, are now faced with the terrible choice I alluded to a few days ago. They can pull together and provide what USM needs to get off probation, only to prolong the misrule of Shelby Thames, who will keep right on despising the very people who saved him. Or they can look for jobs elsewhere, doing everything in their power to escape from Hattiesburg before September 2005.

That many professors at USM seek the alternatives in these stark terms was made very clear yesterday evening, during an emergency meeting of the Faculty Senate. Joan Exline exhorted everyone to pitch in:

"Assessment isn't something that's top down,"..."It's everybody. I'm asking you, regardless of your feelings, to pull together and fix this."

She was met with appreciable skepticism:

The perceived communication gap will keep some colleagues from volunteering for teams being set up to work on accreditation, said Dave Duhon, managing and marketing associate professor.

"I don't think we're going to have a lot of faculty jumping to volunteer because their previous experience wasn't fruitful," he said.

That's precisely the response she deserved. She will continue to deserve it, so long as Shelby F. Thames remains in office.

Stay tuned.

So many things have gone wrong during Shelby Thames' two and a half years of misrule at the University of Southern Mississippi that I haven't been able to cover them all. Of those remaining, surely the most important is the Thames administration's emphasis on economic development.

When Thames, 16 years after being fired from his last administrative post, was campaigning to be chosen as President of USM, he promised to make economic development the university's number one priority. After taking power, he boasted in puff pieces like this one that he had had reoriented the university's entire mission toward economic development. (In a piece of classically Thamesian misrepresentation, the article proclaims that USM's School of Polymer Science is"ranked in the top 10 such schools nationally and boasts 6 professors who were recruited directly from private industry." It might be a little harder to shoot fish in a barrel than to achieve this distinction, because there are well under 10 departments or schools of Polymer Science in the United States. The kind of research in which Thames specializes is usually done in departments of Chemistry or Chemical Engineering--which are not adverse to hiring distinguished researchers with a track record in industry.)

So no one should be surprised to find USM administrators on the fast track to power-- such as former VP for Research Angeline Dvorak, former Provost Tim Hudson, and ongoing occupier of multiple offices Ken Malone--all staking their ambitions on one slender little department... which, of course, was called Economic Development.

The Economic Development program originated in 1998, when Horace Fleming was president of USM. It was housed in the College of International and Continuing Education, which consisted mostly of support bureaucracy, but had managed to grab up one preexisting academic department (Geography) and start another (Economic Development). At one time Tim Hudson was the Dean of CICE. In January 2003, Thames announced his reorganization of 9 colleges into 5, which did away with CICE and relocated Economic Development in what had been known as the College of Business but was now to be called the College of Business and Economic Development.

Now that Thames' legacy includes putting USM into free fall down through the 4th tier of national universities in the US News rankings, and incurring probation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Economic Development story needs to be told. For just recently the academic program on which Thames and several members of his crew have put top priority was endangering the accreditation of several other degree programs at the university.

The Thames administration appears to believe that no activity at USM (with the possible exception of research in Thames' home area, Polymer Science) could ever outshine the marvelous achievements of the graduate progam in Economic Development. The breathless tone of this USM press release, dated August 29, 2003, is typical (my boldface added):

One specific plan that came from the [August 29] meeting is the idea of"branding" the Southern Miss Department of Economic Development as the economic development department of the United States. This is fitting, as Southern Miss is the only university in the nation to offer a master's and doctorate in economic development....

"We have a president (Dr. Shelby Thames) who has made economic development a mission of the university, and the only vice president of research and economic development (Dr. Angeline Dvorak) of any university in the country," Malone said."Also, we have a newly formed College of Business and Economic Development, which increases the important synergy of business and economic development curriculum."

The proclamation is quaintly dated in one respect: after two senior faculty members caught her misrepresenting her credentials and Thames plunged the university into a major scandal by trying to fire them, Angie Dvorak was compelled to vacate her purportedly unique administrative position. In point of fact, many state universities now talk up economic development, in the hope that if it does not induce the state legislature to give them more money, it will entice various industries to increase their financial support. Clemson University presently attaches"and Economic Development" to the title of the Vice-President for Research; so do many others.

More to the point, there is nothing new or unusual about graduate programs in economic development. Courses in the subject been taught in business schools and economics programs for over 50 years; the oldest Economic Development course at USM was and is taught by economics professors. What's more, by the time USM got in on the act in 1998, there were graduate programs in Economic Development all over the United States. They can be found at the University of North Texas, the University of Southern New Hampshire, Penn State, and Vanderbilt, just to name a few.

The only unusual features of USM's program are its questionable quality and its determination not to hire anyone with a background in economics or the business disciplines. Reliable information is hard to obtain because Economic Development is run in near-total secrecy by Ken Malone, a Thames protégé who, after the forced exits of Jack Hanbury, Angeline Dvorak, and Mark Dvorak, has become his number one hatchet wielder. But none of those who are publicly identified as Economic Development faculty appear to hold degree in economics, management, marketing, finance, or other B School disciplines. And the manner in which students are recruited for the doctoral program in International Development (they are told that their presence on the USM campus will be required on just a few occasions) does nothing to restore confidence in the program's academic standards. The online survey that USM uses to promote the program needs to be seen to be believed.

The Department of Economic Development and Planning, as it is officially denominated, lists three faculty members on its Web page. A fourth faculty member has been on the USM payroll since August but has yet to rate a spot on the page.

The director of the PhD progam in International Development is David Butler, who has been an Assistant Professor of Economic Development at USM since the fall semester of 2001. Butler's MS and PhD are in Geography. For the past two years, since he became the director of the program, he has taught 2 graduate courses per semester in International Economic Development, and published in related disciplines. His big project these days, duly ballyhoed by Thames' publicity machine, is promoting the growth of call centers in southern Mississippi.

Richard Hadden was hired in October 2003 as USM's"Director of Strategic Venture Development." Hadden holds a medical degree and used to be a practicing physician. He has experience with high-tech startup companies, not all of them in the biomedical field, but no training in economics or business. What contributions he actually makes to the academic program are entirely unknown to the rest of the world, as he lists no courses or other instructional activity on his vita. Program secrecy has grown tighter since Angie Dvorak's vita came under public scrutiny in January 2004, and Hadden's qualifications to be a faculty member were widely questioned as well.

Mark Miller is a Professor of Economic Development. His discipline is geography and he apparently has been involved with the program since its inception. When Thames took the throne in May 2002, Miller was the Dean of the College of International and Continuing Education. As one of the 9 deans fired in January 2003, Miller was put in the department of Economic Development, which, in turn, was moved into the new College of Business and Economic Development. Sources on the business faculty say that Miller was the only Economic Development professor to enjoy the respect of other faculty in the College of Business.

In August 2004, Judson Edwards, then the economic development director for Phenix City, Alabama, was hired to direct the Masters program in Economic Development. According to a USM press release, he got his Masters degree and his Ph.D. in Economic Development from... how about that?... USM. His prior academic experience consisted of one semester as an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of North Dakota-Grand Forks.

The Economic Development department has also proven to be a convenient parking spot for upper-level administrators.

The Department Chair is Ken Malone, who holds a USM Ph.D. in Polymer Science and spent several years in industry working as a chemist; his publications are all in that field. He was brought on board in November 2002 to recruit companies for an industrial park that USM was establishing, but his position stretched and morphed as Malone collected multiple job titles. His most significant administrative assignment is as"Chief Operating Officer" of the Gulf Park satellite campus, where the International Development PhD program was recently relocated. Malone's vita lists no courses taught since Thames hired him--and no publications of any sort since 1998.

Since Thames came to power, USM's Vice-President for Research and Economic Development has automatically been granted a courtesy faculty title in the department. Angie Dvorak was listed as a faculty member (despite her degrees being in Law and English) during her abbreviated and stormy term in office. Her replacement, Cecil Burge, has inherited her listing in Economic Development. He directed one dissertation in Economic Development before becoming VP, but there is no reason to think that he teaches any courses or supervises any dissertations in Economic Development now. (Oddly, Burge, identified as the Vice-President, appears on a second faculty and staff list for the department, dated February 9, 2004, when he didn't replace Angie Dvorak till July 1, 2004. But then USM's Web pages are maintained in an extremely erratic fashion.)

Standing squarely in the way of Thames and Malone's agenda was the fact that colleges of business have to undergo accreditation by an extremely demanding organization called the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The Economic Development simply could not remain in the College of Business without either causing the entire college to lose its accreditation, or earning AACSB approval through a massive upgrade involving both major changes to its faculty and a substantial tightening of its academic standards.

So Thames came up with an expedient. According to Janet Braswell's Hattiesburg American story of October 7 (no longer available online without paying a fee):

The University of Southern Mississippi will ask the state College Board to approve splitting its economic development department and dropping"economic development" from the College of Business and Economic Development.

Southern Miss President Shelby Thames wants to shift the department's degree programs so that the College of Business and Economic Development can maintain its accreditation through the American Association of Schools of Business, he said during Wednesday's meeting of the President's Council.

"Because economic development is a new field, there are not a lot of PhDs in the field," Thames said."We want to keep the program going and not impair the accreditation."

The doctoral program in international development will move to the political science department in the College of Arts and Letters. The master's degree programs will move to the College of Science and Technology.

It would be interesting to know how the doctoral program ended up in the college that Thames most despises--perhaps because none of the other colleges wanted it? And of course, the shortage of PhD's in Economic Development was another Thames invention... unless he meant that there weren't enough USM Economic Development PhD's to staff the program.

"We were hoping in the College of Business to actually improve the program and keep the program in the College of Business but I think some people didn't think that was a good idea," said Mark Klinedinst, chair of the economics, finance and international business department."There is actually quite a lot of expertise in the College of Business that would have been of use to people trying to do economic development. It's the natural place."

Several economics professors at Southern Miss hold degrees in economic development but aren't interested in all aspects of the discipline, Klinedinst said.

In its October 12 issue, the USM Student Printz carried a blunt statement from Dean Harold Doty about the danger that the program posed to the College of Business:

"As the program is currently structured and managed, it doesn't meet the overall high standards of the accrediting body," said Doty. The accreditation of the entire college could have been put in jeopardy, he said.

The October 7 article reported eye-popping enrollment figures:

Nine students have received doctoral degrees from the international development program since it was started five years ago, said David Butler, program director. He said 65 students have been accepted or enrolled for the spring semester.

"All of our students are working professionals," Butler said."They come from all over America."...

Approximately 45 students are enrolled in the master's degree program in workforce training and economic development, which will move to the College of Science and Technology, chair Ken Malone said.

Hmm, let's see... assuming Ken Malone really does any faculty work (which is highly doubtful), each of the 5 professors in Economic Development is going to supervise... 9 master's level students and 13 doctoral students, thesis or dissertation included? But each will presumably be paying full graduate tuition (and then some... for the USM administration has talked about assessing a"branding" fee on top of it). So the program can be counted on to generate revenue, as long as USM diplomas are still worth anything.

The boasts about enrollment leave no doubt--the program never had a prayer of meeting AACSB standards, which is why reality belatedly set in and it had to be shipped out of the College of Business. Yet such awkwardness hasn't stopped Malone and Butler from pretending that the program is still there, or that it is accredited by the AACSB. The Department page still claims it's in CBED, while the Masters program pagedoesn't bother to say which college it's in. And as udpated on November 10, 2004, the page for the online executive Ph.D. program in International Economic Development still declares that

The International Development Ph.D. Program is in the College of Business and Economic Development which is accredited by the Association to Advance the Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and Southern Association of Colleges (SAC)[sic].

Thames and his crew probably saw the move as part of a shell game. At the October 6 meeting of his President's Council, Thames suggested that Economic Development could be switched back into the College of Business as soon as the AACSB was looking the other way. Thames' press secretary faithtfully echoed him in the October 12 Student Printz article:"[Lisa] Mader said economic development is a changing field, and the program could end up moving back to the College of Business." AACSB accreditation is now being done on a five-year cycle, so there won't be any times that the AACSB isn't looking. Thames was exhibiting the same cavalier attitude toward academic program evaluation and accreditation were about to get him in the soup with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

Adding to the confusion, each version of the official story about the move is different. Here's how Thames described it to the campus on October 25:

Administrative changes included ... relocating the Department of Economic Development and Planning from the College of Business and Economic Development to the College of Science and Technology; relocating the Ph.D. program in International Development from the Department of Economic Development and Planning to the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Letters; renaming the Department of Political Science to the Department of Political Science, International Development and International Affairs in the College of Arts and Letters; and renaming the College of Business and Economic Development to the College of Business.

The Political Science Department's Web pages have yet to register any of these momentous occurences--not a single mention of International Development can be found anywhere, even on the Poli Sci News page.

There is a further question mark as to where the Economic Development programs will be physically located in the future. It would take several contorted installments to retell the history of a certain building project on the USM campus--and how the Thames regime first failed to come up with USM's contribution to the project, then"discovered" the needed funds when it looked as though the project was about to fail. Suffice it to say that the Trent Lott Center is named after a US Senator whose mastery of the pork barrel is universally acknowledged. But it does seem apposite that the exclusive future tenant of this $17 million building will be... the Department of Economic Development. All the more reason to pack the maximum density of administrators into the program! Actually, now that the PhD program has been exiled to the Gulf Park satellite campus, it looks as though the Masters program is due to be housed in solitary splendor at the TLC.

Despite the mum's-the-word culture of Economic Development, and his past successes at getting the media to reprint his press releases about it, Shelby Thames has not been able to pull the wool over the eyes of the USM faculty. At a meeting of his President's Council on September 2, Physics Professor Ray Folse challenged Thames to back up his administration's claims about the Economic Development program. Folse specifically indicted Thames' PR machine for the false claims of uniqueness it was incessantly making on behalf of the program. Thames' response: he would have Ken Malone talk to the PC about the Economic Development program at a future meeting.

Instead it was at the next PC meeting on October 6 that the decision to break the program in two and move the pieces was announced. Folse promptly"stated that he he had heard it was being moved for reasons of quality." Thames"said we would have Dr. Malone at a Council meeting to discuss it."

Thames never had the slightest intention of putting Malone in front of informed critics of the Economic Development program, like Folse or Economics Professor Trellis Green. He was just buying time until the IHL Board approved moving the program at its October meeting. As soon as the Board had acted, Thames haughtily reneged on his promise:

Dr. Ray Folse raised questions about the quality of the economic development program and the qualifications of some admitted students, citing discussions and comments with others about this topic. He asked that a representative of the program visit the President's Council and answer questions that might be asked by President's Council members. As a result of this request, I discussed this matter with the administrative cabinet and it was unanimously agreed that academic program review is not the mission of the President's Council. Instead, program review, evaluation and assessment are the responsibility of the provost, deans, departments and appropriate academic entities such as the academic and graduate councils.

Thames' Kitchen Cabinet did what he told it to. In any event, the President's Council has no decision-making authority over anything. Thames just wanted to make sure Ken Malone wouldn't be answering tough questions about the program in front of Kevin Walters, the Hattiesburg American reporter who has been attending the PC meetings regularly.

It suddenly got harder for Thames to get away with his dodges on December 8, when the SACS accreditation crisis hit the newspapers. Over the next week the IHL Board and the public saw Thames tripping over his own lies as he tried to excuse himself from responsibility, while the severity of USM's predicament finally began to sink in. Hardly anyone believes Shelby Thames any more when he blames his administration's failings on others. He is personally responsible for the hype and deceit that have surrounded the Economic Development program during his entire term in office. We can only hope that he will be held fully accountable for these as well.

Stay tuned.

Since I posted my entry on the Economic Development program at the University of Southern Mississippi and the megahype that surrounds it, informed sources have provided me with several additions and corrections.

First, I was incorrect in stating that Ken Malone, the Department Chair, spends 100% of his time doing administration. He has taught a Finance course in the program.

Second, Richard Hadden, whose terminal degree is an MD, could not have taught any courses in Ecomomic Development during his first year at USM. That's because Economic Development was in the College of Business until October 2004, and Hadden was not admitted to the Graduate Faculty of the College of Business and Economic Development. In other words, professors in the Business disciplines did not deem him qualified to teach any graduate-level courses in Economic Development.

The standards set by the AACSB, the accrediting body for Business Schools, set requirements for the percentage of the workload in Business programs that is carried by"academically qualified" and"professionally qualified" faculty members. For definitions, requirements, and examples, see the AACSB Business accreditation standards (pages 38-48).

According to these standards, Ken Malone is neither academically nor professionally qualified to teach Finance. It's doubtful that he would be considered qualified to teach anything in an Economic Development program, as he has published nothing in the area, and his professional experience before being hired by USM was basically as a chemist. Richard Hadden is not academically qualified to teach anything in the program, and his professional qualifications, even to teach a course about high-tech startups, were not considered sufficient by his former colleagues in the College of Business. Cecil Burge, the present VP for Research and Economic Development, is an Electrical Engineering PhD who taught Computer Science for many years, and has done software quality consulting in industry. By AACSB standards, he, too, is neither academically nor professionally qualified.

That leaves two members of the Economic Development department who actually do a lot of faculty work. I'm reasonably sure that David Butler would be considered academically qualified on account of his publications, even though his graduate degrees are in Geography. Judson Edwards, of course, is not academically qualified, because his PhD comes from... USM's Economic Development program, which has never been accredited by the AACSB. He does have a few months of professional experience, as an economic development official for a city government.

So out of 5 Economic Development faculty listed by USM, 1 is academically qualified and 1 may be professionally qualified by AACSB standards. Not to mention the fact that the enrollment numbers projected by Butler and Malone, at 9 masters students and 13 doctoral students per faculty member, are way out of line with anything that would be considered acceptable by the AACSB.

No wonder Shelby Thames' pet program had to be whisked out of the College of Business"and Economic Development." No wonder it is being widely referred to as a"PhD mill."

Happy New Year, everyone, and stay tuned.

Amy Young, the president of the AAUP chapter at the University of Southern Mississippi, has written a hard-hitting guest editorial on the accreditation crisis.

Because the Hattiesburg American published the op-ed in today's paper but (rather unusually) has chosen not to run it in the online edition, I am going to reproduce the entire text here:

Many faculty members have been asked and have already agreed to serve on committees whose purposes are to address the issues that have resulted in probation for USM by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). In effect, faculty members are being asked to engage in even more service activities. They agreed and will agree to be involved in SACS accreditation issues because of a deep commitment to USM, students, and higher education in Mississippi.

This type of service, the"diligent, active participation of faculty members," is essential to accreditation and success of the university. However, meaningful engagement in important service activities has not been recognized by the Thames Administration as valuable in awarding tenure, promotion, or merit raises. Thus, faculty members have to ask,"Should I work on those professional endeavors that are rewarded by Thames Administration (such as securing grants and contracts and 'buying' myself out of teaching), or should I work diligently to help USM constructively address the issues that have resulted in probation by SACS? If my choice is the latter, I risk denial of tenure and promotion or raises, or unsatisfactory annual reviews that may trigger a post-tenure review."

Most faculty members have been basically excluded from providing input into major decisions for the entire two and one-half years of the Thames Administration. They have had minuscule roles in formulating major goals for the university or in planning and implementing strategies to achieve goals. Faculty organizations such as AAUP USM and the Faculty Senate have been expressing concern for two and one-half years that faculty members have been excluded from meaningful roles in determining the priorities of our university. In this context, members of AAUP USM find it ironic that the Thames Administration is now urging faculty to help repair the probation wreckage and devote considerable time to the reaffirmation of accreditation process.

Why was USM placed on SACS probation? We believe it is because the Thames Administration failed to recognize that maintaining the accreditation of our university is one of the most important responsibilities an administration has. Simply put, the Thames Administration devoted its energies to other"priorities" such as reducing colleges from nine to five without faculty input, firing good deans who were knowledgeable about accreditation, and attempting to terminate dedicated tenured faculty. The misjudgments and failures of the Thames Administration have put USM in jeopardy. And then the Thames Administration has had the audacity to put a"spin" on its misjudgments and failures in order to deflect the blame to others.

Despite obstacles from the Thames Administration, faculty members recognize that resolving the accreditation issues must take precedence over other challenges currently facing USM. But as members of AAUP USM, we strongly disagree with the statement in the January 5 editorial in the Hattiesburg American that"how Thames manages the accreditation issue may well determine his future as president of Southern Miss." Rather, we believe how USM faculty rise to the challenge may well determine the character of our university for years to come. We also believe that the future of the Thames presidency should have already been determined by a two and one-half year track record of missteps and controversies. It will be unfortunate if the efforts of faculty members help to extend the Thames presidency. Based on a two and one-half year performance, real accountability standards by the Board of Trustees would have already returned Dr. Thames to his status as a successful scientist.

On Wednesday the Hattiesburg American ran a rather dismal editorial that could be netted out as:"The USM faculty are stuck with Shelby Thames. He may stink as a manager, but the professors must knuckle under to Thames and do all the work to save the university--or its collapse will be entirely their fault." If the American has decided not to put Amy Young's piece online because she criticizes that editorial--shame on it.

Anything else I could say would be superfluous. Stay tuned.