Don't you have better things to do on your lunch hour---like, oh, I don't know, giving pay raises to your daughter or scratching Angie's back?

The best thing to come out of your administration is that conservatives and progressives on campus are now united with one goal--to depose you.  Thanks for being a unifying force in ways you had not anticipated.

 

Why are so many pro-Thames folks trying to cast this as a Democrat-vs-Republican or liberal-vs-conservative issue? This isn't about right and left. It's about right and wrong.

Plenty of VERY conservative people affiliated with USM who think that Thames needs to go.

Try again. And don't politicize what isn't a political issue.

 Shelboo could be a cast of a past world leader...possibly Stalin, except without quite as much power..yet. Do locked office doors ring any bells?

I am more conservative than 99.5% of the students and staff at USM, and I have seen enough- ST has to go! The ST administration reeks of typical corrupt Mississippi politics; it seems some things will never change.

Politicizing the issue of USM's leadership will only serve to furthur divide the school....

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This is a joke designed to get nasty responses, right?  Please tell me it is.    Thames is a leader "in the mold of Reagan and Bush?"  One huge problem here, bunky; Reagan and Bush didn't run UNIVERSITIES, nor could they.  A university's "product" is educated, informed students who have the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving skills demanded by today's workplace.  Critical Thinking involves questioning received knowledge, and seeing an issue from all sides, not just the "conservative" or "liberal" position, both of which are limited.  Universities don't go to war or build defense systems; they don't support the poor or corporations with handouts; they don't muck around with people's private lives.  What they do, ideally, is produce active thinkers who examine the world before diving into it and doing some good.  That's the crux of this whole situation:  A tenured professor who somehow never learned what a University does, perhaps because he was too busy growing his plastic doohickey business.  Thames (like Reagan, and Bush) has no concept of the purpose of a University; as such, he is useless.  The only people who think Thames is doing a good job are those who are more interested in a balance sheet than an educated populace.

quote:

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Originally posted by: truth4usm
":headbang

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Oops, my headbang didn't work!  Here it is:

Hmmmmmmmm, I must comment some truth on tbings being bantied around about my man George Bush and business in general. The "business" model is being cast in the wrong light here, so read on.

It is my understanding that many on one side of this issue like the idea of running the university like a "business."

I am one of those. But................

The University of New Orleans is run that way but they don't have leadership like this. The dean of their Business College has posted an open letter, forgot where I saw it, about the "proper" business model. They have openess, academic freedom to pursue new knowledge unencumbered of fear, and they reward merit and productivity. Is it perfect? No, but competition forces better decisions to be made and a higher quality educational product to be made.

A business rewards two things to earn a return for their stockholders and owners: merit and productivity.

A business knows what it's "product" is and what it's "brand" is worth (capitalized value).

That is all I really need to say here. If one realizes that the "product" of a university is a joint-commodity that is not sold in a real time marketplace, then leadership styles would not be what we have at USM. No business CEO who runs their "product" and "brand" downhill will return enough to the stockholders, and they will have to step down. Such CEOs do not survive long. The proof is in the pudding.

THAT is accountability in business. I ought to know. I OWN one!

But a university product is different from a manufacturing or service industry, and the nature of profits and "return" on investment are obviously not exactly the same. Most everthing else is the same, however.

The university product is an amalgam of teaching, research, service, invention, curiosity, the pursuit of truth and new knowledge for knowledge's sake as well as new technology to help economic development, the social/cultural enrichment of people, job training, and the promulation of a better standard of living for the taxpayers who fund the university through taxes and tution. They expect quality and accountability, for worker and management and CEO alike. All have to be in synch.

This is not the same as lumber for a lumber company or medical care for the physician. Many in this conflict just cannot seem to see the difference, but we can agree that a businesslike approach is not on its face a BAD thing.

Now, even businesses are now allowing employee input in decision making, and business schools across the US and Europe are incorporating that into their university cirriculum. Toyota and Nissan taught Detroit that lesson years ago, and now at Wal Mart and General Motors alike, management routinely listens to criticism by lower level employees on how to do a better job. The benefits of such shared decision making has now been verified in academic research papers. Few CEOs make decisions without board approval, and that includes the chief financial or whatever officer, or for a university, the Provost, VP, Deans, and Chairs.

Am I making sense?

Now, to maximize the return on investment of resources devoted to production of a university "product" of education, in its multi-faceted form, it is necessary to reward productivity on a merit basis, or else production and value fall. Then the stockholders or stakeholders lose. Competitors then gain at the other's expense. Thus, the reward structure of a business should be openly based upon merit and productivity, not loyalty factors like friendship, nepotism, or cronyism.

If one rewards based solely on "loyalty", then competition will force any business into bankrupcy.

The same holds for a univeristy, although bankruptcy would take a different form, obviously.

Running a university like a business can be good because resoruces are directed where they are most highly valued in terms of return to education investment, research, patents, and quality of graduates. This is not a bad thing.

But what I see at USM is a situation where some "claim" it is being run like a business, when in fact it is clearly not.