Rather than writing them any more letters expressing my personal assessment (which they've heard already), I am trying to send them a sampling of as many new voices as possible.  Here's the latest:

THE LETTER BELOW WAS PUBLISHED IN THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OF THE USM STUDENT NEWSPAPER.


‘Bleeding’ USM becomes academic laughingstock

Well, you've done it, USM.

You've made yourself the laughing stock not just of Mississippi, nor of the South, but of the entire academic world.

Perhaps I'm being a bit strong. It isn't USM itself that has committed these atrocities, though the entire school suffers greatly from them. It is a handful of people.

I am a resident of Kansas, a student at Kansas State University, and if any state knows what it means to be an embarrassment to the nation, it is mine. Our legislature insists on passing laws which remove every scrape of the language of macro-evolution from school textbooks. The best mayors of our largest cities are impeached for raising taxes which favor education. We evict the poorest people in the Midwest to build a lucrative NASCAR track.

You ought to believe me, then, when I say there is nothing in the range of human experience that compares to the absolute irrationality of what has transpired at USM these past months. You who stand for freedom know this to be true. You poor, disgraceful power-mongers who stand only for nepotism and the values of the highest-paid cannot even begin to comprehend your own ineptitude.

Because of the fascistic reactionism of your administration, you are marked with a blemish that will not wash off for decades. But it is not they who have control. No, they have given you into the hands of a darker force than the hunger to maintain and increase power. They have forfeited you to the very things from which they are paid to protect you: barbarism, depravity, bondage.

President Thames, I regret what you have done, but I am not surprised. If it was not you, it would have been some other administrator at some other unsuspecting university.

But mark my words: Your university will bleed for what you have done. It is already bleeding.

Jonathan Lamb
May 2004 Graduate
Kansas State University