I've sent this to Clarion-Ledger, Hattiesburg American, Sun Herald. They probably won't publish it at its present length, so I thought I'd share it here with any who care to read it, perhaps even the board. NP

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE COLLEGE BOARD

I’m writing this out of considerable frustration that the IHL Board, my bosses, have chosen not to intervene in the ongoing crisis at USM. They have chosen to allow Shelby Thames to continue as president in spite of the serious, perhaps irreversible, damage his presidency has done to the university and in spite of the manifest and quickening opposition to him of faculty, students, members of the community, and of educators across the nation.

            But for the moment I want to try to look beyond these particular frustrations and plead with the newly-constituted Board to rethink the way it deals with the faculty at Mississippi’s eight state universities. As it stands, you don’t really deal with us at all; true, some of you do indeed respond to letters and phone calls from individual faculty members, but others of you, like Mr. Klumb, have publicly criticized the faculty in ways that let us know where we stand in the educational scheme of things.

For all of the 27 years I’ve been a professor here, in my native Mississippi, the Board has listened only to the presidents; we, faculty, have been almost completely excluded from discussions about education policies, even though we are the ones who know best how policies made at Board and administrative levels affect education: we are the ones who have to deal with those policies in the classroom.

If faculty have problems with department chairs, we appeal to our dean; if we have problems with our dean, we appeal to the provost; if with the provost, we appeal to the president. But if we have problems with our president, we have no forum for appeal within the system: because you won’t listen to us we have no choice but to go public with our legitimate complaints. You, the board, seem for some reason committed only to the presidents when you ought to be committed to the system, which includes faculty.

To give faculty a regular voice in your deliberations would accomplish two very important things: First, it would make us feel more a part of the educational system than we now feel. As it stands, faculty and Board members too often view each other as antagonists rather than as colleagues, to the detriment of higher education.

Second, and speaking very practically, regular input from us could have saved us all the strain, the diversion, and the embarrassment of the travesty still ongoing at USM and the embarrassment, some years ago, of similar faculty protests at MUW. Wouldn’t it be better for everybody if we could solve such problems behind closed doors, working together? We could, if you would just listen: remember, we’ve been trying to tell you for two years that something is wrong with the way Dr. Thames is doing things at USM. This struggle has been going on for two years, years that have interrupted education at USM, has cost money we needn’t have spent so needlessly, and wrecked lives; in those two years, you’ve listened only to Dr. Thames’s side of things. Can this be reasonable? Can this be good management of a multi-million dollar enterprise?

Mississippi’s university faculty are highly-educated people trained in universities all over the world. Scholars all over the world listen eagerly to what we have to say and we are regularly invited to distinguished universities in other states and countries to lecture. Why should it be so difficult to get our own bosses to listen to what we have to offer? It’s a crying shame to waste so much intelligence, intelligence that we would so willingly, so eagerly, share. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. That's why we are professors.

Please, please, listen to us. We hate fighting with our leaders. We would much rather be teaching and doing the work that you hired us to do. It just doesn’t make sense—educational or economic—to treat us as antagonists. Like it or not, we really are the heart of the system, essential to our mutual mission to educate.

Quite simply, it is in everybody’s best interests for the Board to start listening to faculty on a regular basis, to make our input a regular and necessary part of the information you get about how the universities are being run and about what needs to be done. You can’t continue to operate in a vacuum from what we know and what we can bring to the discussion table.

Noel Polk

Professor of English USM

707 Adeline St.

Hattiesburg MS 39401

601.543.0333

601.266.4326