I'm a USM professor, and I want to say, first off, that Kerry Canton's charge in the Hattiesburg American ("Faculty seeking own interests," May 11) that USM professors are neglecting their instructional responsibilities to students is utter hogwash.

There's an interesting point to be made here, however. Although the college professors I've met in the last 20 years certainly are dedicated teachers, teaching is not the sum total of a professor's work for the university. In addition to research, the third area of traditional professorial responsibility is service.

For a college professor, service includes, among other things, serving on the innumerable faculty councils and committees by which the university is guided and governed, by which its mission is defined, its reputation safeguarded and its curriculum made credible and rigorous. A university faculty exercises careful stewardship over all of these.

Each professor's reputation, credentials and very identity are tied far too intimately to the fate of the university to admit of any other course. Further, professors are bound by professional ethics to assure that their university delivers the best possible education to the students in its keeping. In fact, should a university professor, after careful and considered study, discern a threat to the mission of the university, it is his/her ethical and professional duty to serve the university by thwarting this threat.

It would be professionally self-destructive and unethical to do otherwise.

Far from it being the USM faculty that has overstepped its authority in the ongoing crisis, it is President Thames who has done so. He has violated the bonds of collegiality and shared governance that make the university so utterly indispensable in a democracy.

Thus, in their resistance to President Thames' disastrous regime, USM faculty are about as far from neglecting their responsibilities to the university as is possible to conceive.

Now there, Mr. Canton, is a lesson to be learned!

Will Watson, associate professor of English,

USM-Gulf Park,

Long Beach