The semester has ended, the students are gone, and many of the faculty have left for summer jobs. Perhaps for these reasons, people who have posted on this web site since graduation on Friday have tended to be reflective, summarizing the events of the semester and predicting what is likely to unfold during the next academic year. Their reflections have put me in a like mind, and quite by chance, I stumbled on a solution to a nagging problem for Thames that has yet to be resolved, at least publicly. I must tell you about it.

Thames’s problem is selecting a provost on the Hattiesburg campus for the 2004-2005 academic year. It surely will not be Hudson. If half of what I hear is true, no president, especially someone like Thames, could tolerate a situation in which the person who is second in command actively, even aggressively, lobbies behind the president’s back for the top job. Even if everything I have heard about Hudson’s behavior in recent weeks is not true, I do know from what I have read that Hudson has been out of sight and out of mind since the Glamser-Stringer controversy broke in early March. Apparently, Thames now deals directly with the deans, which means that Hudson has joined Grimes as an extremely well paid window dressing. (Talk about a day’s work for a day’s pay.)

If what I have just said is accurate, the curious flip-flop in the organizational chart at USM over the past two years may provide an insight to Thames’s thinking. You will recall that during the second half of the 2002-2003 academic year the administrative line of authority ran from the president to the provost to the chairs, skipping the deans. The administrative line of authority during the second half of the 2003-2004 academic year has run from the president directly to the deans, skipping the provost. Apparently, USM has an extra layer of administration at the upper level that clearly is not needed.

Here is my prediction of how Thames will solve the problem of selecting a provost for the 2004-2005 academic year. I predict that Thames is going send both Hudson and Grimes back to the faculty and promote all five academic deans to provost. That crafty maneuver will then allow him to abolish the position of academic dean, thereby eliminating an entire level of upper administration in one fell swoop.

To paraphrase Amy Whitten, everybody is a winner. The new provosts get to pump their CVs legitimately. One of the nice things about an academic CV is that you don’t have to say how many other people at your university have the same title you have. For example, I never indicated on my CV that I was one of twelve (or whatever the correct number was) Professors of Psychology at USM when I was there. Consequently, the new provosts will not be compelled to mention that each of them is just one of five provosts at USM. (Do you think that Hudson billed himself as a “co-provost” when he applied at Slippery Rock?)

The chairs are winners because they get to deal directly with a provost. You can hear them talking now. “No more having to work through a nasty dean who diverts funds that rightfully belong to my department,” and “I won’t have to compete with the other chairs for those resources; I can go right to the top!”

Thames, of course, is the big winner because he will have shortened lines of communication (i.e., control) and strengthened his administrative grip. In addition, he will be able to pocket a sizeable amount of discretionary money for all of those special projects.

Finally, even USM stands to recoup some of the prestige it has lost as a result of the latest controversy. We all know that being a provost is a crucial step in a person’s ascendancy to the presidency at an institution of higher learning. We also know that upwardly mobile administrators at most universities are at a severe disadvantage because their universities have only one provost apiece. Think of the advantage to a university that can stamp out as many as five provosts a year. (One-year does seem to be the modal term of service for provosts under this administration.) Just as State of Virginia prides herself on the number of presidents she has contributed to the nation, so will USM become known as the “Birthplace of Presidents” once Thames has his scheme in place. Now, that’s what I call thinking outside the box!

NO QUARTER!

Jim Hollandsworth