What's happening at USM DOES need to be understood in a broader context than merely a local rumble over academic freedom and shared governance. The orginal poster on this thread is correct; the events at USM have not occurred in a political vaccum.

However, it's counterproductive to see the SJT/Roy Klumb/Billy Hewes axis in strictly racial terms. Racism is part of it, certainly, and we need to be alert to its manifestations (what was this about Oceola McArty's portrait being removed?) 

However, what's going on should be understood in terms of the global triumph of what is being called "neo-liberalism" by everybody from Paul Krugman (see "The Great Unravelling") to Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Cornell West. Racism is part of this, but more important is its concerted attempt, on every front, to reduce all human values to market values.

This last is something that is clearly driving the Troll's valuation of  "economic development" as the highest goal of the university and the rationale for whatever damage he wants to inflict on academic freedom and freedom of speech. As with the IMF and the White House, in other words, so with the IHL and the Dome.

The first key to resisting the encroachments of neo-liberalism's is to recognize it for what it is. It's a tricky and smart rhetoric, not merely, as it might seem at USM, the ignorant rantings of ignoramuses. Rather we must understand those rantings as what political theorists call a "multivalent discourse," that is, a publicized body of ideas that speak to the self-interest of diverse social groups, groups that might often appear to have mutually exclusive self-interests.

That's happened here. The pro-Shelby economic and social "elites"--it's a relative term-- have used the typical American respect for conformity and hard work to turn a considerable mass of Mississippi laypeople--black, white, middle-class, working-class--against the state's academics, whose work, traditionally, has been to confer social mobility upon those very groups! Hence, the Shelbistae's repeated attempt to cast SJT as a hero of "traditional American values."  

Neo-liberalism is tricky, however. And it never acts in the interests of anyone but the social elite. At USM it appears to bash intellectuals for the purposes of making academics more like Joe and Jane SixPack: "productive," authority-respecting conformists (" respect for authority" one of Billy Hewes' themes in his commencement remarks) who never question the supposed "right" of their managers to manage. In fact what neo-liberalism always wants is to totally structure the field of ideas, to deprive Joe and Jane SixPack of even the possibility of knowing about alternatives, hence making their subjection to power ever more ironclad and airtight. Where better place to strike then, than the University? What better principle to tout, then, than obedience to authority?

Perhaps the most important thing to recognize about the neo-liberals is that they are essentially revolutionary in nature. That is, they are not negotiating for influence within an existing system. Rather they are seeking to destroy the existing system and replace it with one of their own (I'm borrowing from Paul Krugman's reading of Henry Kissinger's first book, on revolutionary France; it's in the intro to The Great Unravelling)

With these things in mind, the second key to fighting neo-liberalism is to ORGANIZE to resist it, and to the very death, if need be, and on a number of fronts too: ideological, political, legal and cultural. Unfortuntely, with the very slender exception of the fact that Fire Shelby itself is something of a counter cultural venue, that is something I don't see happening here. As grandiose as this may sound, Fire Shelby should recognize itself for what it is, part of the worldwide movement for social justice. The time may have come for people to identify themselves, off-line, in those terms and begin to act  in concert for closely defined social goals: to organize as a political faction; to produce and disseminate a coherent political critique of the "Bubba-ocracy" personified by Thames, Klumb, Barbour and company--this is an election year after all; and, perhaps; to pursue legal redress, but this time with plaintiffs, not defendents, and plaintiffs who are dedicated to the struggle for social justice too, which Frank and Gary, as much as I respect them, were not.

I apoplogize for being so windy.

Solidarity! No Quarter!