ARTICLES CONCERNING
EVALUATION, TENURE AND FINANCIAL REWARDS
EVALUATION, TENURE AND FINANCIAL REWARDS
(March 23, 2007) Special Report The CoB’s Soft Underbelly A Look at Instructor-Specific Principles Level “Gut
Courses” in the College of Business at USM This report consolidates some of the information in the new pick-a-prof
grades tables that have appeared at usmpride.com in recent days. Investigators at usmpride.com present the collection
of instructor-specific principles level “gut courses” in the CoB, using a CumGPA threshold of 2.75.and Laurie Babin in
marketing.
(March 30, 2007) Jaw-Dropper on the Horizon What Some CoB Faculty Will Soon Learn About Their Research
Credentials Usmnews.net has just learned that EFIB Chair George Carter has told some faculty in the EFIB that the
CoB’s classification and consideration of academic research has undergone a complete overhaul since the CoB’s
AACSB Peer Review Team placed the College on Accreditation probation in March of 2007. As a result of the overhaul,
the following changes to research classification and consideration will be implemented by the EFIB’s Carter and the
rest of the CoB:
(April 12, 2007) Favoritism Much can be written regarding favoritism in the CoB. From the days of Joe Greene, who
regularly awarded raises to his personal favorites without regard to their actual contributions, to Harold Doty, who has
engineered Fourth Year Reviews and Letters of Agreement for his personal favorites, administrators in the CoB have
never been shy about allowing personal feelings to bleed into their decisions, especially those decisions regarding
rewards systems.
(April 22, 2007) Best & Worst A Look at Teaching Quality in the CoB Researchers at USMNEWS.NET have compiled
some teaching quality data from the popular website www.ratemyprofessors.com (compiled in 04/2007). Data were
gathered on “Overall [Teaching] Quality” (1 to 5 scale, from low quality=1 to high quality=5) and “Ease” (1 to 5 scale,
from 1=hard to 5=easy) for all CoB professors listed on the site who had more than one rating. Data for 22 CoB
professors were used in Table 1 below, which ranks teaching quality in the CoB using the “Overall Quality” statistic for
each professor.
(April 22, 2007) Written Tenure Standards: It’s Time It’s now officially late April 2007, two months after the AACSB site
team left Hattiesburg, and little progress is being made on USM’s problems that the team highlighted in its report. One
of the most problematic issues is the identified lack of articulated tenure standards. In the AACSB Team’s meeting
with untenured faculty, it became clear that nobody at USM knows what level of achievement is sufficient to earn
tenure. The AACSB Team stated as much in its report. Still, no meaningful discussion has begun in the CoB as to how
this problem will be addressed.
(May 2, 2007) Don't Like Tenure Risk? Then Do What He Did! Imagine our interest upon pulling this e-mail out of the
box:
(May 5, 2007)Pump You Up! A Look at the Professional Recording Practices of Farhang Niroomand Few, if any, CoB
faculty go to the lengths that professor of economics and former CoB Associate Dean Farhang Niroomand goes to in
order to “promote” his professional accomplishments to other faculty and administrators at the University of Southern
Mississippi. There is perhaps no better example of Niroomand’s “resume pumping” than that found in the 2005 USM
Faculty Activity Report (FAR05), which was made available by USM’s Office of Institutional Research (see below).