ARTICLES CONCERNING
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI'S
FINANCIAL PROBLEMS

For more articles and editorials concerning USM's financial problems please click here.
(July 27, 2009) Who's Next? A Guest Editorial by Victoria Tyler A number of tenured faculty in USM's College of Arts & Letters must have spent the weekend wondering if they are the targets of dean Denise von Herrmann's $2 million budget cut. This cut, outlined in The Hattiesburg American and The Clarion Ledger late last week, included almost $450,000 in savings that resulted from the elimination of seven faculty lines in the COAL, some of which are occupied by tenured faculty. Surely there are 14 or 15 COAL faculty who spent the weekend believing they are each one of the seven who can expect terminal contract notification on September 1, 2009.
(July 27, 2009) 2 Questions for Becker Concerning Budget Cuts CoB TM/MGT (?) associate professor Cherylynn Becker was brought to the CoB – shortly after the beginning of the Harold Doty administration (2003-07) – to chair the tourism management department. Despite a number of "issues," she hung on to that role for some time, though she ultimately stepped down and assumed a rank-and-file TM faculty position in the CoB. Given her past administrative position, however, one has to conclude that she developed at least some reliable channels of "inside information" at USM. So, it's no surprise that we connected some dots recently when we heard that Becker may have actually requested the move to the MGT faculty that was the subject of an 18-May-09 Breaking News story here at USMNEWS.net.
(July 27, 2009) Frivolous Expenditures Are Bad PR Given President Saunders’ extensive education in communications and public relations, I would expect that she would have refrained from purchasing a two million dollar plane at the onset of a recession. If she didn’t know the probable impact of a recession, an advisor should have told her to expect that state revenues, and therefore funding to state schools, would decline.
(July 29, 2009) Terminal Confusion A 24-July-09 news story by The Hattiesburg American's higher education reporter Ed Kemp has resulted in some misinformation/confusion among the USM community concerning the ongoing budget crisis. According to Kemp (in "USM prepares for budget cuts"), ". . . state College Board rules [stipulate that] tenured faculty . . . must be notified a year in advance that they will be released. That means the university is facing a Sept. 1 deadline in placing them on terminal contracts for 2010-11 and then releasing them for 2011-12."
(August 4, 2009) 31st & Pearl CoB Economists on Their Own Now If recent speculation that the CoB's economics program is on the chopping block (as a part of the USM budget cuts) is accurate, then the CoB's economists no longer have reason to engage in the sort of orchestrated unity that has characterized the group since the end of the Harold Doty administration of the CoB. For so long now the CoB's pariahs, as they have been called by their former chairman George Carter, have acted in concert in an effort to both bolster their ranks/prospects and sink new CoB dean Lance Nail's reorganization of the b-school. If the terminal contract notifications come (for ECO) by 1-Sept-09 as speculated, many of the CoB's current crop of economists will find themselves on the job market and in direct competition with each other. Talk about a new (and eye-opening) experience for each of them.