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(October 20, 2008) 31st & Pearl Friends Win Benefits The recent story about new CoB Professor of Practice Michael J. Gade highlights a disturbing trend in the CoB's hiring practices in recent years. That practice concerns the hiring of friends and associates of other relatively recent CoB hires, and we got a good glimpse of what was to come with it when, shortly after the ECO hired Akbar Marvasti, EFIB chair George Carter and former CoB dean Harold Doty pulled Marvasti's friend Ray Canterbery out of retirement to (mysteriously) join the CoB as a scholar-in-]residence.

(October 29, 2008) CoB News, 29 October 2008 Wittmann to Get His 2/2 Teaching Load After building what appears to be A Bird's Nest on the Ground via the CoB’s new journal ratings, Michael Wittmann, the CoB’s Max Draughn Distinguished Associate Professor of Healthcare Marketing, looks to be getting the healthcare marketing center that USMNEWS.net reporters wrote about a few weeks ago. According to the 17-18 September 2008 IHL Board Minutes, the relevant portion of which is shown below, Mississippi’s central higher education authority approved the CoB’s request for a “new limited scope center” in the area of healthcare marketing.

(December 12, 2008) Special Report Wittmann’s Nest Getting Bigger An Investigative Report on CoB Faculty Research Credentials The recent Special Report entitled Dakhlia & Co. Rank MKT Journals pointed out that associate professor of economics Sami Dakhlia and the 2007-08 Journal Ranking Committee (JRC) moved 11 marketing journals that were formerly in the B-level column (in the mid-1990s journal classifications) to the A-level column of the CoB’s new 2008 journal classifications.

(December 22, 2008) Top Stories of 2008 by Duane Cobb 10. New Center for Healthcare Marketing -- During the fall of 2008, the Mississippi IHL approved the establishment of the Center for Healthcare Marketing and Sales in USM's College of Business. Reports here at USMNEWS.net immediately showed just how such a "limited scope center" would benefit CoB favorite Michael Wittmann, the CoB's Draughn Distinguished Associate Professor of Healthcare Marketing, by providing him with 2/2 teaching loads well into the future should he become the Center's first director, as sources believed. As other reports at USMNEWS.net have pointed out, Wittmann was a close confidant of former CoB interim dean Alvin Williams. This relationship may have played a significant role in the CoB's support of the CHMS.