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(July 24, 2009) USM Financial Situation Dire and Getting Worse With Ed Kemp's 23-July-09 article for The Hattiesburg American entitled "USM prepares for budget cuts," you have to wonder just what now-former CoB associate professor of finance John Clark knows about USM's dire budgetary situation and why he is leaving for the University of Missouri – Kansas City. According to information obtained by Kemp, each USM dean is drafting a plan to cut $2 million from each of the college budgets, a figure that will likely mean termination of not only staff and adjunct faculty, but also tenured professors. Each cut, as explained by Kemp, is part of an effort to cut $10-$12 million from USM's overall budget. (As reported earlier, only $100,000 of these cuts will be coming from athletics.) Clark's affiliations with the USM Foundation may have put him on the "need to know earlier, rather than later" list vis-à-vis the USM financial crisis reported by Kemp.

(July 24, 2009) Following the Boards The news and discussion surrounding the USM financial crisis is heating up daily, and more and more USM faculty are chiming in about the Martha Saunders administration's lack of transparency concerning the situation. In his 24-July-09 article for The Hattiesburg American entitled "USM prepares for budget cuts," THA higher education reporter Ed Kemp spoke with USM philosophy professor Andrew Haley, who told Kemp that the last communication from Saunders, which came near the beginning of July-09, indicated that things were okay. Since that time, according to Haley, there have been no official communiqués from either Saunders or USM provost Robert Lyman.

(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 28, 2009) It's Simple . . . Martha's Plane May Cost Jobs A Guest Editorial by Victoria Tyler Maybe, just maybe, as a result of USM president Martha Saunders' decision to spend $2 million in taxpayer funds to lease a Beechcraft plane, there's a pilot out there who is now considering membership in the Hattiesburg Country Club. That's nice. However, there are at least seven CoAL faculty out there now, some tenured, who can blame Saunders for their terminal contracts, should they come as expected on 1-Sept-09, that are the result of financial exigencies.

(August 12, 2009) Martha, Martha, Martha Sprucing up the campus The proposed budgets cuts are out, lots of examining, lots of talk, lots of worries, and this is what you bring to the table? Can you ever be serious?

(August 24, 2009) CoB News, 24 August 2009 USM Falls Back to Tier 4 With the release of the U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges 2010 rankings, USMNEWS.net broke the news (on 20-Aug-09) that USM has fallen back into Tier 4, where it resided through much of the Shelby F. Thames administration of the institution.