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Monday, March 29, 2004
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PODUNK
"It is not enough that there be a Williams College," writes Paul Fussell in his book Class (1983); "there must also be a University of Southern Mississippi to give it value." The University of Southern Mississippi is certainly doing all it can of late to oblige. With a tinpot dictator (Shelby Thames by name) whose random antics put Pore Jud (plagiarizing ex-prez of Central Connecticut State College) in the shade, a resume padding vice president, and a somnolent group of overseers which is allowing a gut-wrenching situation to become blood-curdling, USM (I assume that's its nickname) defines podunk. What's sad is that USM clearly has a core of principled impressive faculty (two of whom just got locked out of their offices and had their computers confiscated) and committed students (many of whom are doing all they can to topple the dictatorship). I don't use "dictatorship" lightly - it really does look, from here at least, like a Papa Doc operation down there. The daughter of the president, for instance, was apparently the recipient of the largest merit raise at the university last year, for running a program she seems unqualified to run. And like the resume-challenged vp, Thames's daughter promotes most of her faculty to tenure-track or full-time on her program's website, even though, according to local sources, very few of them are. The vp, Angie Dvorak (Antonin is spinning in his grave), seemed to claim on her cv (or so it's reported) that she'd earned tenure at the University of Kentucky, when she in fact earned it at a community college (this matters, according to faculty at USM, because Dvorak is now making decisions about the tenure and promotion of four-year university faculty when she herself never earned tenure under a four-year system). But it's not really the resume-padding that podunks USM. As the November 2002 New Yorker pointed out, all sorts of people from all sorts of realms pad: [There's] Ronald Zarrella, the chief executive of Bausch & Lomb, who confirmed two weeks ago that he did not, after all, have an M.B.A. from N.Y.U.— [and] Quincy Troupe, California's newly appointed poet laureate, who, shortly after Zarrella's announcement, acknowledged that he had never received a degree from Grambling College, in Louisiana, despite making that claim on his résumé. (Mr. Zarrella remains at his desk, backed by the Bausch & Lomb board; Mr. Troupe's resignation has been accepted by the California senate, presumably on the ground that the last thing a state needs is a poet who makes things up.) These embellished résumés, testing our taste for the legend of the self-made man (as well as Sir Philip Sidney's claim that "the poet . . . never lieth"), can now be filed alongside those of Kenneth Lonchar, the former chief financial officer of Veritas Software (who gave himself a Stanford M.B.A.), Sandy Baldwin, the former president of the U.S. Olympic Committee (doctorate in American literature), George O'Leary, the former Notre Dame football coach (master's degree in education), David Geffen, Miss Virginia 1995, and John Holmes, the porn star, who invented a degree in physical therapy from U.C.L.A. And after all, there's padding and there's padding. Disgraced Washington Post reporter and ex-Pulitzer Prize recipient Janet Cooke, John Leo reports, 'said she had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, earned a master's degree at the University of Toledo, studied at the Sorbonne, was an accomplished pianist, and spoke four languages. An hour's checking surely would have unraveled her fictional past, but nobody made the effort. A Post reporter said that Cooke, who was 25 when she arrived at the paper, "would have had to be at least 35 years old to have done all the things she told people she had done."' No, it's President Thames and his mad firing of tenured professors because they represent the AAUP that makes USM podunk. As this pompous confused man gets cornered, his behavior will become more and more bizarre. The spectacle will be a feast for disaster-voyeurs, but for anyone who cares about the American university, there will be a strong temptation to shut one's eyes. UPDATE, April 19: New Curriculum Vitae Symphony Madame Dvorak, whose claims to four-year, research university-style tenure (she needs this to continue doing what she's been doing as a high-ranking SMU administrator -- reviewing and making promotion decisions) have now been subject to serious faculty investigation, is changing her tune. She's not really willing to give the investigative committee her full cv, and is hemming and hawing and setting terms all over the place as the merde begins to approach very close to the ventilateur for her. The committee has anyway issued its findings: she should be removed from the academic vp position, for which she is unqualified. Serious vindication for the two faculty members, still officially fired, who first questioned her credentials. |