The egregious administrative behavior we are seeing at Southern Mississippi is hardly confined to that institution. As Timothy Burke notes at Cliopatria, "the tinpot dictatorship of [USM's] current president seems to me is widely typical of academic administration once you get past the places where there is wide public scrutiny." Burke is right. Consider the case of Robert Day, who was fired last fall from his job at Cumberland College when he posted a website that criticized the school administration. (Burke and I disagreed about what the defining issues in this case were, but I hope he will forgive me if I group Day's case with those of other professors who have been fired for criticizing the way their school is run.) Consider, too, the case of Gaile Isaacs, who was fired from her faculty position at Shaw University in 2002 after criticizing Shaw's administration. Then there is the case of Jon Davis, an assistant professor of biology at the College of the Ozarks who was fired for exposing the fact that a school administrator had purchased his doctorate from a diploma mill.

Shaw's president ignored FIRE's efforts to remonstrate with him, and Isaacs was never reinstated. Day has retained a lawyer, and the AAUP has become involved. Davis has turned down an offer of reinstatement that would have held him to several unreasonable conditions. As for Larry Cockrum, the dean who bought his degree from a nonexistent school, well, he's still the dean, and he still lists himself as having earned a doctorate from Louisiana's renowned Crescent City Christian College. The college brass say the falsification is all right with them, since a Ph.D. is not required for the job that Cockrum holds.