(June 16, 2008 ) CoB News, 16 June 2008 Williams Takes it on the Chen A number of reports here at
USMNEWS.NET have stated that Interim CoB Dean Alvin Williams joined Interim SAIS Director Steve Jackson
and various SAIS faculty in opposing the tenure application of assistant professor of MIS Kuo Lane Chen.
Reporters at USMNEWS.NET have since learned that Williams was not a part of the opposition group after all.
Instead, he went along with other administrators in the decision to tenure Chen, a move some believe came out
of Williams' desire to avoid another battle during his last weeks in office.
ALVIN WILLIAMS, FORMER PROFESSOR OF
MANAGEMENT AND INTERIM DEAN
For more articles and editorials concerning Dr. Williams, please click here.
(June 17, 2008) CoB News, 17 June 2008 Is Williams Exiting Early? Reports have been sent to USMNEWS.NET
news offices indicating that Interim CoB dean Alvin Williams has chosen to make a mid-June 2008 departure
from the CoB instead of the planned 30-June-08 departure. An early arrival (perhaps mid-June, or slightly later)
for new CoB dean Lance Nail is also part of those reports.
(July 1, 2008) CoB News, 1 July 2008 Let's Not Make Things Better, Yet Say We Did Former interim CoB dean,
Alvin Williams, noted more than once during his April 2007 inauguration meeting that the CoB's Joseph Greene
Hall contained a work environment that was short on civility. However, in his 26-June-08 farewell e-mail to CoB
faculty and staff, Williams spoke of JGH as if it were Disney World.
(July 2, 2008 ) CoB News, 2 July 2008 KLC Gets the Big "T" USMNEWS.NET reporters have confirmed that the
Mississippi IHL voted to award tenure to the CoB's Kuo Lane Chen. The insert below comes from the minutes
of the IHL's May 2008 meeting.
(August 7, 2008) A Taste of How the CoB Works: Journal Classification One of the things USMNEWS.net has
done over the past few years is to show just how politics in the CoB shapes just about everything that is done
there. There is no better venue for doing that than the CoB's recent effort to classifiy journals across the various
business disciplines. Politics affected that 2007-08 process from the jump. First, the CoB was being
administered by an interim dean, Alvin Williams. Williams is certainly not known as a top-notch researcher,
even by CoB standards. Thus, 2007-08 was not the proper time to re-classify business journals at USM.
(August 10, 2008) Textbook Bad Press CoB Once Again Finds Itself in Middle of an Ill-Timed Controversy
"Outraged yet resigned to the inevitable, [USM] students will shell out big bucks this week for textbooks that
they probably can't sell back." With this quote, the higher education reporter for The Hattiesburg American,
Valerie Wells, began her 10-Aug-08 article entitled, "Fingers pointed as price of books continues to rise."
According to Wells' article, textbook prices have risen "an average of 6 percent per year," and they "nearly
tripled from December 1986 to December 2004."