Talk:The University of Southern Mississippi

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Contents 1 Probation and controversy 2 Move page? 3 Cleanup / Thames Controversy 4 Citations 5 Plagiarism 6 Motto

[edit] Probation and controversy

Whoever keeps deleting this information is making a mistake. The information kept in this paragraph represents a fair representation of the events of the President Shelby Thames' controversy that everyone should know. If there is a problem with the facts, correct them. But to delete the whole paragraph is an abuse.

I have moved the information from a separate header into the history header under Thames' bio. That should solve the problem.

Because the information is a small paragraph, and does in fact represent significant factual events at the university, they well belong in this article and not a separate Thames one. Remember, we only present and correct the facts, not hide them. And dont forget to link to archived articles anything that you paraphrase.

[edit] Move page?

Anyone have an objection if I move the page to University of Southern Mississippi (i.e., remove the "The")?Jarfingle 04:36, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

It was my understanding that titles shouldn't start with "the," so I support the change. Cpastern 17:35, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

However, the word 'The' is both included and capitalized within the official name of the university.

See: http://www.usm.edu/pr/graphstandards/brand.html NKirby 19:17, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup / Thames Controversy

Apparently someone injected a large amount of pro-Shelby Thames material into this article in all capital letters. I have cleaned up this material generally, and fixed the capitalization. I have tried to preserve most of the significant positive points about Thames, as they deserve to be heard. But the pro-Thames contingent does itself no favors by inserting hastily written capitalized propaganda. All that does is to reflect poorly on the University as a whole.

I also added a brief "overview" section at the top of the article, that tries to give a general summary of the nature of the institution and its recent history.

I thought about adding some discussion of the U.S. News and World Report "tier drop" issue. As it stands now, there is a brief mention of this. My personal opinion is that the rankings are pretty subjective... their formula considers it a negative if a college flunks out a higher proportion of entering students, which seems counterintuitive. Doesn't a better college demand more of its students, and thus assign more of them failing marks? And was USM really that much better in 2003 (when it was "tier 3") than in 2004, when it was a "tier 4" school? Nevertheless, the "tier drop" was demoralizing and highly-publicized at USM, so I feel there is no choice but to mention it.

I don't fall 100% on either side of the Thames debate, but I do feel very strongly that Wikipedia IS NOT the proper venue to argue the issue.

Here's a thought: I think the majority of the information regarding the Thames controversy under Recent Developments should move to a new page under Shelby F. Thames. There is too much information in that section. Instead, make it a nice summarized paragraph and move the details to Dr. Thames' biography page.

[edit] Citations

I really want to nominate this article as a featured article, however I think it really needs more sources. It's a really good article, but there needs to be some non-OR content. Discussion? /Blaxthos 01:02, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

I would actually suggest that the article be flagged with {{Unreferenced}}. In just the Recent Developments section the Hattiesburg American is mentioned four times, but there's no specific articles cited.--71.226.79.33 03:58, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Plagiarism

It appears the entire History section was copied and pasted from the USM website (http://www.usm.edu/about/history.html). Do we have permission to use that text? Otherwise it should be removed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.226.79.33 (talk) 21:59, 22 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Motto

Is "Freeing the Power of the Individual" really the USM motto or just the current marketing slogan? Doing a quick search of the website shows that PR uses the term motto loosely. On 10/25/06 they say the motto is "Southern Miss to the Top!" Freeing the Power... gets mentioned on 12/20/05 and in a president letter in Feb 2006. These are the only mentions of a motto besides the athletic slogan "Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime." It seems to me that USM does not have a real motto.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 159.178.88.200 (talk)