Budget cuts cost Barthelme his job at USM
Short post today since I was up late working on a book review, but take a look at the Brevity article here or at a longer article here on Barthelme’s forced retirement after 33 years at the University of Southern Mississippi despite his intention to remain director of the program for another few years. We should be used to this in the arts, to having our interests held as less important by those higher up, but this still feels shocking.
Tags: barthelme, budgets, employment, funding
From the longer article (which should have interviewed more than the one student who just kept repeating the phrase ‘marquee name’)
“We could hire a young promising tenure track person who has just published their first novel to great acclaim and let them rebuild a program possibly in the same direction or possibly not,” said von Herrmann. “Or we could go out and find an already well-established writer who is perhaps less equipped or experienced in the teaching function and work with them on the teaching side and pay for the writer and the name.”
I don’t understand how she thinks either of those is a good option when they already had a well-established writer & teacher who voluntarily cut his salary in half.
Also, he was making a $100K before his phased retirement? Seriously?