Barthelme ‘not retained’ at U of Southern Mississippi CW Program

Rick Barthelme is being ‘let go’ from the USM MA & PhD program he built.  Barthelme was long-tenured, of course, but lately has been in phased retirement, and so the administration appears to have the legal grounds to end his contract. It seems on the surface a salary-saving measure.

I suppose we’ll see more of this in the current climate:

Center loses its director
Cuts affect USM’s creative writing program

Ordinarily it should be a time to pop the cork on the champagne. After 33 years of building up a creative writing program from relative obscurity to one ranked in the top 10 percent in the country, award-winning novelist Frederick Barthelme is leaving the University of Southern Mississippi. But for Barthelme, who has been published in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Esquire and has authored 16 books, the situation has an ashes-in-the-mouth taste.

He says he’s not leaving voluntarily his position as director for the Center for Writers, a five-faculty member program within the College of Arts and Letters’ English Department.

Instead, Barthelme who says his intention was to stay at Southern Miss at least another three years, feels that that his hand was forced by a College of Arts and Letters administration that is not acting in the best interest of the Center for Writers.

“What’s going on here doesn’t make sense economically and it doesn’t make sense for the health of the program,” he said.

Trouble began last August when Barthelme – to his surprise he says – received a letter of non-renewal of his contract for the 2010-11 academic year.

College of Arts and Letters Dean Denise von Herrmann said that Barthelme received the letter only after a series of college-wide discussions reacting to $1.21 million in cuts dispensed by the university’s in-house Academic Planning Group.

… The question is where the program now turns during tight budgetary times – questions that Barthelme’s colleagues say they addressed repeatedly to both von Herrmann and Provost Bob Lyman during the last nine months.

“The program needs a high-profile ‘marquee’ writer. Finding one who is willing to do the work associated with running a program is a relatively rare, and expensive, commodity,” said poetry professor Julia Johnson.
“Without the support from the university, I fear that the program will become just another mediocre CW program (of which there are hundreds),” she said.

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20100706/NEWS01/7060333