Mainstream journalism has evolved into often promoting an agenda through news stories employing implication and innuendo. A recent story about leadership at Louisiana State University provides an apex example.
This month, the LSU System gained a new president in former McNeese State University Pres. Wade Rousse, and a new LSU Baton Rouge chancellor in former University of Alabama Provost James Dalton. The LSU Board of Supervisors, a near-majority of whom have been appointed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry along with its presiding officer, made the selections and in the process split the job from its previously combined status under William Tate IV, who left and took with him a few others to the Rutgers University system early in Landry’s term.
The Baton Rouge Advocate’s Tyler Bridges penned a story related to this, which also broadly looked at recent university head honcho appointments. Purporting to reveal the role Landry had in this, it slyly pushed a narrative that not only did Landry have a large influence over the process but also it was extensive to the point that it may be detrimental to academic accreditation by alleged politicization of the process.
Bridges ran this argument in two ways. One was by framing the process as deviant compared to past searches, especially with Tate. Landry was described as telling some supervisors that he thought Rousse would do well and said he didn’t go so far as did his predecessor Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards in Tate’s selection, pointing out that Edwards previously had hosted South Carolina officials including Tate and supervisors at the Governor’s Mansion and lauded Tate.
This assertion of Edwards favoritism Bridges attempted to torpedo with comments made by Edwards’ commissioner of administration Jay Dardenne, who had applied for the job, by Robert Dampf, an Edwards’ loyalist who was board chairman then and was replaced recently by Landry, and by Edwards himself, denying that. But the facts of the search paint a very different picture.
In an initial list of over two dozen including Dardenne, Tate wasn’t on the list. In a narrowed list of eight, he wasn’t there. But suddenly, lo and behold at the Supervisors meeting to vet the eight Tate – who never had headed a university system much less a university system – was added to the list and interviewed on the spot, leading to him appearing on a semifinalist list that included then-University of Louisiana System head Jim Henderson Anybody experienced in academia will tell you this sequence of events is a hallmark of a forced selection; late in the process the headhunter firm was told to cull its files or contacts and find someone who fit a profile, in this case likely a minority with a background in administration or research involving diversity, inclusion, and equity issues, to match the governor’s agenda.
Surprise: days later, Tate gets it, with Dampf calling him a “great leader.” Of course, he and Edwards won’t admit publicly the latter’s role in the process – and, curiously, Bridges’ story was entirely incurious about these details which kicks the props out of its argument. By comparison, Landry’s role in Rousse’s hiring seems quite modest.
As it also seems with the hiring at the University of Louisiana Monroe of new president Louisiana native Carrie Castille. The story also alludes to Landry’s praising Castille to corral her over Louisiana Delta Community College’s one-time interim chancellor Chris Broadwater. But it neglects to mention Castille’s extensive higher education career while Broadwater had been in that business only a few years (currently a corporate lawyer for a business with an extensive history of state contracts), after resigning from the House of Representatives midway through Edwards’ first term as it had become clear his loyalty to Edwards was costing him influence among his fellow Republicans who controlled the chamber. Although the final vote is not public, it’s likely that Edwards appointees on the University of Louisiana Board of Supervisors got him in the race and almost pushed him past the finish line.
The other tack Bridges takes is to hint that Landry’s involvement was extensive enough to threaten accreditation of state colleges by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges for politicization, quoting Dardenne to back that up. However, that judgement is entirely validated when reviewing how SACSCOC investigated a charge that Florida Republican Gov. Rick DeSantis interfered with the hiring of The New College of Florida’s president, which on the surface indicates much more involvement by him than in the accusations against Landry. SACSCOC reaffirmed nothing untoward happened, but if Bridges bothered to gather that information in assessing the claim, inappropriately either he sat on it or his editors removed it.
Thus, the article tries to insinuate that Landry’s role in the hirings were problematic. That tells us more about the general mainstream media’s antipathy towards Landry than actually providing enlightenment on the incident.
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