Battles over university and university system governance in Louisiana really boil down to the fact that Louisiana’s higher education provision is overbuilt.
Culminating a years-long effort that has developed in bits and pieces, the Louisiana State University System has moved to reorganize. It has abandoned the combination of the Baton Rouge campus with the system within leadership by its new recent hires, and rightly so.
Back when system and LSU leadership was combined, the plan for the system was to combine campus governance and implementation as much as possible. On the business sides, campuses were to find economies of scale, and in that aspect the strategy succeeded in creating a central back-office operation among other ways to save.
But the centralization tactic replaced the combination tactic on the academic side as well. Originally, the idea was to take the relative strengths of specific campuses and then export those to others. Naturally, LSU has the greatest program exportation capacity, but other campuses in Shreveport, Alexandria, and the medical schools in New Orleans and Shreveport (through combination undergraduate degrees programs with other institutions) would have some areas of excellence in instruction that LSU could import. Instead, LSU did little in the way to invite in programs from elsewhere and rather emphasized foisting programs onto the other campuses. Not surprisingly, the cross-fertilization effort collapsed in short order.
As unharmonious as that may have been, that approach represented an attempt to solve the problem that has plagued the state’s higher education system almost from its inception: too many institutions placed too haphazardly, particularly at the senior level. Extended to its extreme, it sought to turn back the clock in putting all of these campuses into the posture that basically Louisiana State University Eunice is in: branch junior college campuses, which all of LSUS, LSUA, and the reintroduced University of New Orleans (decades ago, LSUNO) began as, specifically designed to feed into LSU.
That kind of centralization – if not in fact due to accreditation issues, then in spirit – would help to ameliorate the overbuilt shortcoming to some degree, but it can make the situation worse by then starving the non-flagship campuses, perhaps not intentionally but certainly can become prone to that outcome by the natural inclination to feather first the nest of the flagship. The correct strategy to reduce the problem of too many senior institutions chasing too few students is by reducing several of them located near major metropolitan areas (prime candidates being Nicholls State University and Southeastern Louisiana, but perhaps also McNeese State, Northwestern State, and LSUA) to community college status, and combining others (very obviously the three within 30 miles of each other, Grambling, Louisiana Tech, and the University of Louisiana Monroe, but also Southern with LSU and the once-attempted Southern University New Orleans with UNO), which of course the political will for which is disappointingly absent.
With that off the table, the latest reorganization seems to come at the overbuilt problem from the opposite direction. Rather than reduce costs (at least significantly), the mission seems to find more revenues as a result of greater research prestige attracting these. Accomplishing this means combining governance of heretofore separate graduate education and research institutions – LSU Health Sciences Center Shreveport, LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, LSU Agricultural Center, and the LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center – under LSU rather than at the system level. By doing so, it satisfies bean counting for ranking research output that could aid LSU in acceptance for the American Association of University, a group highlighted as including America’s most prestigious research-oriented higher education institutions.
There is some administrative logic and gain to this. The two centers are research institutions whose missions easily could be folded into LSU and wouldn’t be given short shrift if LSU is so hopped up on a larger research presence. Folding in the medical schools is trickier.
On the one hand, medical education is education and other graduate-only degree programs, such as law, already exist under the campus umbrella. But on the other hand, medical education in state university systems often is done through standalone institutions, driven by the separate and very specialized accreditation in medical education.
It doesn’t seem that any one model – an institution under a university system or even with its own separate governance board, or as part of a university – inherently creates better outcomes than another. Thus, while policy-maker objections to the LSU Board of Supervisors taking action to put governance of the four under LSU rather than the Board that the entities won’t receive the attention they deserve under the new arrangement may come to pass, it is the policy-makers themselves who can forestall this by, for example, creating budgets that send monies they think adequate to prevent this.
At the same time, the new approach doesn’t solve for the overbuilt condition. Just as legislators can ensure campuses receive the proper attention, so can they address this larger problem that defines why with so many campuses splitting the pie so small that becomes an issue. They seem far more likely to perform the former than do the latter.
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