The Louisiana State University System rests on the precipice of a potentially exciting new era now that Pres. William Tate IV will fly the coop, if some basic issues can be resolved.
Tate took the Rutgers University system job, which is in a bigger state, has more money and students, and caters more to his leftist sentiments. In the scheme of things, it is a step up from the LSU gig, and an inevitable move by him.
Understand that there’s only a limited amount of destination jobs in higher education. Perhaps maybe three dozen prominent private schools and a dozen or so state systems qualify, and those who aim for that churn as quickly as they can through the ranks of all other schools and systems. Anybody who stays in one place for more than a few years has some kind of attachment to the school and area, which if a quality administrator is a blessing for that institution.
That wasn’t Tate’s plan for his stay at LSU, but now in moving on he may have fulfilled his ambition wish. LSU is not a destination school/system for most, but Tate actually left it as good as he got it, if not better, which is atypical in recent years in academia. With a history of woke scholarship, he knew when to park these sentiments first at South Carolina, then at LSU, and read the tea leaves well enough to make minor efforts to shore against the falling tide of quality that has evacuated higher education beginning even prior to this century. Still, for beneficial change to occur someone whose heart isn’t in it wouldn’t get the job done.
How to take that to the next level is the paramount question. It is a good thing to witness, if not outright panic, the wailing and moaning emanating from hidebound higher education and those who ally themselves to it over defunding, job insecurity, and guardrails placed to ensure quality programs and instruction; good because it shows that wading out of the morass has become, for the first time since I entered the profession four decades ago, possible. It’s an exciting time to be a young scholar – if you have a full-time tenure-track job, which has become increasingly difficult to obtain with the delivery and demographic changes buffeting the environment.
And that must be the lodestar of the next LSU leader search. Except that to pursue someone who can lead from out of the higher education swamp in this specific incidence requires answers to two progenitor questions in their necessary order.
First, a move is afoot to move the University of New Orleans back into the LSU System, where it had been nearly 15 years ago. The argument then was as it neither was a regional institution such as my employer Louisiana State University Shreveport or Louisiana State University of Alexandria nor a flagship school but classified in the middle, that it didn’t fit and didn’t receive the attention that it should with that mostly going to LSU Baton Rouge and where other campuses (plus the ill-fitting community college Louisiana State University Eunice) served as much as satellites to LSU as they acted as their own free-standing institutions.
Indeed, at that time there was an ethos called “One LSU” which called for a closer integration of institutions biased towards making everything outside of Baton Rouge mostly a satellite. There was great talk of LSU having numerous programs delivered in Shreveport and Alexandria and of back-end cost savings from integration of functions in Baton Rouge. It was this worldview that had led to melding the system and LSU Baton Rouge campus leadership posts into one.
That leads to the next question needing an answer: will the two jobs stay together or be parceled back into a system president and an LSU chancellor? Back then, it made some sense to combine the two if the One LSU idea in some form – cross-delivery of programs even if dominated by LSU to the periphery – gained currency. It did not. After some half-hearted attempts – mainly as a response to the threat that LSUS would be gulped up by Louisiana Tech in what was perceived as another win for the University of Louisiana System – to achieve this, within a few years the effort was abandoned on the academic side, although the back offices of the various institutions were integrated to some degree, with cost savings.
As time has passed, the arrangement has made even less sense as LSUS and LSUA have carved out further their own identities, with LSUA becoming a prominent undergraduate online education institution and LSUS the same in graduate education (it now has more graduate students and confers more graduate degrees than does LSU). And their in-resident student bodies still have a regional focus. If UNO is brought back into the fold – which reintroduces the prior problem of being too big to be treated as a satellite, for even if its enrollment has fallen behind LSUS and runs about even with LSUA, its differing academic mission remains the same unless there is an unwise effort to throw in the towel on it – that creates even more impetus to separate the jobs.
If that happens, somebody from outside of academia seems best to lead the transformation envisioned, but who has a minor connection to higher education and also a connection to the political side. This kind of job would not involve inner workings of academia but more managing organizations and their external relations (witness the outgoing and incoming system chancellors at the Texas A&M University System, a system that hasn’t done too badly).
Two traits in particular especially must be valued. One is superior fundraising skills, as LSU’s academic endowment lags others dismally and a higher amount would relieve financial pressures. Also, a commitment to end holistic admission, in contravention of Board of Regents policy, is needed to enhance quality and better deployment of taxpayer resources.
Someone with a more traditional academic background then could be hired to become the school’s chancellor, but somebody who won’t give into faddishness and who values genuine education over indoctrination willing to have that imprinted on campus. Such people rarely pop up in the self-congratulation and virtue-signaling far too commonly expressed publicly among academic administrators these days, but behind the scenes with heads down and out of the limelight they’re there and willing to lead in the restoration cause if given a chance to surface.
A Board of Supervisors now with almost a majority of appointees by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and others wishing future reappointment by him should sympathize with this restorative agenda. Splitting the jobs and hiring a system president along these lines presents a tremendous opportunity to reclaim true academic excellence at LSU.
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