F. King Alexander, perspiring yet cheerful after helping incoming students move into dorms Aug. 20, spoke with pride when describing his first anniversary as LSU President. Discussing university restructuring, pay raises and smoking bans, the 50-year-old administrator stressed one concept above all else: unity.
“Here we created such a competitive environment against ourselves and against other institutions,” Alexander said of the LSU System’s jockeying for funds before his arrival. “Everyone was out for themselves. It was much more Darwinian.”
Alexander emphasized the collaboration he helped to foster over two trying semesters as LSU’s leader, overseeing a meeting of the University chancellors he said had not taken place in six years.
Alexander spoke passionately of other accomplishments, including the University’s highest graduation rate, the two consecutive salary increases provided to faculty and staff and the prolonged realignment with the Paul M. Hebert Law Center.
Such triumphs have led to a public image of Alexander that is now bathed in positivity rather than skepticism.
“I was wrong about him,” wrote University political communications professor Robert Mann in his July 5 column for NOLA.com | The Times Picayune. “King Alexander might be the leader LSU needs.”
Mann, who criticized Alexander for his submissiveness to Gov. Bobby Jindal in the face of budget increases for higher education, compared the University’s Board of Supervisors hiring of Alexander to a blind miner finding a diamond.
Alexander laughed at the analogy.
“Positive acclaim goes up and down; you get negative acclaim just as quickly,” Alexander said. “All I can do is hope the faculty and staff feel better about where we are today than where we were a couple years ago, and I hope our students do as well.”
Alexander is hopeful for the upcoming semester but knows there are challenges ahead. One of his major goals is to increase fundraising.
“We raised $73 million where normally we raise about $40 [million],” Alexander said of last year’s fundraising. “However, our endowment is nowhere near where it needs to be.”
Alexander said LSU has roughly $15,000 per student currently in its endowment, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has about $104,000 per student and Texas A&M University has nearly $150,000 per student.
Another of Alexander’s major tests this year will be the University’s new anti-tobacco rule, a policy LSUPD deemed unenforceable.
Alexander had a final say in whether the campus policy would be smoke-free or tobacco-free. He made the call this summer.
“One of the best values that we can instill in our students upon graduation is to have a healthy lifestyle and healthy habits,” Alexander said. “That is the most significant economic issue that our students will not realize until they have a health problem or someone near them has a health problem. It will change everything.”
University Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said one of Alexander’s biggest challenges this year will be to distance himself from the governor’s office, describing the relationship between Jindal and the University as a “big brother looking over our shoulder.”
“The structure of our government forces that relationship to be more buddy-buddy,” Cope said. “He needs to try to put some distance between himself and the Board of Supervisors and the governor so we can have a university guided by academic concerns rather than political ones.”