Five governing boards oversee public higher education in Louisiana, each with 15 to 16 governor-appointed members, one or two student representatives and countless paid staffers.
These 75 people direct almost 30 public colleges and universities, but House Bill 60, to be presented in the upcoming legislative session, would cut their numbers to 15.
Introduced by state Rep. Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport, the constitutional amendment would abolish the Board of Regents and all system boards of supervisors to create a single Louisiana Postsecondary Education Board of Trustees.
The same bill was introduced in 2011 as HB 588. According to legiscan.com, the bill died in committee.
Carmody said he hopes the bill will fare better in the 2015 session because of increasing budgetary concerns.
“This year, because we are facing such a catastrophic budget deficit … everybody is looking to see what we can do to try to bring down the cost of higher education across the board,” Carmody said.
Carmody introduced a bill after a 2010 governance committee report, requested by Carmody and state Rep. John Schroder, R-Covington.
The governance committee asked the Board of Regents and the system boards to evaluate if the current higher education leadership was practical or universal.
After a review of other states’ higher education governance, the report found the Louisiana system atypical and redundant, Carmody said.
“It just said that Louisiana was very unique in the way that it was set up,” Carmody said. “One of the things the governance commission report showed was that we had redundancies of positions and that each one of the systems basically has reciprocal positions and functions.”
In the current system, the Board of Regents functions as a policy board, making recommendations to the system boards below it. The system boards can then accept or refuse the proposals, Carmody said.
The Board of Regents has no constitutional authority to enforce policy, and there is no penalty to systems that do not follow its recommendation.
Even if the bill passes in the Louisiana State House of Representatives, there is still a long road ahead before the bill becomes an amendment.
After passing in the House, it would move to the Louisiana State Senate. If successful there, the bill would still need to be approved by voters.
Meeting all those conditions, the current boards would be eliminated and the new one would be put in place on Jan. 1, 2017.
But Carmody knows the bill will not pass unopposed.
“Most of the other three systems have felt like LSU would be overbearing on a single board,” Carmody said. “I’ve also heard other people say … it would end up being the Louisiana College and Technical System because they now would be receiving the lion’s share of the money.”
Carmody said ensuring fairness falls to the executive branch. The governor will appoint members to the Board of Trustees, subject to Senate approval, for staggering six-year terms.
The Daily Reveille previously reported that Ann Duplessis was the only member of the LSU Board of Supervisors who did not financially contribute to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign.
“Your executive branch will have to be sensitive as to the appointments so that there would be a cross section of those persons who have the interest of the different boards at heart,” Carmody said. “They would be there to advocate on behalf of the schools that are presently located in those systems.”