LSU System President John Lombardi will no longer be the head of the largest university system in the state after today, as the Times-Picayune has reported that Lombardi will be fired.
 
Alvin Kimble, a board of supervisors member who represents district 6 of Baton Rouge, told the Times-Picayune that board members asked Lombardi to resign Thursday. When Lombardi refused, the members decided to take a public vote at Friday’s meeting to oust him.
 
Lombardi’s appointment does not officially end until Jan. 2013.
 
Today’s Board of Supervisors meeting begins at 1 p.m., meaning there is still a possibility that Lombardi could resign before the meeting or that the amount of members lined up to vote against him could sway. 
 
“I certainly hope we get some answers for why they want to do this,” Kimble told the Times-Picayune.
 
Kimble also told the Times-Picayune that Lombardi has recently felt enormous pressure from the Flagship Coalition – a group of business leaders and influential people who lobby to protect the main campus of LSU from budget cuts when LSU administrators have their hands tied. The Flagship Coalition includes notables like James Carville, Todd Graves, Henson Moore and Sean Reilly.
 
Questions of Lombardi leaving began brewing yesterday when the System Office made a last-minute agenda change for this afternoon’s meeting that called for “presidential succession planning and action(s)” at the end of the meeting.
 
Lombardi was also supposed to make an appearance at LSU yesterday for a discussion with Chancellor Michael Martin and Student Government about the budget crisis. Lombardi canceled at the last minute, citing an “unavoidable engagement.” 
 
Lombardi has been trying to swim through a sea of state budget cuts to higher education since he became the LSU System President in 2007. Historically, he has not spared the LSU main campus from fiscal year and midyear cuts that have splintered its operating budget and led to faculty and staff layoffs and the cutting and merging of programs.
 
Lombardi directed the LSU’s most recent mid-year cut to swell in size by making LSU absorb half of Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s cut, which lumped $340,503 onto LSU’s cut. That made LSU’s total midyear cut at 5.3 percent instead of the 5.1 percent that every other LSU institution took or the 2.6 percent cut that Pennington took.
 
Despite his increase of the flagship campus’s total cut, Lombardi justified his decision because LSU uses Pennington’s research for ranking purposes.
 
As of this time, Lombardi has not returned phone calls to The Daily Reveille.
 
Check back later for more updates.
 
 
 
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]