It is an honor to be a student where stately oaks and broad magnolias shade inspiring halls.
We have all felt, on some level, the University’s commitment to the unquenchable desire of learning and achievement. When we leave the University, its spirit will live in us as we pursue higher goals and dreams with every ounce of tenacity and determination within our fierce Tiger souls.
Unfortunately, the time to leave has come for the chancellor.
Sean O’Keefe’s tenure as the University’s chancellor will inevitably be remembered for his immediate response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the beginning of the Forever LSU campaign aimed at bettering the University’s standing among other schools in the country, a national championship victory and, most somberly, the shooting deaths of Chandresekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam at the tail end of this past fall semester.
What’s happened since these events? New Orleans is still piecing itself together, with little or no visible aid from the University. The University is still decidedly third-tier. Komma and Allam’s assassins remain at large.
Responsibility for all this ultimately lies with the chancellor – and he has failed us.
While not directly responsible for the murders, O’Keefe is responsible for maintaining the safety of the student body, whether by deployment of LSUPD or otherwise. It’s baffling to think these atrocities occurred directly across the street from the governor’s transition headquarters in Kirby-Smith Hall – a mere hop, skip and jump from the Edward Gay Apartments – during Finals Week, the single busiest week of the academic calendar.
This also occurred after the chancellor approved the Freshman Residency Requirement, mandating all first-year students under 21 who do not live in Baton Rouge to live on campus.
How will incoming freshmen in fall 2008 react to the news that Komma and Allam’s murderers were allowed on campus, followed by a month of investigation without the suspects being brought to justice?
O’Keefe has a track record of supporting elimination of sentences for criminals. This past May, The Daily Reveille reported that our chancellor sent a letter to Reggie Walton, the judge in charge of hearing the case of former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby – a man charged and convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators. The crimes originated from an investigation regarding the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
In the letter, O’Keefe said, “I earnestly submit to you that Scooter Libby is a very different man than the sketch that has been presented in the public accounts of the recent legal proceedings.” In July, after the President commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence while leaving a $250,000 fine to be paid, O’Keefe was on record as being “pleased and grateful” for the commute, citing Libby’s “many years of faithful, public service.”
The message here is clear: if you plan to break the law, do it after many years of public service, and our chancellor will want you to go free.
While O’Keefe has pledged his commitment to New Orleans, he was hesitant in the weeks after Katrina; specifically with the New Orleans Saints.
According to The Daily Reveille, O’Keefe was less than pleased about the prospect of a professional football team playing its games in Death Valley, saying, “we’d rather not have the games here at all.”
This statement came on Oct. 11, less than a month after telling The Advocate that the University was “delighted to have the circumstances, as well as the venue to do that.” He asserted there wasn’t “any instance where there was a good experience for a university that had a professional football team play on its campus.”
Obviously, the man doesn’t know football in the South, as the Saints themselves made Tulane Stadium their home in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
For a man with an asteroid named after him, the chancellor is fairly spacey when it comes to decisiveness on an issue. O’Keefe sent out an e-mail in September 2006 concerning the constantly controversial purple-and-gold Confederate flag. While actively working with businesses to limit its sale and distribution, the chancellor stopped short of calling for a ban on the flag – perpetuating the myth that the flag is a symbol of Southern tradition and history.
If racism, violence, hatred and intolerance are the representation of Southern tradition and history, I’d rather not live down here anymore. By stopping short of full action against the flag, O’Keefe demonstrated that he’d rather turn a deaf ear to the festering remnants of racism rather than work actively to improve our collective future.
According to the New York Times, when our chancellor left NASA as administrator for the University, he “bequeathed to his successor a daunting array of half-finished tasks as the American space program struggles to get back on course.”
O’Keefe will leave the University under similar circumstances, no doubt.
But to this columnist, his time to leave is now. It will be a shame to lose that marvelous mustache.
—-Contact Eric Freeman Jr. at [email protected]