Two decades before former Chancellor Mark Emmert made proposals for his Flagship Agenda, Chancellor James Wharton was fighting to secure Louisiana State University’s place as the flagship institution of Louisiana.
The words “flagship” and “LSU” first appeared together in 1988 at the top of legislation written to provide a single board of higher education to supervise all the four-year institutions in the state. That legislation failed, but the freshly coined term remained, Wharton said.
“‘Flagship’ was used as a noun in my tenure. LSU would be the flagship,” said Wharton, who served as University chancellor from 1981 to 1989. “Emmert is the one who wanted to use it as an adjective and talk about the Flagship Agenda.”
The Agenda, adopted in 2003, is now nearing its midpoint. The numbers, though, show the University has a lot of ground to cover to reach its 2010 goals, leaving some administrators and state officials wondering if all involved are doing everything they can to further the Flagship Agenda.
Numbers aside, Chancellor Sean O’Keefe insists that the Flagship Agenda is working – and the University is on the cusp of jumping higher in the rankings and peer assessments.
“Right now, it’s kind of like the signs you see in bars on occasion that say ‘free beer tomorrow.’ Well, every day it’s tomorrow,” O’Keefe said. “It’s thinking about what’s going on right now and what’s the condition of the University now.”
With a capital campaign on the horizon set to bolster the University’s relatively small endowment, administrators and faculty are also ready to wean the University from its dependency on state funds.
But without the state’s support, Wharton said, LSU would never have reached its previous successes.
Wharton, a self-described scholar of LSU history, said there was a time when universities like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were struggling to catch LSU in the rankings. Those days are long gone, and UNC is now one of the top public institutions in the country – but the history remains.
And it all started with Huey Long.
 
DEFINING SUCCESS
Between 1930 and 1939, LSU built 24 new buildings on campus and increased its budget five fold, Wharton said. Enrollment jumped from 1,600 to 8,000. Wharton said external factors like the GI Bill, which helped World War II veterans attend college, helped LSU’s most notorious cheerleader, Long, give the University “a leg up.”
“No university made more progress from 1930 to 1939,” Wharton said. “He wanted a good band, a good football team and by the way, let’s do something about academics.”
By the 1950s, though, LSU had lost a lot of support. Troy Middleton, then chancellor of LSU, begged the Louisiana Legislature not to create other major universities in Louisiana. His effort failed. Wharton said LSU’s financial support was taxed heavily because there was “one great big budget.”
“In Texas, when they create a new university, they hire a president, and he’s responsible to develop a new school,” he said. “Here in Louisiana, they put it on the back of this campus to develop schools like [LSU] Eunice, Alexandria and UNO.”
Wharton said Louisiana has overbuilt higher education, and he doesn’t see a major commitment to make LSU competitive with peer institutions such as the University of Georgia or the University of Florida.
But LSU’s successes aren’t all ancient history. During Wharton’s term as chancellor, the University was ranked a “Research One” University by the Carnegie Foundation. Today, the University boasts several nationally competitive programs, such as its internal auditing and petroleum engineering programs. It is also one of only 25 universities designated as both a land- and sea-grant institution.
Wharton began sowing the seeds of the Flagship Agenda as early as 1981.
That year, he traveled across the country visiting highly-ranked schools such as Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to obtain information about how LSU could gain ground on those highly-ranked institutions.
“In history, we couldn’t begin to compete with Yale,” Wharton said. “MIT was spending more money on electrical engineering in 1981 than we were spending on the whole College of Engineering.”
Until the mid-1980s, everyone who applied to the University was admitted. The open-door policy ended during Wharton’s chancellorship, when in 1984, he brought high schools “kicking and screaming” to accept the University’s new admission requirements of a grade point average of 2.0 and an ACT score of 20.
Since then, the requirement has risen to a GPA of 3.0 and an ACT score of 22. The Flagship Agenda states that by 2010, the freshman class should have an average profile of a 3.6 GPA and a ACT score of 26. The freshman class of 2005 was just below those marks.
Wharton works as a chemistry professor at the University, consults for higher education institutions around the country and has remained close to University administration, including chancellors Emmert and O’Keefe.
“The most important thing to me is to see this University get stronger,” Wharton said. “I’ll help anybody who’s trying to make that happen.”
 
LSU’S MISSION
August 30, 2005 is the day O’Keefe said LSU proved it has earned the rank of flagship institution for the state of Louisiana.
Starting that day – the first after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans, Southeast Louisiana and much of the Gulf Coast – the University became a triage center for victims and a home for almost 3,000 displaced students from New Orleans-area universities.
O’Keefe said the University was making “substantial progress” before the hurricanes hit.
“If there was ever any doubt of the standing of this institution as the flagship of the state, it was demonstrated very clearly in the days and weeks following the hurricanes,” O’Keefe said. “The last few months have shown a changing of priorities – but it’s not a setback to what is the Flagship Agenda.”
The Flagship Agenda’s preamble says it will “enhance Louisiana by converting scientific and technological discoveries into new products and processes, by preparing an informed and creative labor force and by applying University resources to solve economic, environmental and educational changes.”
But while state officials, including Gov. Kathleen Blanco, have expressed support for LSU and the Flagship Agenda, funding for higher education makes supporting that agenda tricky.
Roderick Hawkins, Blanco’s deputy press secretary, said the governor’s actions have supported the Flagship Agenda.
The governor’s push for teacher pay raises will “have a direct impact on LSU,” Hawkins said.
“We can make sure we can get quality faculty,” Hawkins said. “She’s fighting for education and a stronger economy, and that requires a good research institution.”
But state Sen. Jay Dardenne, R-Baton Rouge, a former LSU student body president, said the state is not doing enough monetarily to ensure the success of the Flagship Agenda.
“It is an agenda that requires a substantial financial commitment from a state that has limited resources and has not shown a tendency in the past to reward the flagship status of LSU-Baton Rouge,” he said.
All the institutions of higher education in the state received $5,505 per full-time enrolled student before the hurricanes of 2005. For the fiscal year 2006-2007, the Board of Supervisors is projecting that number to drop to $4,861 per student after budget cuts.
Dardenne said despite cuts, there should be some kind “sweetener” for the flagship campus of Louisiana.
“There has been a tendency in the past to approach funding higher education in a matter of distributive politics, in which money was distributed to all campuses,” Dardenne said. “There needs to be a funding mechanism that rewards the flagship institution.”
Dardenne said one of the reasons LSU’s enrollment will continue to grow is its need to “drive dollars” to the campus.
But Dardenne, who sits on the State Senate Education Committee, said changing the allocation is something that is not easy to propose. He said the “political reality of that argument” is much more difficult because legislators’ loyalty is to their districts, many of which have other institutions of higher education.
“You’re talking about potentially diminishing the funding to other institutions,” he said. “This is something I think has to be done, but we have not yet gotten a broad enough base of support to get that legislatively.”
State officials and administrators agree that LSU’s mission should be to stimulate economic development in the state.
State Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie said Louisiana “desperately needs” the benefits a competitive research institution can provide.
Savoie also said the state has not adequately funded its flagship school, but it takes time to “adjust the internal culture” of the state.
LSU Board of Supervisors Flagship Committee Chairman Stewart Slack said it doesn’t make sense for Louisiana not to pour money into the University and let the administration use that money to bolster academics and research.
“I see LSU as the best investment we’ve got,” Slack said. “We have only one Fortune 500 company in Louisiana now. We can prosper in Louisiana by focusing on knowledge-based business. The way to leverage that is through higher education. We have to do what the Flagship Agenda is designed for.”
Dardenne agreed the Flagship Agenda must be funded to help spur economic development.
“If we’re missing the mark on the Flagship Agenda, we’re short-changing the citizens on our economic challenges,” Dardenne said. “We need to do more to advance the Flagship Agenda and ensure LSU’s role as a flagship university.”
But Savoie also said LSU’s role is to educate Louisiana’s citizens.
“LSU has a responsibility to provide educational opportunities to Louisiana citizens,” Savoie said. “But its role in the scheme of institutions across the state is to focus on graduate-level opportunities and research opportunities.”
Wharton said TOPS could actually be hindering the Flagship Agenda, because TOPS eliminates the disparity in tuition prices between LSU and regional universities like UNO and Louisiana Tech. This essentially equalizes LSU with other institutions, letting students choose where they go based on academics and overall experience as opposed to finances.
“When cost is off the table, quality becomes the decision,” Wharton said. “Thirty-three percent of all the TOPS students in the state come here.”
At the undergraduate level, Wharton said, all universities are regional, but graduate programs are nationwide or worldwide.
Wharton said he judges a flagship by how much “knowledge it’s pouring out.”
“The state would have to put [a lot more money] into LSU, and it would take 10 to 15 years of really tough faculty recruiting to become competitive,” he said.
 
DESTINATION 2010
Halfway through the seven-year Flagship Agenda, the University is poised to launch a massive capital campaign to enlarge its endowment and remake the image of the University.
“It raises our visibility,” O’Keefe said of the campaign. “It reminds folks on a national basis that LSU is neither flooded nor on fire.”
O’Keefe and Vice Chancellor for Communications and Media Relations Michael Ruffner have repeatedly referenced the all-important U.S. News and World Rankings, which places LSU in the third tier of four-year higher education institutions.
Emmert has said LSU “doesn’t belong in the third tier” and said the University will have to re-calibrate after the events of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to demonstrate “nationally and globally what a great public university can do when it reaches out and supports its neighbors and communities.”
Still, raising the University’s rankings is a priority for the administration.
Bob Morse, director of data research for U.S. News and World Report, said Ruffner contacted him seeking insight on how the magazine’s ranking system worked.
Morse said LSU is a “certain type of school” with a mission and resources that doesn’t gel with the standards set by the ranking system.
“We’re saying it’s better to have higher standards of admission or pay higher salaries to their faculty,” Morse said. “That may not be possible for a school with [LSU’s] mission and resources.”
“Unless there’s some big changes, your school serves the state – you’re going to get students from in state,” he said.
 
 
Contact Scott Sternberg at [email protected]