The numbers surrounding the University’s National Flagship Agenda halfway through the seven-year program show in some areas LSU has not made progress at the pace it outlined in 2003.
The Flagship Agenda, designed to make the University a nationally competitive institution, is a plan to improve the quality of the undergraduate and graduate education and faculty research.
University officials blame finances, external forces such as Sept. 11 and hurricanes Katrina and Rita for the shortcomings in achieving the agenda while touting the bright spots of the initiative, but statistically the University is below the halfway marks of the agenda in almost every measurable category.
The Flagship Agenda began with former Chancellor Mark Emmert in 2002 and went into effect in 2003. Three years later, Emmert has moved on, but his agenda remains.
Emmert, who now serves as president of his alma mater, the University of Washington, said his vision for LSU as a nationally recognized, top-tier public institution was ambitious.
“People were appropriately skeptical,” Emmert said in a recent phone interview. “They were enthusiastic, though. We made dramatic progress in the first few years.”
 
BY THE NUMBERS
The University’s Flagship Agenda, broken down into six objectives, focuses on bolstering research productivity, increasing the quality of undergraduate and graduate students, providing a diverse and quality campus life and assessing and communicating the University’s achievements while increasing funding from state, federal and private sources.
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Risa Palm said her University Planning Committee keeps benchmarks on the Flagship Agenda.
Palm said in an e-mail she acknowledges progress “has been limited by available resources,” and the Flagship Agenda simply outlines the University’s priorities as Louisiana’s flagship institution.
But Chancellor Sean O’Keefe said the events of 2005 have validated LSU as the flagship institution of the state, no matter the numbers. O’Keefe said the hurricanes and the University’s response did not “set back” the Flagship Agenda but proved the need for a flagship institution.
O’Keefe also pointed to the rising average undergraduate GPA and ACT scores as evidence that the agenda is slowly but surely working.
“People are stunned when they hear the entering freshman class had a GPA slightly below 3.5 and an ACT slightly below a 26. This has been building that way for the last several years,” he said.
Undergraduate student admissions standards have risen in accordance with the agenda with the current admission standards of a 3.0 GPA and a 22 ACT. The agenda calls for the freshman class to have a median GPA of 3.6 with an ACT score of 26 by 2010.
O’Keefe said even with rising admissions standards, a larger number of in-state residents are demanding better education from the University.
“Folks are voting with their feet that this is the place to go,” O’Keefe said. “This generation is coming with greater and greater expectations and larger numbers.”
O’Keefe also said applications to the Honors College are “twice they’ve ever been.”
Cleve Brooks, director of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said each time the University increased enrollment standards, applications have dipped and then increased the following semester.
This year could be different, though.
“Many of our high school seniors have been displaced,” Brooks said. “We may not rebound this fall as we’ve seen in the past.”
Freshmen-to-sophomore retention rates, which Objective Three states will reach 88 percent to 90 percent by 2010, are currently down from their all-time high in 2003 of 85.1 percent. In 2004, 83.1 percent of freshmen returned for their sophomore year.
The current five-year graduation rate is 49.7 percent and has been steadily climbing, according to graduation numbers provided by the University.
Objective Three also calls for the number of enrolled transfer students to double.
But in 2005, that number remained the same from 2004 at 788. In 2004, the number of enrolled transfer students increased from 723 the year before.
Brooks said his office will continue to “take very seriously” the initiatives laid out in the Flagship Agenda.
“They are goals that we are striving to achieve which we feel will not only help us meet the Flagship Agenda by 2010, but they are important for us to pursue in an effort to make us a stronger, competitive institution,” Brooks said.
 
RESEARCH-FOCUSED
UNIVERSITY
Objectives One and Two of the Flagship Agenda call for the addition of 150 new tenure-track faculty members, increasing the number of graduate assistants, laboratory space and the total “high quality” graduate students and programs.
Since 2003 the number of graduate assistants has increased by 4.8 percent compared with the 2010 goal of 50 percent.
Lab space has grown 34 percent of the 2010 goal. And the University has hired 58 new professors or 38 percent of its 2010 goal, according to numbers provided by the provost and the Office of Budget and Planning.
Harold Silverman, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, said several changes in the funding of graduate students have explained the small growth of graduate assistantships.
Funding tuition remission for full-time graduate assistants essentially gives free tuition to graduate assistants and takes up millions of dollars.
“This was an important and necessary choice to remain competitive,” Silverman said. “Our ability to make this investment reflects the increase in research productivity at LSU such that there are increased dollars available to be invested in the graduate program.”
Silverman, who also serves on Palm’s University Planning Committee, said achieving the agenda’s many goals will rest on hiring more tenure-track faculty to mentor graduate students.
“Investment in high-quality faculty has been one of the University’s highest priorities early in the Flagship Agenda,” Silverman said. “This will pay off in the graduate program as we move forward.”
Silverman said that as nationally competitive faculty settle on LSU’s campus, the number of students who need to be advised will rise, and the amount of money brought in from grants will increase.
Objective Two also calls for graduate students to become 20 percent of the campus’ enrollment. But that number has dropped and spiked since the 1990s. In 2003, graduate and professional students made up 16.2 percent of campus. But in 2005 that number has dropped to 15.8 percent.
Silverman says this decrease is due to the decline of international graduate students applying to U.S. schools after Sept. 11, 2001, and it took a while for the effects to trickle down to an institution such as LSU.
Silverman said there was a 20 percent drop in international applications this year. Silverman said some programs such as engineering were hit “more severely” than others.
“The decrease in these students is caused in part by the tougher visa and admissions policies into the U.S.,” he said. “These decreases did not hit LSU as rapidly as other schools in the country.”
Chuck Wilson, vice provost for academic affairs, said laboratory space has increased in large percentage amounts, and several projects on the horizon will make up for not moving toward the Flagship Agenda’s 2010 goal.
“The Flagship Agenda was a set of goals we aspire to achieve,” Wilson said. “If you don’t get it exactly by 2010, then you still shoot for it.”
Wilson said two future increases in lab space will be a new space south of campus on Nicholson Drive that the state gave to the University. That area, which Wilson referred to as “South Campus,” will be occupied by the displaced LSU Dental School until summer 2007. Then the Department of Chemistry and the College of Engineering will begin working together on a microstructure research complex to be housed at the site.
Also, the new Choppin Annex for the chemistry department was supposed to begin construction this year, but money from the state wasn’t available. The old chemistry library on the third floor of Williams Hall will be converted in December into new laboratory space, freeing up research lab space elsewhere.
Since the Flagship Agenda was implemented, the Energy, Coast and Environment Building is the only structure to open new laboratory space.
The building was opened in 2002 but wasn’t completed until 2005.
After these new structures are completed or renovated, Wilson said the University will have achieved 70 percent of its 2010 goal.
“The only way to get more lab space is to build new buildings,” Wilson said. “It’s critical if we want to hire more faculty. It’s a puzzle when a dean calls with five new faculty asking for space, and you don’t have it.”
“You can’t hire more faculty without more space, and you can’t increase the faculty-student ratio without space,” he said.
 
MORE FACULTY
A bright spot for many departments has been the increase in the number of tenure-track faculty positions they can fill, said Anna Nardo, chair of the Department of English.
Nardo said the number of English instructors had “ballooned” to more than 75 in 2003, and that number will have shrunk to around 40 in May in addition to the hiring of 14 new professors.
“A flagship university should not have twice as many instructors as professors,” Nardo said. “The funding was never there to do that before. We were given instructor positions to keep courses on the books.”
Nardo said the English department did its best to retain instructors that had “made commitments” to the University. Many of the instructors who were not rehired had not been at the University for an extended period of time.
“These are people we think highly of,” Nardo said. “But there was a disproportion of professors to instructors. A university shouldn’t have an overload of lower-division employees.”
Subsequently, tenure-track professors are teaching general-education courses like poetry, fiction and drama. Topics courses, such as English 2123: Arthurian Literature, have experimented with large lecture classes and smaller breakout sessions with graduate students.
“There’s no point in going back,” Nardo said. “You set high goals for yourself, and you move as far as you can. You can’t make bricks out of straw. You’ve got to be willing to work.”
Nardo’s department is one of the many across campus that has been cutting instructors and hiring more professors.
And to pay for those 150 new tenure-track faculty positions and keep the course books filled, many students are now taking lower-level and general-education classes from upper-level professors.
 
UNDERGRADUATE QUALITY
Every Tuesday and Thursday, animal science junior Megan Zigler and hundreds of other students file into the 1,000-seat Bo Campbell auditorium for a math class that just a few years ago was taught to classes of about 40 students.
George Cochran, Zigler’s professor, is teaching a 534-student lecture as a result of the Flagship Agenda.
Smaller class sizes vanished in the University’s math department with many of the lower-level courses being taught in large auditoriums, some with smaller lab sessions on non-class days.
Once a week, students meet with teaching assistants in groups of 30 and go over homework problems for the course, said Cochran.
The Flagship Agenda has made this particular class, Math 1022, a nightmare for Zigler. She has taken it multiple times - and each time, she’s had to drop it.
She says this time she’s not going to get a C. Right now, she has a B and would like to keep it, so she stays afterward to talk to Cochran.
“I’m good at trigonometry,” she explains. “But there’s too many people – not enough one-on-one – so I stay after.”
One-on-one coaching is something Cochran is used to. He’s been teaching at LSU since 1989 - but he’s taught general education courses such as Math 1022 sparingly. Cochran said he used to teach primarily upper-level and graduate courses, but the Flagship Agenda has him connecting with non-math majors.
“I’m really enjoying it,” he said. “I think the kids who come to my lecture enjoy it too; we have a nice back and forth going on.”
Cochran, who also serves as associate chair of the math department, says the course’s main problem is the number of students who don’t show up to the larger classes or are afraid to ask questions.
“It’s much more difficult to get students to ask questions,” Cochran said. “It’s one thing to ask a ‘dumb’ question in a group of 40 and another thing to say it in a large auditorium.”
Cochran said students don’t have to come to class – he posts the notes online – but he tries to do “different things” with his lectures.
Just three years ago, Math 1022 would have been taught by an instructor, he said. Many of those instructors are now gone - only 19 remain of more than 40 affiliated with the math department before 2003. In 2005, four new professors were hired with more on the horizon, Cochran said. Hiring more professors, Cochran said, has raised the prestige of the department, despite larger class sizes.
“The mechanics of teaching in that auditorium I think works out well,” Cochran said. “If I [were not teaching 1022], I’d be teaching a 4000-level statistics class.”
 
FINDING THE MONEY
The Flagship Agenda calls for a doubling of federal grants and a general increase in the money taken in by the University from federal, state and private sources.
The amount of funding LSU receives has increased since the adoption of the Flagship Agenda. Federal, state and private grant money jumped significantly from 2002-2003 to 2003-2004 by $12.4 million to $134.8 million. In 2004-2005 that number dropped slightly to $133.3 million.
Todd Pourciau, assistant vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, said a nationally competitive university is defined by the amount of external funding it can raise.
“In order to be competitive nationally, your funding needs to be from federal agencies,” Pourciau said. “The Flagship Agenda and the publicity has let people know we are a university that is connected to research.”
Pourciau said his office is trying to move away from relying on state funds because a flagship university should compete on a national level.
Actual funds raised at this point are up 9 percent from last year, Pourciau said, and extra funding received after hurricanes Katrina and Rita could make the University’s bottom line higher. The University’s fiscal year begins July 1, and Pourciau said with numbers already up, he is expecting the numbers to stay higher.
Pourciau said University researchers have been busy applying for money earmarked for hurricane research after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
“It’s been phenomenal for the opportunities for funding,” Pourciau said. “It’s ignited so many different research areas.”
But grants aren’t the only way the University can fund research to make it a nationally competitive flagship institution.
O’Keefe said he is spending his time preparing for the University’s capital campaign, a fund-raising effort to increase the University’s endowment, which it uses to pay for research and education.
“Building the endowment and the capacity of the University for financial sustainment for the years ahead – now’s the time to build that,” he said.
 
BUILDING REPUTATION
Palm pointed to the University’s math department, which she says is now a “model for other universities nationally” with its math lab program.
Phoebe Rouse, a math instructor who used to spend her time teaching Math 1021: College Algebra and Math 1431: Business Calculus, is now managing the Department of Mathematics’ learning lab in Pleasant Hall.
Rouse is one of the few instructors who survived the instructor cuts. Now she’s redesigned a course taught to hundreds at a time, when she used to teach the same course in Lockett Hall to classrooms of 40.
Students enrolled in college algebra, a math class that 60 percent of freshmen take, spend two hours a week in her learning lab. They also spend less time in the classroom than in previous incarnations of the general education classes.
Rouse said the biggest student complaint – that there is no partial credit allowed by the software used – comes from those who still remember the smaller classes.
“This is where large enrollment Universities are going - students who are willing to do the work do well,” Rouse said. “In another two years, this will just be the way you take college algebra.”
Tuesday is her busiest day, Rouse said, but thanks to graduate assistants and undergraduate tutors ,she thinks the lab easily makes up for the larger class sizes and decreased time in class.
Funded by a series of grants and modeled after similar labs at the University of Alabama and the University of Idaho, the new system helps students make better grades in the face of larger classes, Rouse said.
“This is all a result of the Flagship Agenda,” Rouse said. “We had looked at a redesign for years – success rates have improved.”
Students have access to a “help” button and an electronic version of their textbook through the computers. The system has been successful enough that a similar lab is now being built in the basement of Pleasant Hall to accommodate students in other general education math classes, Rouse said.
“Part of it is getting the people in here immediately and getting them engaged,” Rouse said. “Over time, we’ll get better at this, but I’m very happy with the way it’s worked out.”
Rouse said she spends much of her free time traveling to peer institutions like the University of Florida and the University of Georgia to help them open similar learning labs.
“We usually think of Florida and look up,” Rouse said. “When I showed them pictures, they were literally drooling.”
 
STRIVING FOR 2010
Emmert, whose University of Washington is one of the top public research universities in the country, said he keeps up with LSU and believes “continued progress is occurring” toward a 2010 goal.
“We intentionally set very ambitious goals,” Emmert said. “I think they were appropriate. LSU doesn’t belong in the third tier; it’s a much better university than that.”
When asked whether 2010 was still a reasonable goal for the benchmarks of the Flagship Agenda, Palm said the agenda’s success will be defined by “available resources.”
“The Flagship Agenda should be understood as a path to greater achievement for LSU,” Palm said. “It outlines our priorities as the state’s flagship institution.”
O’Keefe, who acknowledged he inherited the Flagship Agenda from his predecessor, said he was going to do everything possible to make sure LSU hits its 2010 goals.
“We’re going to do our level best,” O’Keefe said. “That’s going to be a challenge – we’re in a different place than we were six or seven months ago.”
Louisiana Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie said that 2010 may have been an “aggressive” target, but it was important to be aggressive early to “start changing the internal workings” of the University.
“I see significant evidence that progress is being made,” Savoie said. “When will we get there? I think the truth is that we’ll never get there because regardless of how good you become, you will always want to be better.”
 
Contact Scott L. Sternberg at
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