Administrators, legislators, faculty and students are all seeking answers for how to deal with past and future budget cuts.
Plans and ideas have been considered or implemented like cutting programs, increasing tuition and finding more donors. One idea has been around for years — the concept of combining the University, LSU AgCenter, Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Paul M. Hebert Law Center under one administration.
The conglomeration of the four LSU System entities is one of many ideas to save money by cutting back administrators. By putting the units under one chancellor and one basic administration, several administrators could be eliminated.
AgCenter Chancellor William Richardson said a conversation about the idea has come up once or twice a month since the center split from the University in 1972. He said the AgCenter wants to maintain alignment with the System, but the agricultural community would be “adamantly opposed” to the idea.
“[LSU System President John] Lombardi and I have had the discussion about this,” Richardson said. “He realizes, too, that it would be a political impossibility.”
The AgCenter does research in 20 extension services across the state, so most of its employees aren’t even in Baton Rouge, Richardson said.
Richardson said administrators in other campuses don’t understand the priorities of agricultural research and therefore couldn’t govern them well.
“[We have] plows, sows and cows. They don’t understand the complexity of modern research today,” Richardson said.
The AgCenter has a strong constituent base at the extension services, and money from farmers in the state often comes to the center for research. If the AgCenter shared administration with other system entities, administrators who understand agriculture wouldn’t be able handle the budgets for the extension offices, Richardson said.
“[Farmers] want to know damn sure where that money is going, and they hold me accountable,” Richardson said. “I listen very carefully to what those people tell me.”
Richardson said the AgCenter’s success keeps it competitive with other similar schools.
“Our ranking in this is higher than the football team’s ranking,” Richardson said.
The Law Center has similar prestige. It is one of three law schools in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi ranked in the U.S. News and World Report’s top 100 law schools. The students consistently achieve the highest bar passage rate among Louisiana students, according to Law Center Chancellor Jack Weiss.
But with the Law Center’s achievements, students receive a bang for their buck. Prelaw Magazine ranked the school as the fifth-best value law school.
Weiss said this success can be attributed to being separate from the University for the nearly 30 years and focusing solely on the needs of a highly specialized school.
“Even with the state’s current financial challenges, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would want to tinker with the Law Center’s success,” Weiss said in an e-mail. “The specialized services, such as admissions and career services, our small staff provides to our students could not be provided as effectively or efficiently within a larger, consolidated bureaucracy.”
Although the consolidation would save money, administrators system-wide continue to say the idea will not happen anytime soon.
University Chancellor Michael Martin said there are many colleges that show how a unified system would work but it’s one of several workable models.
“I think there’s many arguments to be had on it. One of the top five programs in the country is fully unified,” Martin said about the University of Florida’s system. “Quantitative measures have suggested it is one of the best in the country.”
Prior to LSU, Martin worked at the University of Florida and the University of Minnesota, where there was also a unified system.
“Louisiana is comfortable with that arrangement. … There are very few like it in the country,” Martin said. “Maybe Louisiana knows something others don’t know.”
Martin said a non-unified system works, and no one is “tinkering with it for now.”
____
Contact Catherine Threlkeld at [email protected]