The Reveille sat down with President William Tate IV Nov. 23 to discuss the most pressing issues facing LSU as the new president’s first semester in Baton Rouge nears its end.
Title IX
“Every tiger has a claw,” Tate said, explaining what he wants to see in LSU’s next head football coach. C, for character; L, for leadership; A, for academics; and W, for winning.
Character protrudes as the biggest concern. Last year, the LSU Athletic Department became embroiled in a Title IX scandal after a report from law firm Husch Blackwell showed that LSU covered up credible allegations of misconduct against former football player Derrius Guice and former head football coach Les Miles.
Coach Ed Orgeron was implicated in the scandal, although he denied any wrongdoing. His midseason firing was attributed only to his shortcomings as a coach.
In October, it was revealed that the French department at LSU was aware that a French graduate student was charged with rape, yet still allowed him to work with undergraduates. The French Studies chair was removed from her post several weeks later.
This reoccurring problem at Louisiana’s flagship university has built a lack of trust between students and administration, which Tate acknowledged.
He said he has a simple plan to fix trust issues: to follow through on promises.
“If you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, why would you trust this?,” Tate said. “Why would anybody trust you? What I have to focus on is, what do we say we’re going to do? And did you do it? And if you deviate from that, that’s a problem.”
Tate feels optimistic about the future. He expressed a feeling of pride in the progress the Title IX office has made since his arrival.
“I think we’ve been able to see many of the weaknesses in the past processes and all of those have been addressed,” he said. “We’re going in the right direction.”
Tate said that the staffing problems have been addressed as well as the deficiencies in the reporting process. “I’m not tolerating anybody who’s engaged in anything that’s inconsistent with Title IX regulatory function,” he said.
COVID-19:
Tate explained how his background in epidemiology helped guide his decision making on LSU’s COVID-19 mitigation policies, which are some of the strictest of any SEC school.
Tate has written on the topic of pandemic response and is a psychiatric epidemiologist.
“Everybody I interact with has been giving me epidemiology advice, you know, with their degrees from Twitter,” he said, laughing. “I was going to be guided by science. And I was just going to put blinders on; I was going to shut Twitter off, shut off political stuff and just do what would work.”
Tate tempered his excitement about low COVID-19 cases in recent weeks and the lifting of the mask mandate with some words of caution about the holidays.
“It will cycle back,” Tate said. “Because you’re going to leave, you’re going to get exposed and the numbers will go up a little bit again.”
The world is currently on high alert due to the emergence of a new variant of COVID-19, Omicron, which was discovered in South Africa on Nov. 24.
Even if there is another surge over the winter months, Tate said the worst that could happen would be a repeat of this fall’s mitigation efforts, like the return of a mask mandate and continued use of HEPA filters in classrooms next semester.
Scholarship First
On his first day on the job in July, Tate spoke about his “scholarship first” approach to bolstering the university’s academic reputation. He recently outlined five areas he believes the university should focus on to “protect the future of the people of Louisiana” and make LSU a premier research university.
The first three are focused on environmental issues in Louisiana, like securing the state’s disappearing coast, investing in carbon capture technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improving agriculture through precision agriculture and biotechnology.
“The future of our coasts is completely aligned with the future of the state, which is completely aligned, in my opinion, with the future of the United States,” Tate said. “If we don’t deal with the energy problem in carbon capture related to it, climate change is going to destroy us.”
Tate also wants the university to be a nationally designated cancer institute. Louisiana has the fifth-highest cancer death rate in the U.S., according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We should be solving the cancer problem,” Tate said.
Lastly, Tate said LSU should focus on cybersecurity research to ensure the country’s protection against potential cyber attacks.
LSU’s college ranking in the most recent U.S News and World Report fell 19 spots, putting the university near the bottom of the SEC, ahead of Mississippi State University only.
“That tells me a lot about the climate,” Tate said. “I don’t think we should be dead last.”
“What is it about that environment that is different than our environment?,” Tate said. “[Is it] Football? Doubt it. We’ve won national championships too. Something else is happening in terms of how people are enculturated and brought into the community and made to feel bigger than just their individual selves.”
