Chancellor Sean O’Keefe addressed a crowd of fewer than 50 students and faculty members in the basement of Lockett Hall about their concerns for the rest of the semester following the two devastating hurricanes that roared through the Gulf Coast in recent weeks.
The question that appeared to be on everyone’s mind in the sparsely attended town hall meeting was the University’s decision to reschedule Monday’s classes but not the football game against the University of Tennessee.
O’Keefe has repeatedly said the University rescheduled classes in anticipation of cleaning up damage caused by Hurricane Rita.
Some said they believed the University actually rescheduled classes for the football game and not for Rita, which turned out to have far more of the bark and less of the bite than Hurricane Katrina had in the Baton Rouge area.
Elissa Sartwell, graduate student, asked O’Keefe after he outlined the University’s plan for the coming months as it struggles to achieve a state of normalcy, whether he thought rescheduling classes on a game day could hurt the University’s effort to become a tier-one University and shake its long-standing reputation as a “football school that has academics as an afterthought.”
The University is ranked as a third-tier university by Princeton Review.
O’Keefe said in response to Sartwell’s question that the University has proven that it has far more to offer than football as an institution of higher learning.
“We are going to continue to develop the image that the Department of Health and Human Services and Surgeon General Richard Carmona described as the largest acute care facility to be made at a moment’s notice in the history of this nation,” he said. “That’s how we are going to combat the mistaken perception that we are merely a football school.”
He followed by saying the Athletic department is entirely self-sustaining and receives no money from tuition or fees.
“They actually kick back about $6 million a year to run this institution,” O’Keefe said. “Our athletic department is one of only about 12 in the nation to run itself in a way that actually helps the academic side of the University. And they didn’t make a peep when the game against Arizona State was moved to Arizona, and it cost them some serious money.”
While Sartwell said after the town hall meeting that she still had some questions about the University’s decision to reschedule classes, Sartwell said she thinks O’Keefe’s plan to stress the University’s flexibility in a time of crisis is a good way to handle any negative fallout from “outsiders’ opinion.”
“I don’t know if I was satisfied with his answer,” she said. “But I do think turning the campus into a medical facility is a good way to dispel the long-standing reputation the University has as a football school.”
O’Keefe said to a student who asked whether he regretted the decision to reschedule classes that you can always look back on decisions and think about how they could have been handled better.
“The best analyst I have ever met is time,” O’Keefe said. “There have been many times in my career when if you had more time, you could have made a better decision. You’ll never have the wisdom in a given moment that time brings.”
Tuesday’s meeting had originally been scheduled to be held in Dodson Auditorium. The chancellor did not say why the location had been changed.
Contact Jeff Jeffrey at [email protected]