Here we go again, further proof and branding of LSU as an athletic, not academic, institution. The Board of Supervisors will give a high six-figure bonus to President Tate atop his already million-dollar compensation (The Reveille: “Unconstitutional,” September 23).
When the Attorney General questions such “incentive compensation” that is being awarded to a president for the first time as possibly even against the state constitution, the Board Chairman justifies it as being done in athletics.
Athletic values rule, no justification based on looking at the academic side of U.S. universities, nor any consistency with the fact that presidents and chancellors are given faculty tenure. At least football coaches are at risk and indeed can be fired if they lose a couple of games.
Decades ago, when again LSU was the first public institution that suddenly boosted then chancellor Emmert‘s salary completely out of scale with that of professors, the justification was again comparison with athletics, the offer at that time to coach Nick Saban.
Now it is again athletic coaches held up to start these incentive bonuses for administrators. In his case, Emmert’s whole career trajectory was aimed at becoming an athletics commissioner.
It is almost a joke that the Board lists “incentives” as higher student retention rates and faculty research grants, all of which rest on the academic work of students and faculty, a president having little to do with it.
Yet it is the president who gets the credit/bonus! All of this is on par with Louisiana doublespeak where education support was the façade to push legal gambling through the legislature. And once that was achieved, school and college budgets were slashed.
So too at LSU, where decades go by of a pitiful library while sports palaces are quickly funded. And at the same time as we learn of these newly invented bonuses, the administration on budgetary grounds denies faculty searches even to replace retirements.
Yet the same six or seven hundred thousand dollar bonus amount could pay a professor’s alary for several years and it is such a hire that holds prospect of bringing in grant monies of those amounts.
A. R. P. Rau is a professor of physics and astronomy and LSU faculty member for 50 years.