After six months of uncertainty, LSU has found two new leaders in its search for a president.
Reveille leaders have had the chance to meet President Wade Rousse, and we look forward to his tenure. We hope Rousse is able to bring the experience he gained at McNeese and his career before higher education to LSU and benefit its students.
We also met Jim Dalton, who the Board of Supervisors named executive vice president and chancellor, a position it created Tuesday. We agree with faculty leaders that he is extremely qualified to lead campus research, and he expressed excitement over working with students.
Leaders have said this new structure will help each leader utilize their specific skills to serve not just the LSU system, but the state overall. It can’t be overstated how important it is that the state finds the ideal strategy for LSU, the predominant university in the state’s higher education environment and a dominant force in Louisiana culture.
The Reveille is eager to see these leaders begin their work and move toward filling out upper leadership and setting clear strategic goals.
But the way this process unfolded was worrisome.
In the days before the decision, the third finalist told the Reveille he felt the outcome was “predetermined.”
“There’s no fighting the governor,” he said.
It’s a view that was shared by political insiders, other outlets have reported. It’s also a view that’s trickled down to the LSU community and made many students, faculty, staff and onlookers skeptical of the process.
Any process in which a finalist is convinced he’s not being considered has questionable integrity.
We recognize and appreciate LSU’s efforts to make this process transparent, including holding public forums with core stakeholder groups where faculty, staff and students have had the chance to question and get to know the candidates. Those groups were then able to fill out surveys and indicate their thoughts on the finalists.
However, those processes mean little if they have no influence on the final decision.
This feedback was intended to be how the forums could be accounted for in the final decision. Board Chair Scott Ballard told us that while the Board was provided the data from these surveys, he didn’t look at it.
That shows a lack of respect for these groups’ perspectives, and, in practice, it shut them out of the decision-making process.
And while we salute the thinking behind LSU’s creative leadership solution, it was a solution that was never presented to the presidential search committee as an option. Faculty Senate President Daniel Tirone, a member of the committee, said this as well, and told us that certainly would’ve changed the committee’s thought process.
The committee was intended to be a body that’s representative of LSU’s community. If it had formulated this plan rather than the Board of Supervisors, a body led almost entirely by state business leaders, then the plan would’ve been a result of input from more stakeholders.
Instead, it happened in an executive session, behind closed doors, in a two-and-a-half hour period led by a group that cannot claim to speak for LSU’s broad community.
We don’t mean to suggest that Rousse won’t be capable as LSU’s president. Rousse’s merits as a candidate are obvious; he reversed McNeese’s enrollment trend from 14 years of decline, places an emphasis on structure and has evident energy that will help him relate to students. His partnership with Dalton will allow both to best offer their respective strengths to LSU and its community.
However, it’s disappointing that the result came at the expense of community input.
It’s also impossible to ignore the influence of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in this search for the next president. Landry has increasingly inserted himself in LSU matters over the past few months, whether by publicly ripping into Athletic Director Scott Woodward a day before the university announced his departure, calling for an honorary Charlie Kirk statue to be built on campus or even bringing a live tiger into Tiger Stadium last year.
Many have reported Rousse was Landry’s preferred candidate well in advance.
Eleven of the 16 members of the Board of Supervisors, the body that voted to select the president, were either appointed by Landry or have donated to him. The same is true for 11 of the 20 members of the presidential search committee, which narrowed the candidates down to three finalists.
For his part, Rousse has offered some critiques of Landry’s “micromanaging” of the university. He told student leaders he thought the government’s involvement in LSU in recent months was “not healthy” and undermined university leadership. He said he understood why Landry and others would want to step in given the university’s current vacuum of leadership, but said he hoped to say “we got it from here” once taking office.
Rousse and Dalton have also both emphasized they’d take lengths to consult faculty, staff and students in their decisions.
We hope they’re sincere on these points.
It’s important that their leadership is uninhibited by outside force, especially as the state and university face a tense political climate, federal funding cuts, a fiscal cliff that is continually kicked down the road but never solved and a shrinking population that struggles to retain its young talent.
These new leaders for LSU are coming at a critical time.
Above all, we hope Rousse and Dalton’s partnership can be one that makes decisions that are autonomous, are inclusive of all in the LSU community across all eight — soon to be nine — campuses and push the university system toward excellence in all facets.
The Reveille Editorial Board consists of Editor in Chief Jason Willis, Managing Editor Olivia Tomlinson, News Editor Courtney Bell, Sports Editor Chloe Richmond and Opinion Editor Garrett McEntee.
