The LSU Board of Supervisors officially approved contracts for new President Wade Rousse and Executive Vice President and Chancellor James Dalton on Thursday.
Rousse and Dalton will both make equal base salaries of $750,000 annually but have a long set of incentives that could see them earn more.
Both contracts include incentives for increases in retention rate, graduation rate, enrollment, enrollment revenue and doctoral degrees awarded. They will receive incentives for revenue items like negotiating state and federal funding or large securing donations.
Both will also receive a $100,000 incentive if LSU achieves a top-50 research university ranking and a $200,000 incentive if they remain in their roles after five years as a “recognition of the stability provided by uninterrupted service.”
Rousse has more specific incentives related to revenue, like launching a capital campaign or reaching agreements with Louisiana Economic Development. This aligns with Rousse’s role, which will deal more with external relations, and, as a candidate, he championed creating more business and government partnerships for the university.
Dalton has academic incentives like recruiting esteemed faculty, spending more on research and earning higher research rankings.
The pair could end up earning millions annually with these extensive incentives, many of which have no limits.
Other organizational changes
Also officially approved Thursday was a change in system structure to unify LSU’s Baton Rouge campus with its other main research campuses — AgCenter, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, LSU Health New Orleans and LSU Health Shreveport — under the flagship campus. That unified research institution would rank as the No. 69 public research institution in the nation with $488 million in research in the most recent available numbers, according to LSU.
With LSU now able to report its major research expenditures as one, it can elevate its standing among top research universities and “successfully compete for major grants,” it said in a press release.
The new unified institution will report to Dalton.
As a result of the change, LSU also moved to change the titles of the chancellors at LSU Health New Orleans and LSU Health Shreveport to senior vice chancellors.
The university also named former Interim President Matt Lee a senior vice chancellor. Lee is now back to his role as the dean of the College of Agriculture.
In another organizational move, Jason French, who Rousse named in November as in charge of his transition efforts, was hired as LSU’s chief of staff and vice president of external relations.
Background on Dalton and Rousse
The pair were chosen for the new leadership roles on Nov. 4, ending a search that lasted months starting in May when former President William Tate IV took the same job at Rutgers. It was a search that initially sought to find just one president, but ended with a surprising and broad reimagining of LSU’s existing structure.
Rousse and Dalton, both finalists for the presidential position, presented a vision that installed both of them in top leadership roles and split the LSU president role, which previously oversaw the entire statewide system of campuses in addition to the Baton Rouge campus, into two.
The Board ultimately voted to make that happen, installing Rousse as the system’s leader and Dalton as a head of all things academics and research, as well as the Baton Rouge campus.
Rousse officially started at LSU on Nov. 17, while Dalton’s first day was Dec. 1.
Rousse was formerly the president at McNeese State University, while Dalton was the Executive Vice President and Provost at University of Alabama.
