Although the Transition Advisory Team is presenting a progress report at today’s Board of Supervisors meeting, most of the actual reorganization changes will hinge on decisions made by the University’s Presidential Search Committee, which is also meeting today.
The Team will present a general overview of its progress so far to the Board, but the report will not include any recommendations for reorganization, said SSA Consultant Christel Slaughter. Those recommendations will be presented to the Board of Supervisors in July, the same month the new system president will be hired, according to a Transition Advisory Team PowerPoint.
Slaughter said the “progress report” is not a proposal because it will simply outline the Team’s development and will not include any recommendations for how the System should move forward with the reorganization process, but the Team should develop a proposal within the next few months, she said.
“Depending on how clearly things come together, that really determines the recommendations. But form follows function, and we’re still in the process of defining the function,” Slaughter said. “By the time we get to summer, we should have an idea of how things will come together.”
The March report was meant to produce a “vision and organizational models” that would “inform [the] search for [the] permanent system president,” according to a Transition Advisory Team PowerPoint, but Interim System President and Chancellor William “Bill” Jenkins said the Team is a bit behind in its progress.
“For now, it will be our progress to date. No surprises, just how it’s advancing,” Jenkins said. “Originally there was some anxiety to get this done for March, but we’re not going to make the deadline.”
Slaughter said the Team has done well to determine focus areas to examine more closely in the coming months, and the top priorities of each area will be the focus of the next few months.
“When we started out in January, we thought we’d be pretty far in 60 days,” Slaughter said. “When doing these sorts of projects, there’s no way to know how much you’ll get done in a certain amount of time.”
However, Slaughter said the Transition Advisory Team was never meant to provide the Board with an actual reorganization plan. Those changes will ultimately be left to the discretion of the incoming president, who has yet to be selected, she said.
“I don’t think there was any expectation that there would be something before the end of June that would be actionable,” Slaughter said. “The University will be getting a new president, and the Board will hand over the [Transition Advisory Team’s] ideas to the new leadership.”
Slaughter said by the end of the process, the Team would give the Board of Supervisors a report of the big concepts for what could be improved and allow the new system president to guide those changes, a model Jenkins said he supports.
“This will be a work in progress over the coming years. At the end of the day, the final facets of the reorganization need to be attended to by the new president,” Jenkins said at the most recent Transition Advisory Team meeting.
The 10-member Transition Advisory Team officially began looking at ways to reorganize the LSU System on Jan. 8, and since then, it has expanded to include five subcommittees, a Legal and Regulatory Advisory Group and six task forces that are working to determine ways to improve the System’s efficiency and effectiveness.
“By the time we get to summer, we should have an idea of how things will come together.”
