The Transition Advisory Team’s technology and finance subcommittees’ leaders joined to create six task forces that began meeting for the first time Thursday.
Thursday’s meetings were the first of many that will examine the strengths and weaknesses of each campus’ inner workings and define a course of action to suggest to the Transition Advisory Team, which will consolidate each task force’s suggestions for a final proposal to the Board of Supervisors this summer.
The task forces that held their first meetings Thursday were Administrative Services, Revenue Generation and Technology.
At the Administrative Services task force meeting, leaders began working with the idea that consolidating managerial operations, which differ from campus to campus, could improve efficiency and save money.
“We’re used to doing it one way, and everyone’s hesitant to change their campus’ system. But we aren’t as big as Walmart, and they do it,” said Jake Netterville, chairman of the Board Emeritus, Postlethwaite & Netterville.
Others at the meeting had different opinions about the direction the changes should take.
“There’s not a single system that’s perfect,” said Mike Ferrell, LSU Shreveport’s vice chancellor of Business Affairs. “You want to make sure you don’t have to go in and overhaul the systems just to do something new.”
Combining resources across the system has downsides as well as upsides, said SSA Consultant Christel Slaughter.
“What the wise people did is they picked the best of the banks and picked the best systems of each. That’s where higher education is headed,” said Lee Griffin, the Finance and Revenue subcommittee co-chair and president and CEO of the LSU Foundation.
Technology task force members strongly emphasized the importance of collaborations across campuses.
“There is a tremendous opportunity for the campuses, especially in the research area, to do some type of consolidation,” said Jennifer Rood, a professor and associate executive director of Cores and Resources at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Deron Thaxton, executive director of Information and Education Technical Services at LSU-Alexandria, said they should look at merging student data.
“If we can pool student data, we can start building trends and models, and we can look where we need to get students, who the model students are and where those students are going,” Thaxton said. “We have to have the connectivity between campuses.”
Slaughter said some short-term goals can save the University money in a short time and provide better functionality across campus units.
She said there is an idea of campuses coming together with a governance structure for technology.
“What it would mean is that every campus would have a tech person, and they would all meet – maybe monthly – and they would talk about issues in their commonly-shared systems,” Slaughter said. “They would make recommendations and list their priorities, and there would be sort of a higher-level governance that would then decide which are the most important.”
Thomas Klei, the interim vice chancellor for Research and Economic Development, was a special guest at the Revenue task force meeting. He said the University needs to invest in people to increase revenue.
“It starts with people … faculty that you hire, investing in students and graduate students,” Klei said. “We need money to drive the people apart.”
Robert Kuhn, interim CFO and vice chancellor for Finance and Administrative Services, said the cornerstone of the University is the faculty.
“LSU has been asking for stability in the past year,” Kuhn said. “The root of this is recruiting and maintaining quality faculty.”
Kuhn also spoke about the problems with a per-credit tuition rate.
“To be a full-time student, all you have to do is take 12 hours. Those hours taken above 12 are virtually free, and you pay the same whatever your major,” Kuhn said. “LSU is in a great position to increase revenue. LSU doesn’t require that freshmen live on campus. We’re in a good position that demand is very high and the quality is very high. I haven’t heard any complaints about the increase in residential life fees.”
