If there’s anything members of the LSU community can agree on, it’s that our school has a lot of problems. Any number of them – decrepit buildings, insufficient research funding, low employee pay or Title IX scandals, just to name a few – would be reason enough bemoan the sorry state of what is supposed to be Louisiana’s educational (and athletic) pride and joy.
Any number of them, too, would be reason enough to hire a new administration, which the university did, of course, when LSU President William Tate IV took the helm in May of 2021.
While it’s too early to bring down a definite verdict on Tate’s tenure in Baton Rouge, one thing is sure: LSU is changing.
This is normal. A new university administration naturally brings a state of flux. LSU is no exception. Deans, department chairs, professors, instructors and veteran students across campus have been listening and waiting intently to see how Tate will change the makeup of their daily and professional lives. Will funding be cut? Will there be raises? What about that leaky roof in the library?
Some things are already clear. Newly hired LSU Executive Vice President and Provost Roy Haggerty has shown what some of the school’s new priorities are, including increasing graduate assistant stipends, a subject that has been on the minds of graduate students for years.
Haggerty announced this plan in a recent Senate Faculty meeting, where he proposed increasing graduate stipends from approximately $15,000 to $23,000 – an almost 50% increase that is fantastic news for a seriously overworked and underpaid workforce.
What’s especially interesting about Haggerty’s proposal, though, is the way in which he framed it: not in financial, business terms, but in moral ones.
“We need to make sure we increase our graduate stipends to a level … where students are not having to eat from the food bank or wait to have wisdom teeth pulled until they can save up enough money,” he said. “…[W]e need to provide stipends that are livable [with] basic health benefits.”
He continued, “We should not be paying graduate students a stipend that they cannot afford to live on in Baton Rouge, Louisiana…We have to increase this, ok? Morally, we have to do this.”
Though the plan isn’t without its concerns, Haggerty’s presentation of this significant financial relief as an ethical necessity is a welcome change from the cold penny-pinching reasoning that was a feature of the Bobby Jindal administration from 2008 to 2016.
For his part, Tate has also contributed significantly to the new direction of the university when he announced in March 2022 his “Scholarship First Agenda,” which focuses on STEM-related endeavors, specifically procuring grant money for funding energy, defense, costal, biotechnological and agricultural projects, which is supposed to help both LSU and the state.
So far, the plan has been a success. Shell donated $27.5 million dollars to help create the LSU Institute for Energy Innovation; the state legislature allocated $12 million for a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence computer; and the Louisiana Children’s Medical Center and Our Lady of the Lake committed $245 million to help better care for LSU students and athletes.
Noticeably absent, however, from both the Scholarship First Agenda and the growing list of donations given to LSU in recent months, is funding or any substantive mention of the humanities disciplines – history, political science, philosophy, English, French and other foreign language departments, art and music history, geography, or religious studies.
It’s not necessarily surprising. There’s been a significant decrease in humanities majors dating back to the late 1960s. Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, conducted a study in 2018 that found that humanities degrees had dropped by 66% from 1969 to 1985 – a trend that continued, albeit at lower rates, into the 2010s.
Of all majors affected, history was the hardest hit.
“In 2008, the National Center for Education Statistics reported 34,642 majors in history; in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, the number was 24,266,” Schmidt reported. “Between 2016 and 2017, the number of history majors fell by 1,500.”
From a pragmatic point of view, these statistics may show why LSU hasn’t demonstrated much, if any, interest in supporting the humanities. In business terms, why invest in something that won’t yield a sufficient return? From this perspective, it seems hard to justify.
But from another perspective – one that has the historical university in mind – the benefits of a robust humanities program are more tangible.
Once upon a time, the humanities were the foundation and lifeblood of universities. Studying them cultivated in a person an understanding of the good things, the true things, the beautiful things. It was believed that, in order to be a well-rounded citizen, one had to know a thing or two about history; that one should know the basic forms and rules of civics and government; that one should know more than one language (not to mention the mastery of one’s native tongue); and that one should know a thing of two about music and the fine arts.
This idea persisted for centuries, up until around the end of World War II, after which came a focus on engineering, mathematics and the hard sciences. Cast aside was the study of the human spirit and embraced was the apparent belief that all that was needed for complete human knowledge were empirical “proofs” about reality that could only be found in the physical world.
Tate and the new LSU administration seem to have taken this new perspective to heart, largely leaving the humanities alone to fend for themselves.
And fending for themselves they are. LSU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, or HSS, is developing a strategy to develop new directions for all the departments under its authority and to articulate the special place and role that the humanities have in today’s university system.
A key part of this strategy has been increasing interactions with all members of the HSS constituency – faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. Lines of communication have been opened from HSS Dean Troy Blanchard’s office, where members of the HSS community have been invited to send in their thoughts and concerns about the good and bad of the academic and professional experiences at LSU.
Another aspect of communication has been a series of “listening sessions” with faculty and students, where they’re asked similar questions about what they think is and isn’t working well in the college.
In one of these meetings on Oct. 21, HSS dean’s fellow and associate professor Chris Barrett shared five aspects of the college’s new strategy, which were primarily aimed at professional and academic development.
Barrett said that the HSS wants to advance and emphasize “scholarship, teaching, diversity and inclusion, community outreach, and shaping leaders.” At the heart of all of these is a single, unified goal: to “advance student success in and beyond the classroom.”
HSS graduate students at the Oct. 21 meeting seemed to be generally receptive to this plan – they all seemed to agree that reshaping the trajectory of the college is a worthy pursuit. Most of their concerns were, instead, aimed at things outside of the college’s control, namely stipend increases, deferred building maintenance and streamlined communication between departments and the graduate school, which has historically struggled to convey bureaucratic policies to departments across the university.
While Barrett said that such concerns would be relayed to higher ups at LSU (i.e., Tate and his office), the college is limited in what it could actually do about them. Its control is largely limited to academic affairs and agendas.
Which begs an interesting question: If most of the problems that exist at LSU are only under the control of executive offices, who is left to defend the interests of the humanities?
The answer, simply, seems to be anyone with no actionable authority.
Blanchard and his staff can suggest certain policies that could advance the cause of non-STEM fields, relay concerns of faculty and students and defend, to the degree that they can, the vitality of a humanistic education – but ultimately, they’re left to Tate’s fancies.
Tate’s focus, he’s made clear, is the hard sciences and those fields that bring in the most money for the school. In an Oct. 21 interview on the Paul Finebaum Show, for instance, Tate was asked about some of the university’s research and development priorities.
“We’re invested in the sea and understanding our coast,” he answered. “We’re invested in the land; we’re invested in space.”
Tate did mention “the humanities and social sciences” in the interview – but these rang as a quiet afterthought; the real focus, it seemed, is the sexy, cutting-edge fields that bring in piles of cash.
And while Tate’s interview could very well be a one-off comment, it’s difficult to see a bright future for the humanities in Louisiana higher education, given Tate’s (albeit short) track record.
It would be dishonest to pretend that the humanities, at least over the last several decades, have been given any sort of special dispensations at LSU. But with the rate at which things are changing – largely for the better – it’s discouraging to see the heart of the historical university being cast by the financial wayside.
It also spells danger for LSU more broadly. The humanities are those subjects that inform our science. Without the human element, which the humanities provide, engineering, chemistry, computer science and other STEM fields are reduced to simple data points devoid of feeling or qualitative analysis.
Let’s hope that the Tate administration has something substantive planned for the humanities. Without it, it may prove difficult to celebrate the otherwise positive changes that are coming to LSU.
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old history graduate student from Shreveport.
